Watch: why finding a coronavirus vaccine could take longer than you think

Vaccine making is not rocket science; it's a lot harder than rocket science ... [This] is not going to be simple.'

These are words worth listening to. They come from Meredith Wadman, one of the world's leading biomedical science journalists and author of The Vaccine Race, the epic story of how one young biologist in the 1960s developed a way to produce the first safe, clean human cells that – when infected with rubella, rabies and other viruses – could act as hosts with which to mass-produce vaccines. It was a discovery that has saved the lives of hundreds of millions of people across the world since, and revolutionised our relationship with sickness.

In short, Wadman knows her toxoid vaccines from her heterotypic vaccines, and all the others in between. Here, she explains how vaccines are made; why sometimes - such as in the search for a Covid-19 cure - they can take so long. But why, also, we should all have faith.