Longshot

This is the story of what it took to create a coronavirus vaccine in record time - a feat that will likely eclipse the importance of Jonas Salk's polio vaccine in medical history.

Barney Graham is not a household name. Before the morning of January 11, 2020, when he learned about a novel coronavirus that had appeared in Wuhan, China, Graham was working on a vaccine for an obscure disease called Nipah, a brutal illness that had broken out in India in 2018. His mission, as he saw it, was to prove that the United States government could, if it absolutely needed to, produce a vaccine fast enough to stop a pandemic.

In What Doesn't Kill Us, journalist David Heath writes the story of how circumstances conspired to put Graham's theory to the test. The book will narrate the race to create a vaccine for COVID-19 from the day the virus first appeared to the intense final stages of the vaccine's development. The author will draw on hundreds of hours of interviews with key players in the story, describing how the race to create the vaccine sparked a revolution in medical science.