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This is a pretty misleading take on what happened. DARPA awarded the grants to research mRNA based vaccines in 2013. These vaccines were many, many years in the

This is a pretty misleading take on what happened. DARPA awarded the grants to research mRNA based vaccines in 2013. These vaccines were many, many years in the making before the pandemic hit and practically unlimited resources were poured into them to push the final stretch out. Even then, it required dropping many best practices around safety and validation just to get some kind of results out the door as fast as possible. So perhaps a better wording is that we got incredibly lucky that this specific grant was awarded over other similar ones and that it happened to bear fruit. It could've just as well been a different kind of pathogen and we would've been out in the cold. Saying we can just invent a fix when a problem comes up is not the right takeaway here. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27359269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27359269

graeme 5y ago
What best practices were dropped? The vaccines moved quickly because everyone gave them priority, and because there were many cases in the wild so the trials could amass the needed events quickly. mRNA vaccines have been great. But multiple conventional vaccines were developed about as fast and we’d probably do fine just with those.
Lammy 5y ago
Luckily we wouldn't be starting from zero here either since DARPA has been doing climate research for thirty-plus years, and if the global climate situation turned dire I'm sure it would get more resources than even COVID did: https://web.archive.org/web/19970429012543/http://www.au.af.mil/au/2025/volume3/chap15/vol3ch15.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/19970429012543/http://www.au.af....