The Race For the COVID-19 Vaccine | National Geographic

[JONATHAN WOSEN]: So the idea behind any vaccine is to introduce some piece of a virus to your body so you can mount an immune response. And then your immune system sees those fragments and learns to respond to it.

[ALBERT BOURLA]: You do things in parallel. Research, trials, manufacturing, and distribution.

[MIKE MCDERMOTT]: So if we think about how long we would take to build our manufacturing network, typically that would be a two to three year process. We shrank it down to about five months.

[NATHAN VARDI]: There are some important reasons why messenger RNA was appealing for developing a COVID-19 vaccine. First of all, the virus itself is an RNA virus. So it lent itself to this technology.

[PHIL DORMITZER]: In an RNA based vaccine, you simply inject the instruction set that teaches your body how to make a piece of the virus.

[LAURIE GARRETT]: This is going to have a huge impact down the road.

[FRANK SNOWDEN]: It's wonderful…. What's happening is an extraordinary scientific breakthrough.