When reports began emerging in January 2020 of a mysterious respiratory virus spreading in Wuhan, China, politicians, health officials and scientists were unprepared for the global pandemic that was soon to follow. As the scale of the calamity unfolded, the world’s best known pharmaceutical companies had nothing in their arsenal to deal with it.

The scientists and drug companies that mobilized an effective response were not the usual suspects. They were an untested group, and many operated at the fringes of science. BioNTech and Moderna were unknown to the general public and had not had commercial success with vaccines. But when leaders from the two companies heard about the novel coronavirus spreading in China, each believed that they could crack its genetic code and devise a vaccine based on mRNA technology, which they had been researching. These unlikely scientists were soon on a race to save civilization.

Award-winning Wall Street Journal reporter Gregory Zuckerman tells this story in his new book, A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of the Life-or-Death Race for a Covid-19 Vaccine.

“This is an age of outbreaks,” writes Zuckerman. “Each year, humans encroach on nature, increasing the risks that animal-borne diseases will cross over and threaten humanity. Lessons from the vaccine race will inform scientists, politicians, and others if—or perhaps when—we confront another deadly pathogen.”