Af­ter falling be­hind the lead­ers, dissed by some ex­perts, biotech show­man Patrick Soon-Sh­iong fi­nal­ly gets his Covid-19 vac­cine ready for a tri­al. But can it live up to the hype?

In Jan­u­ary, when dozens of sci­en­tists rushed to start mak­ing a vac­cine for the then-nov­el coro­n­avirus, they were joined by an un­like­ly com­pa­tri­ot: Patrick Soon-Sh­iong, the bil­lion­aire doc­tor most fa­mous for mak­ing big, con­tro­ver­sial promis­es on can­cer re­search.

Soon-Sh­iong had spent the last 4 years on his “Can­cer Moon­shot,” but part of his project meant buy­ing a small Seat­tle biotech that spe­cial­ized in mak­ing com­mon-cold vec­tors, called ade­n­ovirus­es, to train the im­mune sys­tem. The bil­lion­aire had been us­ing those vec­tors for on­col­o­gy, but the com­pa­ny had al­so de­vel­oped vac­cine can­di­dates for H1N1, Las­sa fever and oth­er virus­es. When the out­break be­gan, he piv­ot­ed.

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