COVID soft toy owned by Dan Barouch during his work on COVID-19 vaccine development, made by GIANTmicrobes, 2020

Given to Dan by his sister and sat on his home office desk, this soft toy shows the basic structure of the COVID-19 virus of a spherical base with spike proteins. Like many scientists and researchers, Dan worked tirelessly to help develop COVID-19 vaccines and treatments, saying he did not have a single day off for 414 days.

Dan is Professor of Immunology at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He has spent his career studying viruses including HIV and Zika and ways to both prevent and treat them. This decades long work was crucial in being able to rapidly identify possible candidates for a COVID-19 vaccine. His laboratory and team contributed to the development of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine, developed in 13 months. Known as by the brand name Jcovden, and developed by Janssen Vaccines in Leiden, it is a single dose vaccine which used an adenovirus to deliver the genetic code for the coronavirus spike protein to prime the recipient's body for an infection of COVID-19.

Janssen, the pharmaceutical company side of American owned Johnson and Johnson, is now known as J&J Innovative Medicine.