Going viral

ON JANUARY 19TH 2019 published a story about plans that were being laid for . The idea was to develop a technological platform which could be tailored quickly to the specifics of any as-yet-unknown pathogen, in order to create a new vaccine against it within months. One of the leading approaches used genetic messenger molecules called mRNA. A year to the week later, . China’s authorities admitted to the world that, the previous month, doctors in Wuhan had noticed cases of illness caused by a novel coronavirus. The pre-eminent scientific and technological story of 2020 has thus been of medical researchers struggling, first, to work out those who had contracted this virus and , and then, how to develop a vaccine against it. That led to the announcements of three successful candidate vaccines—made by ; , and . The first two of these are, indeed, mRNA vaccines.