Dear unsung heroes in the international scientific community. Thank you! Please tell us your story.

As 2020 comes to a close, I want to express my deep gratitude to the international scientific community for all of their efforts to fight coronavirus. What has been accomplished is truly remarkable. Just since the pandemic began, 74,000 COVID-related scientific papers are now listed on PubMed, there are over 4,000 COVID-related clinical trials, and this week healthcare workers in the US began receiving Pfizer’s vaccine.

When I think about all this, I think about ALL the people whose work made this happen – the scientists, business leads, clinical trial staff, regulatory folks, operations folks, supply chain folks, HR folks, IT folks, administrative staff, facilities staff, security guards, lawyers, food services folks, and cleaning staff. The list goes on and on. And all of them dropped what they were doing early in 2020 and turned their attention to helping their institutions, organizations, and companies fight coronavirus. Some worked in the lab, some figured out brand new operating systems, some figured out how teams could keep working as they moved online, some got new clinical trials up and going, some wrote papers, and some implemented new initiatives to better support employees. This list of what has been done also goes on and on. And they did all of this ON TOP OF dealing with the difficulties and challenges of life in a pandemic like school and daycare closures, distance learning, figuring out virtual work, new safety procedures and protocols, fatigue, and burnout.

So much of this work is invisible and goes unseen. But I can imagine you all out there in the world – this behind-the-scenes human infrastructure – that accomplished in under a year what normally takes several years or even decades. I’m sure these accomplishments came with many sacrifices and stressors, not just for you all individually, but also for your families. These collective efforts to fight coronavirus will go down in the history books as one of humankind’s greatest achievements.

I would love to learn more about all these unsung heroes, whose ongoing work is required to combat coronavirus. So please tell these stories here. Tag your colleagues, friends, and/or family members here and tell us more about their contributions to these efforts.