Review:
I was helping a student at the library I work at find immunology books and realized that we don't have paper copies of anything published after 2019. Not super great. We also don't have much of a budget, and what we do spend goes almost entirely into databases and e-books, so I figured I'd read this and donate it.
This was published in 2021. Rhodes goes over the history of immunology and what we currently know about the immune system and how it works. He also discusses the history of vaccines, various types of vaccines, and the various stages of vaccine development. Then he looks at the various COVID-19 vaccine contenders, arranged by class: inactivated whole-virus vaccines, protein subunit vaccines, live attenuated vaccines, nonreplicating viral vector vaccines, replicating viral vector vaccines, virus-like particle vaccines, DNA vaccines, and RNA vaccines. There's a chart of COVID-19 vaccines and vaccine candidates at the end of the book. Rhodes also goes over some vaccination hurdles and how they might be overcome.
This book was maybe not the best place for me to start. Rhodes is an immunologist who definitely seemed to know what he was talking about. Unfortunately, I wasn't always able to follow along with his explanations very well. I really could have used some visual aids.
Still, I appreciated learning a little more about vaccine development in general and the development of COVID-19 vaccines in particular.
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