photo by: Mike Yoder

Dr. Barney Graham, who recently retired as the deputy director of the National Institutes of Health Vaccine Research Center, speaks on the University of Kansas campus on Thursday, March 31, 2022, for the 17th annual Takeru Higuchi Memorial Lecture.

Dr. Barney Graham — widely credited as one of the key researchers who developed today’s life-saving COVID-19 vaccines — knows some people won’t receive the vaccine because they worry it was developed too quickly.

What he also knows is the world is quite lucky to have that worry.

Graham — who received his medical degree from the University of Kansas and recently retired as the deputy director of the federal government’s Vaccine Research Center — told a crowd on the Lawrence campus Thursday that if the virus that created the current pandemic had been from nearly any other family of viruses, the world likely would still be waiting for a vaccine — and perhaps waiting for a long time.

“It would have been a more typical years or decades type of process,” Graham said almost matter-of-factly as he gave the Takeru Higuchi Memorial Lecture at Gray-Little Hall.

Graham said the release of a COVID-19 vaccine only came so quickly because there had been 20 years of curious researchers learning information such as the shape of certain proteins that turned out to be immensely important for researchers like Graham being able to make quick decisions about what type of vaccine would be most effective in battling COVID.

It was mainly just luck, Graham said, that the pandemic was spurred by a coronavirus, which had a lot of basic science research already in the bank. The pandemic just as easily could have been spurred by another type of virus that had little basic research to pull from.

“I think we should all feel a little bit lucky, maybe to the point that we see it as a second chance to get better prepared for next time,” Graham said in an interview with the Journal-World on Thursday.

As part of his address, he advocated for more funding for basic science research, saying that the pandemic should serve as the ultimate example of why basic research is critical.

While Graham did not do his undergraduate studies at KU, Lawrence is a familiar place to him. Graham grew up in Paola on a family farm, and his “little sister,” Janice Olker, lives in Lawrence currently. His parents, now both deceased, lived in Lawrence for decades after leaving the family farm, a fact that became clear as a line of well-wishers talked to Graham after the lecture.

While a few asked him to autograph items, one couple told him how much they enjoyed playing bridge with his parents in Lawrence. They remembered that Graham’s father used to brag about how his son was good at repurposing old farm machinery.

“Well, we didn’t have any new machinery,” Graham told the couple. “That was the problem.”

photo by: Mike Yoder

Dr. Barney Graham, right, who recently retired as the deputy director of the National Institutes of Health Vaccine Research Center, is presented a plaque by University of Kansas Chancellor Douglas Girod on Thursday, March 31, 2022, for speaking at the 17th annual Takeru Higuchi Memorial Lecture.

Paola, a Miami County town of about 5,700 people, has a fair amount of vaccine hesitancy, like many rural communities, statistics show. The town can produce a scientist capable of helping create a world-changing vaccine, but it struggles to get its residents to receive it.

Graham said he’s not sure why. But he said it is interesting to note the differences between the groups of people who are resisting the vaccine.

“I don’t know how to explain why Kansas farmers and urban Blacks agree on this one thing that they are reluctant to take the vaccine developed for coronavirus. But I have spent a lot of time trying to help people understand what this is all about. I wish I could help them understand it or believe in it enough to get the help it provides.”

Graham said he’s hopeful that vaccine hesitancy will decline as the environment around the pandemic becomes less stressful.

“It is very hard to gain trust during a crisis,” Graham said. “The trust building and education has to be done during peacetime.”

He said more transparent communication in communities will be important, and so too will better biology education for American children. Graham told the crowd that he is hopeful the pandemic will spur many of today’s youths who lived through the hardships of the pandemic to become immunologists and scientists.

But Graham also said there is much work for politicians and other leaders to do.

“There is a lack of faith in institutions and expertise,” Graham said of the American public. “That’s partly because of the institutions’ behavior and the experts’ behavior.”

But that doesn’t mean the public should turn its back on the vaccines and the science that helped create them, Graham said. Multiple times in his speech and in the interview afterwards, Graham came back to the idea of how the pandemic could have turned out even worse.

He pointed back to 2002 when the first SARS virus surprisingly stopped spreading after infecting about 9,000 people.

“What would have happened in 2002 if it would have gone on like this?” Graham asked. “We didn’t know how to make a very good vaccine, we didn’t have any anti-virals and we didn’t have Zoom. It would have been a complete disaster.”

photo by: Mike Yoder

Dr. Barney Graham, who recently retired as the deputy director of the National Institutes of Health Vaccine Research Center, speaks on the University of Kansas campus on Thursday, March 31, 2022, for the 17th annual Takeru Higuchi Memorial Lecture.