Inside the quixotic 30-year quest that gave us the Covid-19 treatments, vaccines and could unlock vaccinology’s new holy grail
John Mascola, America’s soft-spoken, no-nonsense chief vaccinologist, spent 2020 on the fourth floor of the Vaccine Research Center in Bethesda, MD, primarily working on three projects. There’s a decent chance one of them has already been injected in your arm — twice. Another was infused into hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 patients, potentially protecting them from hospitalization.
And the third is a scientific codex that has bedeviled Mascola, his colleagues, and researchers around the world for the better part of three decades.
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