Outpacing Pandemics

How slow is vaccine development? Very. Very. Slow.

The vaccine for typhoid fever was first tested back in 1896. It only came into safe, effective use from 1994. Nearly a century later!

That’s longer than most lifetimes, regardless of whether you were lucky enough to avoid typhoid.

But breakthroughs in science and technology mean that, within the decade, it may be possible to develop vaccines much more swiftly. In weeks rather than months or years.

To show the extremely complex process of vaccine development, we worked hard to break it into simple steps for people: Code, Validate, Produce, Distribute, Adapt.

We included this as an illustrated ‘chapter’ in the piece to give context about vaccine development in the future.

Using a split-screen device on a timeline, users could easily compare the frightening rate of outbreaks directly against the much slower-moving vaccine development.

We went back to 1899 for our first outbreak data, plotting nearly 70 outbreaks, right up to 2016.

To bring home just how many lives could be saved with the earliest possible introduction of a vaccine, we gave users two powerful outbreak scenarios to explore: Ebola and flu.

We worked closely with experts at the Gates Foundation, the University of Florida and the Institute for Disease Modeling to ensure that we represented realistic hypothetical scenarios.

We created punchy animated promos for the Gates Foundation to build buzz on social media.

These super-short looping visualizations were designed specifically to entice the audience to engage, click and find out more.