You, know, for when the next clown tells you this was all thanks to the munificence of the blessed Free Market™.

If the first vaccines against Covid-19 really do start coming online in a couple of weeks, that’ll be a blazingly fast scientific achievement—from new virus to new vaccine in just about 12 months, faster than ever before, and using a new vaccine technology, too. Amazing! And also only sort of true, because the path of the two vaccines likeliest to become available first, one from the pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and BioNTech and one from Moderna, began long before people started getting sick in Wuhan in December 2019.

Like all scientific discoveries, that path has many trailheads. One of them is the lab of John Mascola, director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He didn’t come up with the idea of using genetic material to make vaccines, but he and collaborators around the US spent years trying to direct those efforts against coronaviruses, the family that includes SARS-CoV-2, the cause of Covid-19. Most vaccines against the disease clue the immune system into seeing a specific protein on the surface of the virus; it was Mascola’s VRC that brought the mRNA for that “spike protein” to Moderna.

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How did the VRC’s work on mRNA and the spike protein end up being developed by Moderna, a relatively small and inexperienced pharmaceutical company?

Our partnership started probably with working on the disease Zika in 2017, or maybe even before. We looked at a number of companies who were doing RNA vaccines, and we came to have a good working relationship with Moderna because we had a strong mutual interest in infectious disease vaccines. So it was a very good fit, and we were pretty convinced that they had a very robust, strong scientific capability to make RNA vaccines. Moderna was interested in working on Zika, they had some funding from Barda—the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority —and they wanted a scientific partnership to work on the design of the vaccine. So we had a collaboration going back to Zika, and then after that passed, we talked to them about other areas of mutual interest. We proposed that coronaviruses would be a fruitful area for both of us.

Note the ".gov" in the URLs of the links I embedded in there.