Scientists’ pandemic response could be even faster next time

AS THE DELTA variant of covid-19 continues to spread across large parts of the world, the shame is that vaccines are still in such short supply. Worse, they are being hogged by rich countries even though the need elsewhere is so great. For that, blame politics. The triumph, however, is that vaccines exist at all. And for that, praise science.

The sequence of the virus’s genome was made public on January 11th 2020, just one month after a new respiratory illness was first reported in Wuhan, in China. Days later, on January 15th, Moderna, working with America’s National Institutes of Health, had completed the design of the prototype molecule that would comprise its vaccine. Sixty-two days after that, on March 16th, human trials began. Maggie Keenan, a 91-year-old Briton, received the first clinical Pfizer vaccine on December 8th. By comparison, the vaccine against polio in America took 20 years to make the journey from trials to licence.