💡 What if every day was a pandemic day?

This is a member-only post I have made freely accessible.

Scientists, take a bow. 

With the announcement of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, we now have three effective vaccines against the coronavirus with 90% efficacy or above. Even the Oxford vaccine reports 90% efficacy with a particular treatment protocol; more discussion about that and what remains to be understood here. Two of these candidates are built on entirely new vaccine platforms, the mRNA candidate approach, while the AstraZeneca vaccine uses a more established platform, which had yet to have much success in humans.  We can expect to hear news from other vaccine candidates like CanSino and Johnson & Johnson soon enough.

Yet, the vector was only sequenced in January, that sequence, of what was then known as  2019-nCov, released to the world on 19 January 2020. It has taken 310 days, 10 months and change, to achieve this.

Remarkable:  we’ve got this outcome roughly ten times faster than the usual. Earlier conditions like hep…