Like the rest of engineering, you very rarely start with a novel target. You’re building things from a library of tested techniques. Vaccines aren’t drugs. T

Like the rest of engineering, you very rarely start with a novel target. You’re building things from a library of tested techniques. Vaccines aren’t drugs. They’re a method of delivering material to the immune system for it to do its thing. We do that by finding the thing we want to present, finding a pipeline to extract that, and finding a delivery mechanism that is tested and compatible. We don’t “discover” a new flu vaccine ever my season, we put together this seasons release. That’s why it didn’t take years to design and release a new vaccine for covid: we have the technology already, we just needed to pick the payload and select the rocket best suited for the job.