Not sure what the point was you were going to make, but the mRNA technology is a big step in the direction of being able to address medical problems like writing a software. For a long time, pharmaceuticals were create in a trial and error process. It took science a long time to be able to reliably predict the outcome of chemical reactions, if we are talking about complex organic chemistry. I was working a very little bit on that in the mid-90ies. One very naive program I implemented was trying to predict the toxidity of a random chemical by its formula. We have come far from that. But with the mRNA technology, they could design their vaccine on a computer, also the production of the mRNA is highly automatized, so no experimenting in how to create it.
Developing the mRNA technology was of course decades of research, but now it is ready to be used. It also helped, that the SARS-virus was very well researched, so like with software, it the vaccine wasn't created "from scratch". It used the knowledge already present about these viruses. This means, while you might not get a vaccine against a random virus in two days (no HIV vaccine available yet), adjusting the vaccine for slight variations of the SARS-cov-2 virus, should be a very quick process.
You're being downvoted but the point is valid. To say that this was built in two days is to completely ignore the near decade of investment into mrna vaccines. Total nonsense.
That's not relevant. The point is that Moderna had a low-latency solution when the moment showed itself. It isn't that it's easy. It offers some thinking that their technology is revolutionary and that perhaps we need to revisit our calculations to see if the risk/reward means we should attempt earlier roll out.
We know, this time with hindsight, that it would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives and billions of dollars if we'd used their product on day 3.
Can we develop a protocol that can tell us that so we can use this tech on day 10 next time? Then we can save those lives.
> if the risk/reward means we should attempt earlier roll out
you still need to make sure the vaccine actually works in trials and has no severe side effects. It takes one, and only one minor vaccine scandal to completely blow the trust of the public in public health.
There is no linear risk/reward when it comes to vaccines. You need to be incredibly confident that they are safe or else you're going to screw yourself possibly for decades.
Sure, but we have experimental drug programs. People will sign up for challenge trials. We don't do it for the same reason IBM doesn't end up making the iPhone: risk aversion is really strong. If trust in the public were a thing the HHS were interested in they wouldn't have lied to the public about masks.
They're so far off the claim it's embarrassing they even said it. They couldn't write 1% of Twitter in a weekend.
Twitter circa 2006, they could clone the basics of it. And only because someone else already showed them what to do so they don't have to burn much time thinking very much or go through many learning iterations.
