zlacker

Unless we forget how to make mRNA vaccines, we're likely to avoid pandemics forever. These vaccines are going to fix everything.

>>presid+(OP)
mRNA vaccine technology is just a platform for presenting antigens to the immune system, the fastest one to make vaccine candidates by far, literally over a weekend for Moderna after the first SARS-CoV-2 sequences were published by Chinese researchers. It also has many advantages in simplicity.

That doesn't mean we'll be able to provide safe vaccines for sufficiently novel pathogens, behind Moderna's candidate was a decade and a half of research into making safe vaccines for SARS type coronaviruses, with researchers at the NIH finding one solution in 2017 for the antibody-dependent enhancement issue that had been plaguing such attempts starting with SARS and inactivated whole virus vaccines.

A fast pandemic can also get a long distance before you can ramp up production and vaccinate 8 billion people, with vaccines that so far need freezing for shipping, and medical grade refrigeration afterwords until used. Plus you need to make at least 8 billion syringes and needles and so on.