The Race For the COVID-19 Vaccine | National Geographic

less than 1m read

·Nov 11, 2024

[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.

Wood Yearning Life Below Zero

The Man Behind the Bucket: Making Self-Portraits From Trash | Short Film Showcase

View All

Identifying value in digits

So I’m going to write down a number, and I’m going to think about how much do each of these digits of the number—what value do they represent? And actually, let me pick on this 2 here. What does that 2 represent? Does it just represent two, or does it rep…

How Much Is A Bird in The Hand Worth?

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. And as they say, “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” What it means is that it’s better to have a certain advantage than to have nothing, except the possibility of a greater one. But two birds in the bush? Who calcula…

There's no such thing as Universally Preferable Behaviour

Universally preferable behavior is the name of Stefan Malan’s book arguing for an objective non-religious foundation for morality. Uh, I’ll begin by saying I don’t believe that anything that could fairly be called objective morality exists. Uh, so catego…