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The New York Times, "Realistically, the 4 just eleven months after as nine years simply to get a product Yet the greatly underappreciated miracle of COVID vaccines is not the fact that they were created and approved. It's that they were created and approved faster than any other vaccines ever. In fact, it happened even more rapidly than many people, including me, were willing to predict in public. In April 2020, although I thought we could have a vaccine by the end of the year, I wrote on my blog that it could take as long as twenty-four months--I thought it wouldn't be responsible to raise the prospect of quick successes if there was a decent chance they wouldn't happen. In June, after seeing initial data on some promising vaccine candidates, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration told The New York Times, "Realistically, the 12 to 18 months that most people have been saying would be a pretty good marker but still optimistic."3 What did in fact happen was the best-case scenario. The vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech was approved for emergency use at the end of December,4 just eleven months after the first cases were identified. <~?~Insert art 025_Gate_9780593534489_art_r1> Making a vaccine. All vaccines go through a rigorous process to make sure they're safe and effective. Incredibly, several vaccines were created for COVID-19 within one year. To do this, scientists and manufactures consolidated costly development stages without sacrificing safety. (NEJM 2020) To get a sense of just how fast this was, consider that the vaccine development process-- from the first discovery in a lab, through proving that it works and getting it licensed--typically takes between six and twenty years.5 It can take as many as nine years simply to get a product