They spent 2 decades building technology platforms that enable rapid development of vaccines for specific diseases.

The specifics of the Moderna vaccine took 2 days once they had the genome of the virus. But there was an awful lot of work done before then.

Can you elaborate on what you mean it took 2 days? is this akin to a programmer creating a simulation for weeks and then taking an hour to ingest the input data into the simulation?

It’s very similar to your analogy. Basically, they have a ginormous database of how genes express themselves in various cell types, and they can run fancy queries against this database to identify which cells are most likely to be compromised by a virus of COVID’s shape.

From there, the process of developing the vaccine is training the body to fight blobs that function like COVID does.

The first shot introduces some COVID-shaped blobs, and your body develops some antibody factories to fight them, and keeps some around just in case the scary blobs come back.

The second shot introduces some more blobs, and your body reacts by producing even more antibody factories. “Trick me twice, shame on me”, in nature.

The hard work was building the database. Which was only possible because of the genome project and cell project.

They got the genome (and I imagine other data) from scientists in China, identified what they believed would be a good target for the immune system and designed the mRNA sequence that would trigger immunity to that target.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7492076/moderna-coronavirus-vacci...

They were also working on SARS and MERS vaccines prior to this so they had a really good head start that they should target the spike protein.

Plus:

- "These are the first mRNA vaccines ever released. We don't yet know the long term effects."

To biologists in this field, I suspect this statement reads something like “this is the first Python client for our Node gRPC service, we have no idea if the language interop will work”.

It ignores all of the hard work over literal decades that has gone into the work of developing mRNA-based medicine (gRPC and protobufs), which was developed literally for situations like Covid-19 (polyglot services communicating over network interfaces).

Yes, mRNA is basically magic from a distance. So is all of modern technology. But it’s built on and hardened by iterative experiments, not conjured from thin air.

> Don’t forget how many people don’t even take the flu shot.

That's a funny comparison from a UK perspective where the flu shot isn't even offered to the general population (only the elderly, vulnerable or those whose work in healthcare or similar). I'd say there is much more reason to take the COVID vaccine than the flu shot.

Are you sure about that? I know you can easily get it in a local chemist for about a tenner, I’m nearly sure you can book it with your GP if you’re willing to wait a bit longer

What are you talking about?

Most companies offer the flu jab to their employees for free, and otherwise it's like a tenner to save yourself the risk of 2/3 days of feeling horrible.

Fwiw, every time I have taken a flu shot, it has guaranteed 2/3 days of feeling horrible.

That said, I don’t get the flu every year (iirc, I’ve had it twice in the past 20 years).

You forgot: - "There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature"