Going through this gish gallop point by point: mRNA technology has been in development since the 80s because there were and are a lot of challenges with deploy

Going through this gish gallop point by point: mRNA technology has been in development since the 80s because there were and are a lot of challenges with deploying it on a wide scale. This Nature article [1] goes into it, but a lot of the foundational elements of the vaccines were only developed in the last several years. The need for immunity for the makers is because these vaccines were developed very quickly and administered through EUAs, since the low chance of long term side effects was deemed less harmful than the time constraints that would have been required for normal approval. This need was codified into law back in 2005's PREP act, invoked by the Trump administration in February of 2020, and the legal immunity only lasts until 2024 [2]. If everyone who got an mRNA shot develops myocarditis in 15 years, Moderna et al won't be immunized from those lawsuits. Pfizer/BioNTech is currently the only fully approved vaccine, but they aren't going to pull EUAs for other vaccines when supply constraints are still an issue. Pfizer is widely available, but it isn't universally available and keeping other options (themselves going through the process for full approval) available is not unreasonable. Moderna was founded with the idea of commercializing mRNA technology. This is the first significant commercial use of mRNA technology. It doesn't really seem like a big mystery to me. [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w [2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/covid-vaccine-side-effects-compensation-lawsuit.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/covid-vaccine-side-effects-c...