The Coronavirus Vaccine Is on Track to Be the Fastest Ever Developed
In early April, as COVID-19 cases and deaths in New York City were rising to horrifying numbers, Tal Zaks, the chief medical officer of Moderna, a Cambridge-based biotech company, was concerned about time. In just three months, his company had created an experimental vaccine to inoculate against COVID-19, and begun to inject the vaccine into humans, under the guidance of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in a Phase I clinical trial involving forty-five healthy men and women. This kind of speed in vaccine development was unprecedented, and largely derived from the revolutionary—and yet, on a large scale, untested—biomedical technology behind the Moderna vaccine. Still, if there was any chance of getting the vaccine federally licensed, and then manufactured into hundreds of millions of doses, in twelve to eighteen months—as Anthony Fauci, the director of the N.I.A.I.D.