Yes mRNA gives us some good weapons against future viruses. More important than that would be to react quicker when a new pandemic looms. Make sure that all air travel is checked (the US banned travel from China, while infected people would arrive from Europe...), be quick with local lockdowns while the virus isn't spread around the country. Especially, watch out early for local outbreaks.

Also improvements to public health information systems. It seems like there are a lot of people employed in public health in the US across the local, state and federal levels and those people are not served by good systems.

The fact that for most of the pandemic, a volunteer effort run by The Atlantic magazine was better at reporting disease statistics than the CDC is a flashing red sign.

My own county’s system seemed designed for tracing and reporting a handful of cases per week for TB outbreaks or the like and was knocked over when the COVID surges happened.

>(the US banned travel from China, while infected people would arrive from Europe...)

It's worse than that. We banned some non-citizens from entering the US if they had been in China, we did not ban travel from China.

Depends on the virus.

Coronavirus is an "easy" one to create a vaccine against. HIV would be the toughest one, regular approaches don't work, which is why we don't have a vaccine despite 30 years of trying.

For HIV you need a different approach, called "germ-line targetting", where instead of presenting the virus, you are trying to direct the evolution of antibody producing cells towards a specific kind which is able to produce working antibodies. If you just present the virus, you get useless antibodies.

So if we are hit by a "hard" virus like HIV, mRNA vaccines will be useless, since it takes years to figure out that germ line targeting.

The optimism around the mRNA vaccines should be tempered: there are reports of coronavirus vaccines causing heart inflammation (particularly in youngsters); and causing substantial changes in the immune responses. These admittedly infrequent or possibly benign consequences will need to be understood much better for mRNA vaccines to become mainstream.

I wonder how much head start the Chinese labs had vs February of 2020 in terms of sequencing the virus. (I'm not trying to make any remotely xenophobic claims here, but it seems like there is substantial evidence that something unusual was happening in Wuhan as early as late fall of 2019.)

The rest of your comment stands strongly, but I'm not so sure about "the first weekend" as being entirely correct and repeatable.

the formulation of the vaccine was very fast and relatively simple compared to the 12+ year span required to understand the virus to the extent that a working vaccine could be formulated.

we were lucky with this one, and we need to put more effort into surveillance of novel pathogenic threats and facillitate investigation regarding molecular characteristics

if this pandemic involved a pathogen that we have only a nodding familiarity with we would be having some very different concerns and probably have a pandemic that goes full bore until burnout with no vaccine available until such time as we learn how to make one.