The Keys and Perils to Racing for a Covid-19 Vaccine: QuickTake

When Merck & Co. won regulatory approval for its mumps vaccine in 1967, it set the record for speed. The process had begun four years earlier when scientist Maurice Hilleman was awakened one night by his sick 5-year-old daughter, swabbed her throat and took the specimen to his lab. This year, thousands of researchers in more than 30 countries have been racing to not just beat Hilleman’s time but to bury it, collaborating and competing on almost 200 projects to develop a vaccine against the n