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How a David and a Goliath sprinted ahead in the vaccine race

By Sharon LaFraniere, Katie Thomas, Noah Weiland, David Gelles, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Denise Grady
New York Times·
20 mins to read

The furious race to develop a coronavirus vaccine played out against a presidential election, between a pharmaceutical giant and a biotech upstart, with the stakes as high as they could get.

The call was tense, the message discouraging. Moncef Slaoui, the head of the Trump administration's effort to quickly produce a vaccine for the coronavirus, was on the phone at 6pm on August 25 to tell upstart biotech firm Moderna that it had to slow the final stage of testing

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