This has been a bizarre year, but let me pause to say that a bloody amazing thing happened this year:

Duirng a global pandemic, several companies took the idea of making a vaccine out of MESSENGER RNA and spun it up to approval within EIGHT MONTHS.

Thankful for modern science!

Here are two of the heroes of the story: Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman. Kariko struggled with how to package mRNA for years. In the 1990s she collected many rejected grant applications, got demoted at the University of Pennsylvania - but she persisted. https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/10/the-story-of-mrna-how-a-once-dismissed-idea-became-a-leading-technology-in-the-covid-vaccine-race/

And then there is the crowd who developed the ideas further, and eventually founded Moderna. A mix of scientists, an engineer, and venture capitalists. Key figures included Americans, a Canadian, a Frenchman, and a VC who was a Lebanese immigrant (from an Armenian family).

Over in Europe: BioNTech, started by Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci, two Turkish immigrants to Germany. They eventually partnered with US company Pfizer, which will produce hundreds of millions of doses by spring (& their competitor Moderna will do the same). https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/heres-to-the-immigrant-heroes-behind-the-biontech-vaccine/2020/11/13/f454cdc2-257d-11eb-9c4a-0dc6242c4814_story.html

There were technical challenges in stabilizing and packaging messenger RNA. This molecule doesn't last long on surfaces - not at all stable.

No part of it is from the coronavirus. But it gets our body to make the coronavirus spike protein - and we make the immune response too.

A combination of fundamental research, U.S. federal funding, international scholars and enterpreneurs coming to the United States & Europe, venture capital, & industrial might got us to this point.

And by paying taxes, *you* my fellow citizen played a key role. So thank you too!

And speaking of taxes, we have the federal government. Tasked with keeping our drugs safe, the FDA and other agencies maintain a rigorous process. They oversee vaccine trials to make sure we get rigorous answers about efficacy and safety.

Three cheers for Big Government!

/end