Infield Fly Productions Embeds With Top Vaccine Teams As They Race To Save Millions
By Dugald Maudsley
SARS-CoV-2 infecting cells at VIDO-Intervac in Saskatoon, Canada
We knew something very dramatic and very dangerous was hurtling towards us.
We were in the midst of making a documentary for CBC's The Nature of Things on climate change. We’d already shot in New York City. But now people were pulling out – fast. First it was a group in the UK: they didn’t feel comfortable having a crew in their home. Then it was our shoot in New Zealand: the country was about to close its borders. Finally, we could no longer get our crew on a plane.
It was then we realized – like everyone else in the world - that the coronavirus pandemic was about to totally and irrevocably change our lives. And we decided to try and document this deadly event.
I immediately got on the phone with Sue Dando, the executive producer of The Nature of Things. We’ve made films for Sue and TNOT for more than a decade. If anyone had the vision and guts to take on this project it was Sue. She had two key questions: could we get access? And how were we going to film a documentary in the midst of the pandemic? When we told her our plan she gave us the green light.
Our director, P.J. Naworynski, had just completed a documentary series in Canada’s far north where he worked with crews as far away as Iqaluit from his base in Victoria, B.C. We adopted this same remote-control strategy for Vaccine Hunters, the name we gave our doc. But would it work?
Now we had to gain access. That job fell to me and our researcher and co-producer, Monika Delmos. “At the outset, there were about 100 scientific teams globally,” remembers Delmos. “That quickly climbed to 200, then 300 teams. At the start of the pandemic, we didn’t know which teams were poised for success. It didn’t help that immunologists told us only six percent of vaccines that are developed ever make it to market!”
Our research revealed that collaboration was the key to creating a vaccine in less than a year. So it was important to film many teams from all over the world. But we had a problem: they were racing against the clock and spending millions of dollars to develop a vaccine in record time. Yet we wanted to embed a crew in their lab. A single mistake, a single infection could be disastrous. But, in the end, six agreed to let us follow them for the next year. We tell the story of four in our documentary.
P.J. Naworynski brought together 11 crews in 10 different international locations. For months, his phone in Victoria rang day and night as crews checked in from around the globe on camera angles, interview locations, lighting, sequence priorities and safety issues. Amazingly, it all began to come together.
Our biggest coup was working with BioNTech in Germany – the team that eventually won the race. Company founders Professor Uğur Şahin and his wife Dr. Özlem Türeci, had spent two decades working on RNA vaccines. When COVID-19 struck, they realized this same technology could be used to confront the coronavirus.
To conduct an interview with Prof. Şahin, our team in Mainz, Germany filmed him while I asked questions via Zoom from Toronto. Our conversation took place at 4 in the morning my time.
“This is the worst pandemic in the last, at least 50 years, maybe in the last 100 years,” Prof. Şahin told me, “and we have the ability to react fast.”
We also received permission to follow VIDO-Intervac in Saskatoon. We focused on Dr. Alyson Kelvin, a virologist who left her home and family in Halifax to travel across the country to work at VIDO’s high-tech facility at the University of Saskatchewan.
“Despite the sacrifices that I made to come here,” Dr. Kelvin told me, “I would have felt useless being at home. It wouldn’t have made sense to me to stay. I always think of myself as a mother-scientist. To take one of those away killed me. It was awful.”
Our story took us around the world. In Tianjin, China we filmed with one of the country’s leading biotech companies, CanSino Biologics. Their CEO, Dr. Xuefeng Yu, graduated from McGill University. He had a tremendous advantage – he was backed by the powerful Chinese military. “We will be the first one to see how this vaccine works,” he said during our interview with him.
In Thailand, we chased bats. Ratchaburi is the location of a 700-year-old Buddhist temple that sits on a cave that is home to 2.5 million bats. It was a critical location for Dr. Jonathan Heeney, a Canadian leading a team at Cambridge University in the UK. Dr. Heeney was chasing the Holy Grail - a vaccine that protected against multiple coronaviruses. To succeed, he required coronaviruses carried by bats. “We are probably dealing with hundreds, if not thousands of different coronaviruses that have the propensity to spill over into humans, he said. “Why wait, again, for another disaster.”
In Brazil, we chased ambulances. After the United States, Brazil had the largest number of coronavirus infections in the world. It was also the location of BioNTech’s Phase 3 human trials. That’s where we met Rosângela Tupinelli, an ambulance driver who also volunteered to test the BioNTech vaccine.
“We need to do this for our parents, for our children, for our friends,” she told us. “In some way, this contributes towards helping them. Because if there aren’t any volunteers, there won’t be a vaccine.”
To keep up we were all working seven days a week. “We were training technicians at VIDO-Intervac to film inside their bio-containment lab because we couldn’t go in there,” remembers our P.J Naworynski. “We had to get a cameraperson onto an ambulance in Sao Paulo, Brazil where thousands were dying. And I was talking to crews all the time. It was crazy.”
But the footage began to flow in from around the world and we began to put our documentary together. We called it Inside The Great Vaccine Race. Then, in November of 2020, news broke that BioNTech’s new vaccine was more than 90% effective. The race was over. But was it?
After more than a year of frantic filming, I realized that the race had only just begun. “We have a huge challenge,” Prof. Uğur Şahin told me. “We have to provide almost ten billion doses in the next 12-18 months, and BioNTech-Pfizer can’t do that alone.”
Right now 27 million people around the world get vaccinated everyday. But 4.3 billion more have yet to receive a single dose. To protect them, more vaccines are needed. 300 are still in development. Many of them must succeed if we’re to beat the coronavirus. As Jonathan Heeney pointed out, “vaccines will only work if we manage to vaccinate the vast majority of the population, otherwise we can end up in this mess all over again.”