This is the editor's letter in the The Week magazine.
A month before the first American died of the coronavirus, scientists already had designed the vaccine. In a Massachusetts lab last Jan. 13, Moderna researchers used the genetic sequence of the virus, made public by China, to design an mRNA molecule that teaches the immune system to recognize and neutralize it. By February, their vaccine had actually been made and shipped to the National Institutes of Health to start clinical trials. This largely unknown time line shows that while development of coronavirus vaccines was astonishingly rapid, approval of them was painstaking: More than 300,000 Americans died and 16 million were infected while a nearly miraculous solution underwent testing and approval. "For the entire span of the pandemic in this country," David Wallace-Wells said last week in New York magazine, "we had the tools to prevent it." But for sound reasons of safety and ethics, science and government did not authorize their use — until now.
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