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into humans for clinical testing, and even with a lot of time, there's no guarantee of success. The first vaccine trial for HIV began in 1987, and we still don't have one that's licensed. Before COVID, the land speed record for developing a vaccine was four years. This remarkable feat was achieved with a vaccine for mumps by a scientist named Maurice Hilleman, who was one of the most productive vaccine makers ever. Of the fourteen vaccines currently recommended for children in the U.S., he and his team at Merck Pharmaceutical developed eight, including ones that protect you from measles, hepatitis A and B, and chickenpox.6 In 1963, his five-year-old daughter, Jeryl Lynn, came down with a sore throat. Suspecting that she had mumps--for which there wasn't yet a licensed vaccine--he took a sample from her throat using a swab, went to his lab, and isolated the virus. Eventually he used it to create the first licensed mumps vaccine in 1967. This strain of mumps is still in use today, and it's named for his daughter. If you've received the MMR vaccine--for measles, mumps, and rubella--you got the Jeryl Lynn strain. In Hilleman's time, making a vaccine in four years was a fantastic accomplishment. But one of the reasons he was able to move relatively fast is that there weren't the same stringent ethical standards for gaining consent or assuring quality that we have today. In any case, when an outbreak is threatening to become a pandemic, four years would be an eternity and longer would be a disaster. The implications for preventing pandemics are clear: We need to raise the odds of success for vaccines, and we need to reduce the time it takes to get them out of the lab and into humans, without sacrificing safety or effectiveness. We also need to manufacture so many of them so quickly that they'll be available to everyone in the world within six months.