Back to the Future.
(Image credit: Illustrated | IMP Awards, iStock)

The pandemic could have been way worse, observes Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle in a new article: It could have struck 20 years earlier — COVID-1999 instead of 2019.

The world was already connected by "economic superhighways" two decades ago, McArdle notes, so the virus could've spread with similar ease. But vaccine research was nowhere near its present state. Crucial information on mRNA vaccines (like the Moderna and Pfizer shots) "was still five years from being published, and work on adenovirus vaccines, such as those from Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, was also in early innings."

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.