The former Miss England, Dr. Carina Tyrrell, is now at the forefront of the hunt for an effective and safe Coronavirus vaccine. She is now a part of the Oxford University research team.
Tyrrell has spent the past 12 months working tirelessly to help find a vaccine against the Coronavirus caused disease, analyzing data from hundreds of COVID-19 vaccine trials including Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Oxford-AstraZeneca.
From Beauty Queen to Healthcare Professional
Tyrrell became Miss England in 2014 and in the same year she came fourth in the Miss World competition. The 31-year-old former beauty queen said: "I still really support both Miss World and Miss England and I still judge the Miss England contest."
However, she practised medicine at Oxford University and was a researcher at the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) at the World Health Organization (WHO). During her work at the UN agency, she authored international policy documents on data sharing, research, and innovation, and published work on emerging respiratory viruses.
Graduated with a first-class degree in Natural Sciences from Cambridge University, Tyrrell has been part of the Oxford team and working tirelessly to make sure that the vaccines are safe to be rolled out to the people.
"I didn't think six years on I would be part of a team searching for a vaccine during a global pandemic on this scale. We've been gathering data from all over the world and trying to identify the most promising vaccine candidate," she said.
Tyrrell and her team at Oxford have looked at all of the Coronavirus vaccines and analyzed over 700 trial studies. "I've been looking at the vaccine and therapeutic clinical trials trying to identify the most promising vaccine and therapeutic candidates. And of course, making sure the vaccine is going to be relevant for specific user groups," she added.
In terms of the policy work, she has been the lead. She has written some of the policies and her scientific paper is going to be published in the British Medical Journal. Tyrrell, who lost her uncle to COVID-19, stressed that even though there is finally light at the end of the tunnel with the vaccine development news, it will take some time to get back to normal.
Tyrrell urged all the Britons to support the mass vaccination program in the UK. She said it is important for people to be vaccinated and "I encourage everybody to accept the vaccine when they get offered it". She believes that immunization is the way forward and it will help the wider population.
