Jon CohenThe first people in the world to receive a COVID-19 vaccine were not part of a clinical trial. No TV stations or newspapers covered the historic event.
No company issued a statement.On 29 February, less than 2 months after the world awakened to the threat of the new disease, virologist Chen Wei, a major general in China’s army, and six military scientists on her team stood in front of a Chinese Communist Party flag and received injections of an experimental COVID-19 vaccine.
Chen, a national hero for her work on Ebola vaccines, had come to the initial center of the pandemic, Wuhan, with her group from the Academy of Medical Military Sciences, in part to help make the candidate vaccine with a commercial company, CanSino Biologics..