Editor's letter
Editorâs letter A month before the first American died of the coronavirus, scientists already had designed the vaccine. In a Massachusetts lab last Jan. 13, Moderna researchers used the genetic sequence of the virus, made public by China, to design an mRNA molecule that teaches the immune system to recognize and neutralize it. By February, their vaccine had actually been made and shipped to the National Institutes of Health to start clinical trials. This largely unknown time line shows that while development of coronavirus vaccines was astonishingly rapid, approval of them was painstakin...