The Great Vaccinator

A couple summers ago, Radiolab reporter Alex Neason got out of the shower and almost stepped on her worst nightmare: an American Cockroach. It was flipped onto its back, struggling, and for a split second, Alex swears she felt the spiny tickle of its legs on the underside of her ...  Show more

This episode makes three earnest, possibly foolhardy, attempts to put a price on the priceless. We figure out the dollar value for an accidental death, another day of life, and the work of bats and bees as we try to keep our careful calculations from falling apart in the face of ...  Show more

Now that scientists have created a Covid-19 vaccine in record time, the race is on to vaccinate the world. Public health professor Devi Sridhar follows the journey of the Covid vaccine from factory to arm as she goes behind the scenes of the rollout. Speaking to health leaders, p ...  Show more

This past year, scientists racing to stop the novel coronavirus delivered vaccines at a pace and scale the world has never seen before. Adrian Hill, director of Oxford University's vaccine research institute, recounts how he and his team developed the AstraZeneca vaccine. He expl ...  Show more

The race for a COVID-19 vaccine entered a new phase recently. Four different vaccine candidates, developed by Moderna, Pfizer, BionTech and Johnson & Johnson, entered final-stage trials, with two others close behind. But we won’t know exactly how these four vaccines work for mont ...  Show more

On the same day the COVID-19 death toll surpassed 300,000 in the United States, the first vaccines are being administered, finally giving millions of Americans hope for a better future and a return to normalcy. We explore how officials expect to deliver a safe and effective vacci ...  Show more