Horizon Special: The Vaccine

BBC2, 9pm

With the successful vaccine rollout offering hope that there may soon be a way out of the Covid-19 pandemic, this documentary reveals the unprecedented scientific effort over the past 18 months that has gone into getting us to this point.

From Oxford University and the University of Queensland to the giant US firm Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, the brilliant minds who led the charge explain how they responded to the arrival of the coronavirus at the start of 2020 and managed to compress the normal vaccine development time of a decade or more into a few months.

As we witness them working under pressure and displaying true team work while pushing themselves to the limit, this inspirational story offers hope for humanity’s capacity to respond to similar emergencies in the future.