| Hi, it's Sarah McBride. Two Covid-19 trials were put on pause last week. Mine wasn't one of them. For the last few months, I have been a human guinea pig in Pfizer Inc.'s Covid vaccine trial. The process has been mostly uneventful so far, but one rough day gives a potential glimpse into what the rest of humanity can expect when a vaccine is more widely administered. So much relies on a viable vaccine, in the economic and political sense, as well as to ensure a return to normal daily life. Some tech companies, including Netflix Inc., have said they won't reopen offices until a vaccine is widely administered. AstraZeneca dampened some of the optimism when it placed vaccine trials on pause in September due to "an unexplained illness." Johnson & Johnson followed last week with a similar, vague explanation, and so did Eli Lilly for its Covid-19 treatment. By the end of the week, Pfizer emerged with an encouraging sign: The company said it was targeting an application for emergency authorization in the U.S. for its vaccine by late November. Dozens of vaccine candidates are in testing, many part of the U.S. government's Operation Warp Speed program, but a flurry of news in the last week has drawn greater interest to the mechanics of these trials. This was my experience: Friends thought I was crazy when I volunteered for a trial early in the summer. "You might die!" one told me on a masked walk. Maybe all these years living in San Francisco and covering technology have made me buy into the beta-test culture. I found studies showing vaccine trials were generally safer than drug trials, and the ones I was reviewing had already advanced through two earlier phases of study. I read about a man who said he had participated in a coronavirus trial and fainted in the middle of the night after a shot. Unpleasant, but I could handle that. By early August, I was headed to a clinic in Walnut Creek, California, that was administering trials for Pfizer's potential vaccine, where the first order of business was filling out lots of paperwork and reviewing a presentation about the trial on an iPad. A doctor talked with me, a phlebotomist took blood samples, and then I headed outside for a Covid-19 test. The clinic had set up a screened area on a small patio with a chair, where I sat while a scrubs-wearing, gloved, face-shielded clinician stuck a swab up my nose. Finally, an assistant led me to a barren room centered around a blue medical armchair. I sat down and received a shot. It could have been the placebo or the real thing. Nobody was telling. I felt fine and drove home, armed with a thermometer and a device to measure any swelling. For seven days afterward, an app I had installed on my iPhone beeped every night, reminding me to fill in a health diary recording any symptoms such as nausea or fever. Three weeks later, I returned midday for another shot. That time, my throat felt itchy almost as soon as the needle punctured my arm. My temperature rose almost two degrees higher than it had registered before I arrived at the clinic—but at 98.3, still within a safe range. I went home feeling OK, but I woke up in the middle of the night aching everywhere, even in my teeth. My throat was dry. My skin burned and then went shivery. Finally, I fell back asleep. When my alarm sounded, I felt exhausted. I canceled an online exercise class and trudged through the workday. All the while, my temperature remained elevated. My arm itched like crazy, from right below the injection site down to my elbow. The situation improved by evening, with the symptoms gone except for the itching, which continued for days. The app pings me every week, and I've been back to the clinic once more so the doctors can test for antibodies. I'll be there three more times over the next two years. The vaccine may be coming at warp speed, but true normalcy still seems like a long way off. —Sarah McBride | 
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