Let’s get one thing straight about vaccines: It’s not like in the disease outbreak thriller novels and movies. A bunch of scientists in a lab don’t suddenly find the magic formula, bottle it up, and have a medical flying squad race to the scene and inject it into the arms of the stricken, who, miraculously, recover in a matter of seconds or minutes. For one thing, vaccines are almost always for prevention rather than treatment. For another, once you’ve got the proof-of-concept “formula” that appears to work in the lab and then in animal models, you’ve got a long way to go before you can even
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