The Pandemic Diaries
How has COVID-19 affected the pharma industry and medicine makers across the world?
| Opinion
Throughout 2020, we have been asking medicine makers from around the world to tell us about their experience of COVID-19 and the impact the pandemic has had on their professional and personal lives. Here is a selection of the pandemic diaries we have published so far.
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“I remember when reports of a novel coronavirus first began to emerge in late December. Somebody mentioned it at the weekly product development meeting – more as a curiosity than anything else.”
“I’ve been humbled to observe, amongst the obvious heroism of front-line workers, the motivation of dedicated scientists who are continuing to undertake pharmaceutical R&D in the knowledge that it will one day contribute to the better treatment of, or help to defeat, the world’s evolving healthcare challenges.”
“As a population, we are currently learning how to function during a pandemic. Everyone is claiming “business as usual” – but can this really be the case when there are still restrictions on global travel and social distancing?”
“Over the last few months, remote working has been implemented relatively smoothly across the industry. Even before the pandemic, we’d already seen many companies embracing digital and virtual technologies within the laboratory setting through our Lab of the Future (LotF) initiatives, and this has now picked up further pace.”
“Despite the underlying competitive spirit among biopharma companies to be the first to create a vaccine, I believe this pandemic demonstrates the importance of collaboration among different industry members.”
“SARS-CoV-19 – or rather its devastating direct and indirect effects – certainly never crossed my worried mind in 2019 (despite subconsciously knowing that the risk was always there; if SARS and MERS weren’t warning shots across the bow, I don’t know what were).”
