World Premiere of Inside The Great Vaccine Race to air on CBCs The Nature of Things Friday 5 November at 9pm

After a year filming with six international research teams during the height of the pandemic, the inside story of the race to create a vaccine and defeat the coronavirus is set to open the 61st season of The Nature of Things and premiere on CBC Gem Friday 5 November at 9pm.

Part thriller, part personal drama, Inside the Great Vaccine Race is a powerful documentary about the high stakes mission to save millions of lives, a quest that continues today with more than 4 billion people yet to receive a single shot.

Dr. Jonathan Heeney developing his pan-coronavirus vaccine at Cambridge University in the U.K.

“We were filming a story about climate change,” says executive producer and writer Dugald Maudsley. “But it was becoming impossible to shoot because of the coronavirus. We quickly realized we had another dramatic story right in front of us and decided we had to document it.”

The first task for Maudsley, and researcher Monika Delmos, was to choose which teams to follow.

“At the outset, there were about 100 scientific teams globally,” says 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.”

Infield Fly Productions embedded with six labs pursuing different types of vaccine – including BioNTech who won the race, and teams from the University of Saskatchewan and Cambridge University in the UK. They also negotiated rare access to one of the Chinese contenders.

But filming these teams in the midst of the pandemic was a dramatic challenge. It was impossible to fly crews around the world so the entire production had to operate by remote control. Director P.J. Naworynski was responsible for bringing together an international team of 11 crews filming in ten different locations that he ran from his base in Victoria, B.C.

“We were training technicians at VIDO-Intervac in Saskatoon to use one of our cameras to film inside their bio-containment lab that we weren’t allowed to enter. We had to get a cameraperson onto an ambulance in Sao Paulo, Brazil where thousands were dying. And I was talking to crews day and night about gear, access, lighting and camera angles. It was crazy.”

Inside the Great Vaccine Race also chronicles the remarkable personal journey of the scientists who sacrificed everything to produce one of the greatest medical breakthroughs in the last 100 years.

Dr. Alyson Kelvin is a virologist who left her home and family in Halifax to travel across the country to join the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization in Saskatchewan. “Despite the sacrifices that I made to come here,” says Dr. Kelvin, “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.”

Dr. Jonathan Heeney trained as a veterinarian at the University of Guelph. He heads the Laboratory of Viral Zoonotics at Cambridge University in the UK. His team chased the Holy Grail – a vaccine that protects against multiple coronaviruses. To do that he had to secure viruses from bats all over the world, including a huge colony in Thailand. “We are probably dealing with hundreds, if not thousands of different coronaviruses that have the propensity to spill over into humans,” says Heeney. “Why wait, again, for another disaster.”

A huge coup for Infield Fly Productions was gaining access to the team that eventually won the race, Germany’s BioNTech and their CEO Professor Uğur Şahin. Şahin and his wife Dr. Özlem Türeci have spent two decades working on RNA vaccines. When SARS CoV-2 struck they realized this same technology could be used to confront the coronavirus. “This is the worst pandemic in the last, at least 50 years, maybe in the last 100 years,” says Prof. Şahin, “and we have the ability to react fast.”

Infield Fly also filmed with one of China’s leading biotech companies, CanSino Biologics. CEO Dr. Xuefeng Yu is a graduate of Montreal’s McGill University. He and his team decided to build their vaccine on the base of another technology created to fight the Ebola virus. Dr. Yu had another advantage – he was backed by the powerful Chinese military. “We will be the first one to see how this vaccine works,” he told Maudsley.

While Inside The Great Vaccine Race charts the setbacks and triumphs of creating a vaccine, it also carries a stark warning: The race is not over. “We have a huge challenge,” declares Prof. Uğur Şahin. “We have to provide almost ten billion doses in the next 12-18 months,” if we hope to defeat this virus.