Hacker News Reader

Thanks. This is best explanation so far.

They say they’ve been studying this mRNA idea for decades, but yet, nothing has succeeded. Until now.

And now, we’re about to do a trial run, and inoculate 100 million Americans, and the rest of the world.

It's not true that they haven't succeeded. BioNTech has used mRNA vaccines to prime the immune system of cancer patients. The difference is that these vaccines are individually tuned to the genome of the patient. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature23003

It's unfair to say that they haven't been succeeding until now. Plenty of trials with mRNA vaccines have been finding positive results in humans. However, the appetite for new vaccines is generally pretty low, aside from pandemic situations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com