Moderna designed the COVID vaccine on January 13, two months before the pandemic was declared.

Despite the fact that Moderna announced on November 16 that the mRNA-1273 vaccine offers an efficiency of 94.5%, the vaccine was designed already on January 13, two days after the genetic structure of the SARS-CoV virus was published. . 2, writes The New York Magazine.

The American pharmaceutical company managed to design the vaccine in a single weekend at the beginning of the year, before the Chinese authorities recognized that the virus can be transmitted from person to person, and a week before the confirmation of the first case in the United States.

By the time of the first COVID-19 death in the United States, about a month after the first American was diagnosed, the vaccine had already been produced and shipped to the National Institutes of Health in New York for the start of the first stage of clinical trials.

However, the vaccine could not have been approved so early by the authorities, even if the first phase of clinical trials provided a satisfactory level of efficacy.

“It is as if we were preparing to send an astronaut to Mars on the same day that the first man stepped on the moon.”says Nicholas Christakis, director of a research division at Yale University.

Peter Hotez, a scientist in the bandwagon at Baylor University, says that “Operation Warp Speed” (the US project for the rapid development of an anti-COVID vaccine) involves conducting clinical trials simultaneously and not successively, production concomitant of the vaccine and authorization for emergency use in December of this year.

The operation is also based on a series of data that does not monitor long-term protection and does not measure the effects of the vaccine on transmission, but only the degree of protection in general.

In fact, it would have been nearly impossible in May, for example, for a world-renowned epidemiologist to endorse the vaccine produced by Moderna, and the chances that the authorities would have agreed to use it in an emergency would have been slim to none.

However, the fact that the main structure of the vaccine was created almost two months before the WHO declared a pandemic, given that such a vaccine is normally developed over a period of at least five years, can become a useful guide for future generations and how they will cope with the inevitable health crises.

To date, nearly 71 million people around the world have been infected with coronavirus, while the death toll has exceeded 1.5 million. Almost 50 million people have been declared cured.

The first doses of the Moderna-produced vaccine are expected to be delivered to the US beginning December 21, the second serum released after Pfizer / BioNTech.