” “Transforming Spaces” is a series about women driving change in sometimes unexpected places.” An item appeared in the paper today that is not only appropriate for Black History month but to counter the flaming %#*&# people who think they know more than science and that the vaccine was created too fast.

”Kizzmekia Corbett had gone home to North Carolina for the holidays in 2019 when the headlines began to trickle in: A strange, pneumonialike illness was making dozens of people sick in China.”

”By the first week of January 2020, the number of infected people in China had climbed to the hundreds, and Dr. Corbett, a viral immunologist, was back at her desk at the National Institutes of Health, where she served as a senior research fellow at the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. And that’s when the news was confirmed: The mysterious illness was a novel coronavirus, exactly the category of infection that she had been probing for the past five years in a bid to develop a vaccine.”

”Dr. Corbett, 37, was used to having to prove herself. As a Black woman in science, she is accustomed to asserting her worth in rooms filled with white men. In early 2020, she had been at the National Institutes of Health for five years, and had already published groundbreaking research about the structure of other coronaviruses, and how the viruses’ spike proteins — which form a distinctive crown shape on the surface of the virus and latch on to healthy cells in the body — act as the doorway to infection. This research was part of the foundation, laid by scientists including Dr. Graham, Katalin Kariko and Dr. Drew Weissman at the University of Pennsylvania, for the Covid-19 vaccine, the fastest vaccine ever developed.”
[nytimes.com]