The Path to a Covid Vaccine

The Path to a Covid Vaccine

August 11, 2020, 8:00 AMThe Path to a Covid VaccineIn a special Vaccine Issue, Bloomberg Businessweek looks at the biggest challenges, promising solutions, and the weirdest science, from the molecular level on up.August 11, 2020, 8:00 AMThe story of the war against Covid-19 begins half a billion years ago. That's when jawed fish—our scaly forebears—evolved an immune system capable of learning, adapting, and defeating invaders. The adaptive immune system, as it's called, was so massive an improvement over the slow-learning innate immune system of the day that some scientists now describe it as the Big Bang of immunology. In humans, only the brain rivals the immune system for sophistication, says Alice Huang, a senior faculty associate at the California Institute of Technology who has studied virus-host interactions for some five