Gates Package — page 1033

We were good, but s outbreaks (SARS months, smashing the previous record for this approach. Before COVID, the only licensed viralvectored vaccines were for Ebola, and those took five years to be approved. As optimistic as I am about these technologies, I need to add a caveat: We were good, but we were also lucky. Because coronaviruses had already caused two previous outbreaks (SARS and MERS), scientists had learned quite a bit about the structure of the virus. Especially important was the fact that they had identified its characteristic spike protein--the crownlike thing you've seen a dozen pictures of--as a potential target for vaccines. When it came time to modify mRNA for a COVID vaccine, they had a sense of what the target should be. The lesson here is that we need to keep up basic research on an even wider array of known viruses and other pathogens, so we understand as much as possible before the next outbreak. We should also be stepping up research on the broad-spectrum therapies that I mentioned in the previous chapter. But no matter how quickly we make a new vaccine during an outbreak, it won't do any good if it takes years to get through the approval process. So let's look in detail at how that process works, and how we might accelerate it without sacrificing safety or effectiveness. *** Humans invented vaccines long before they invented ways to make sure they worked. The British physician Edward Jenner is considered the founder of modern vaccines, having shown in the late eighteenth century that inoculating a young boy with cowpox--a disease related to