Pfizer 'variant hunters' race to stay ahead of the Covid-19 pandemic

Hundreds of millions of doses have been injected worldwide, but at the Pearl River research center where the vaccine was created, the pace has not let up. A team of “variant hunters,” as they call themselves, race to track changes in the fast-mutating SARS-CoV-2. A “virus farmer” grows the latest variants so researchers can test how they fare against the vaccine. And a colleague known as the “graphing unicorn” converts the data into intelligible results overnight. The scientist leading all this work, Phil Dormitzer, was among the first to open the email bearing results of tests on how well Pfizer’s shot worked against Delta. For a heart-stopping moment, he thought the vaccine was indeed less protective against this wildfire of a variant. Then he looked again