Abundance

by Ezra Klein

By the time the coronavirus outbreak shut down the city of Wuhan in China, Moderna and BioNTech had spent years fine-tuning their technology, which explains how they solved the mystery of SARS-CoV-2 with such speed. It turned out that mRNA offered the perfect key to pick the lock of the virus that caused COVID. Coronaviruses are named after a crown, or “corona,” of proteins that surrounds the virus particle, like spikes around a ball. Synthetic mRNA therapies send detailed instructions to a person’s cells to make duplicates of the distinctive “spike protein,” which the immune system trains itself to attack. Later, if the same person confronts the full-blown virus, the body recognizes the spike protein again and blitzes it with the precision of a well-trained military, reducing the risk of severe illness.