We’ve come to the close of another year. Unfortunately, if not unpredictably, the COVID-19 pandemic eclipsed 2021 after severely disrupting most of 2020 for most of the world. But while we may be entering the third year of this new and shifting reality, at least we are now equipped with safe vaccines that are effective against the pandemic virus—a scientific feat that was achieved remarkably fast.
Even with the recent upticks in political divisiveness and misinformation spread that have attended this milestone in the course of a challenging pandemic, it’s hard to overstate the triumph of creating a COVID-19 vaccine within a year of the pandemic’s outbreak. For context, vaccines against polio—which first sparked an epidemic in the US in 1894, later paralyzing and killing millions of people in the first half of the 20th century—took two decades from the start of their development in the 1930s to the mid-1950s, ...
