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“And even though it’s only less than two years ago since that first vaccination[…] COVID-19 is still very much part of our lives.
“And if you look back, two years ago to what had been achieved, it’s a really incredible story, everything happened quickly and largely very efficiently to produce this incredible outcome in such a short time.”
The museum’s own role in hosting one of London’s largest vaccination centres and administering 139,000 jabs is documented in the exhibition. Other items include the Keep Calm and Make Vaccines mug that sat on Professor Sarah Gilbert’s desk as she created the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, the chair on which the first person to receive a trial dose sat, as well as sculptural representations of the virus itself.
A notebook with handwritten notes by the woman who oversaw the UK’s vaccine rollout, Kate Bingham, setting out the early stages of the enormous project is also on display.
“I quite like objects that in other contexts are quite ordinary but because of their association are very special,” Emmens said.
He says he was invited by the NHS to visit their headquarters’ a year ago to take whatever he wanted to keep for record relating to the vaccine rollout.
“They said ‘just help yourself’,” he recalled. “I’m sure it would have gone in the bin otherwise.”
Also prominent is a huge reproduction of an image inside CSL’s Broadmeadows factory taken by this masthead’s photojournalist Chris Hopkins showcasing the enormous scale of vaccine production.
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But while the focus of the exhibition is on the creation of the vaccines, it does allude to vaccine nationalism; to inequities in distribution (rich countries bought up supplies first) and the preference exhibited by some people for the Pfizer vaccine, because of rare blood-clotting cases earlier associated with the Oxford.
“We’re very clear that the distribution has been unequal,” Emmens said.
“It’s a not a black and white story, we’re mainly looking at the challenges of creating it, trialling it and mass-manufacturing and rollout. Within that we certainly suggest there’s a lot of other things going on.”
“It wasn’t a smooth story,” he said.
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