There’s an alternative story—a triumphalist narrative—that can also be told about the pandemic. It goes this way: immunologists and virologists, building on decades of investigation into the fundamentals of cell biology and immunity, developed vaccines against SARS-COV2 in record time—some less than a year after the man from Wuhan had entered the Seattle clinic. Many of these vaccines functioned with entirely new methods of eliciting immunity—an altered chemical form of mRNA, for instance—again, using decades of knowledge of how immune cells detect foreign proteins, and how they might stave
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