Very recommendable! However, no credit at was given to President Trump! He was not even mentioned once in this article, although without his support and push it would not have happened this fast! This is very disingenuous by the author of this article!
The article explains very convincingly how it was possible to develop the new vaccine so fast by different companies in several countries.
"Driven by a global urgency and underpinned by decades of prior work on vaccine technology, vaccine developers found a way to chop not just days or months, but years off the timeline. What was jettisoned was not the science, or the safety tests, but rather the wait time baked into the development process — waiting for results and waiting for regulatory approvals ...
It began with deciphering the exact genetic makeup of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. By early January 2020, that genetic blueprint was in hand and the first vaccines to test were ready just a few weeks later. ...
Researchers knew to zero in on those [spike] proteins thanks to decades of work studying coronaviruses, including two that have caused other outbreaks of human diseases — SARS and MERS. That work also identified the best form of the protein to use: a stable form just before the virus fuses with a cell it’s about to infect. ...
Scientists had already built these rapid, genetically based templates largely because of the ongoing battle against HIV ...
“plug-and-play” vaccine manufacturing. Decades of trying to attack HIV has created a library of safe [templates] to use quickly against any new would-be viral marauders. ...
It began with deciphering the exact genetic makeup of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. By early January 2020, that genetic blueprint was in hand and the first vaccines to test were ready just a few weeks later. ...
Researchers knew to zero in on those [spike] proteins thanks to decades of work studying coronaviruses, including two that have caused other outbreaks of human diseases — SARS and MERS. That work also identified the best form of the protein to use: a stable form just before the virus fuses with a cell it’s about to infect. ...
Scientists had already built these rapid, genetically based templates largely because of the ongoing battle against HIV ...
“plug-and-play” vaccine manufacturing. Decades of trying to attack HIV has created a library of safe [templates] to use quickly against any new would-be viral marauders. ...
One of the templates directly carries a nonfunctional, partial strand of viral mRNA to cells in the body, delivering instructions for those cells to create copies of the protein that the immune system recognizes as foreign. That’s what’s used in the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna shots. ...
The mRNA for the coronavirus’ spike proteins gets packaged inside tiny bubbles of fat called lipid nanoparticles. These tiny fat bubbles have been around for decades and safely used for dozens of other drugs, some approved, others still in the pipeline. ...
One therapy, made by Germany-based CureVac, is the first vaccine to reach human trials that was developed using mRNA to fight an infectious disease. It targets the rabies virus and was injected into human volunteers starting in 2013. Decades earlier, in 1971, researchers developed the first syringefuls that they thought were safe for humans, which they initially tested by injecting themselves. The first version of the mRNA-based rabies vaccine ... did show that the technology was safe. ..."
Two key therapies — one still in the works and one approved — paved the way for COVID-19 vaccine developers to hit the ground running with RNA-based templates.
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