Jayhawk doctor’s vaccine research featured in The New Yorker

Vaccine research by Dr. Barney S. Graham, m’79, deputy director of the National Institutes of Health’s Vaccine Research Center, is prominently featured in The New Yorker magazine’s 30,000-word story “The Plague Year,” which fills its issue of Jan. 4 & 11.

“He is the chief architect of the first covid vaccines authorized for emergency use,” notes staff writer Lawrence Wright, who collaborated with Graham to create the fictional virus in his prescient novel The End of October, published in April 2020. “Manufactured by Moderna and Pfizer, they differ only in their delivery systems.” Wright quotes Graham’s boss, Dr. Anthony Fauci, as saying of Graham, “He understands vaccinology better than anybody I know.”

Wright talks with editor David Remnick about what he learned writing “The Plague Year” on an episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour.

Graham recently joined Twitter, @BarneyGrahamMD, “to recount the previous [year’s] events and thoughts about COVID-19 vaccine development.” 

Kansas Alumni magazine has been in contact with Graham, with the goal of featuring Graham and his wife, Dr. Cynthia A. Turner-Graham, m’79, in an upcoming issue.

—Chris Lazzarino