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Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, setting aside all the politics and silliness, the science going on around this pandemic is remarkable. Going from nearly zero (yes, there was a bunch of research from SARS-Cov-1, MERS, and similar to build off of but nothing like this) to a functioning, tested, and mass manufactured vaccine in a year is absolutely jaw dropping. Even if it takes two years to distribute widely, three years to stomp out a pandemic is blindingly fast and a major credit to modern medical science, and the processes we have built up around it.

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Although I want to agree, none of the companies started from zero.

All these new technologies, the techniques, the principles were in development since years if not decades.

Not trying to diminish the accomplishments achieved, great effort nontheless. Just saying nobody started from zero here, that would have been insane and frankly impossible.

> All these new technologies, the techniques, the principles were in development since years if not decades.

Yes, I first heard about intramuscular nucleic acid injection around the year 2000. At the time it was naked DNA and not RNA in a lipid nanoparticle suspension, but the principle was the same.

In particular BioNTech from the article was founded 2008. This is their first publicly available "product" - it applies their vision for cancer treatment to specific SARS-nCoV-2 proteins (arguably I don't know if they're working on other ideas as well).

They might be working on this particular vaccine since 2020, but AFAIK they have been working on the specific principle the vaccine uses since 2008.

True, but it's the first time we see those technologies in action. Some (many?) of the vaccine projects for example use paths that have previously been considered, played through in "toy" projects that never made it to production and so on, and now they are suddenly standing in the limelight, going live. For some sub-fields of biotech this must almost be like the mindboggling aviation had from roadshow curiosities to a major war factor in hardly more than a decade.

I don't really understand the underlying science but the nucleic acid based vaccine platforms seem really, really exciting. Getting an effective COVID vaccine is obviously huge, but the ability to rapidly develop vaccines in the future for emerging pandemics is amazing.

What I find more impressive is Moderna was finalized in February, and most of the other candidates were finalized by March.

If we could somehow develop rapid testing in some way, it's shocking to me that the vaccine could have entered mass production by the Summer.

There was a time where the only true way to test a new model Aircraft was to build one, but nowadays pretty much every characteristic is well understood by the time it enters service. To reach a similar point with vaccine testing will be important when the next pandemic hits.

DNA/RNA vaccinations have been around for 30 years or so.

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