Graham had a flash of intuition: Perhaps it would be worth taking a closer look at this humdrum cold virus.
It was an impulse born more of convenience and curiosity than foresight, with little to no expectation of glory or profit. Yet the decision to study a colleague’s bad cold gave rise to critical discoveries. Together with other chance breakthroughs that seemed insignificant at the time, it would lead eventually to the mRNA vaccines now protecting hundreds of millions of people from COVID-19.
The shots were developed at record speed, arriving just over a year after a mysterious pneumonia surfaced in China, while so much else — political feuds, public distrust and botched government planning — went wrong.
They remain a marvel: Even as the omicron variant fuels a new wave of the pandemic, the vaccines have proved remarkably resilient at defending against severe illness and death. And the manufacturers, Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna, say that mRNA technology will allow them to adapt the vaccines quickly to fend off whatever dangerous new version of the virus that evolution brings next.
Skeptics have seized on the rapid development of the vaccines — among the most impressive feats of medical science in the modern era — to undermine the public’s trust in them. But the breakthroughs behind the vaccines unfolded over decades, little by little, as scientists across the world pursued research in disparate areas, never imagining their work would one day come together to tame the pandemic of the century.
Source: The decades of discoveries before the ‘miraculous’ sprint to a vaccine | The Japan Times
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