It's now been almost a year since the New York Times put together this technically impressive yet totally wrong interactive article about how long it would take to get a Covid vaccine.

To their credit, the NYT allowed you to try, by clicking, all sorts of (implausible, they suggested) accelerants like fastrack regulatory approval and building factories ahead of approval. But no combination of options got you to how fast we actually got the vaccine.

I'm trying to understand why so many people underestimated our ability to get a vaccine (to say nothing of such an effective one) in less than 12 months. Part of it is that mRNA vaccines were still new; they didn't have confidence that they would work.

But even traditional attenuated/killed vaccines (like China's) got out faster than this timeline.

This reminds me of the Erlich/Simon debate. People so often discount the effect of innovation under pressure cc @stewartbrand

Here's the original NYT piece. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/30/opinion/coronavirus-covid-vaccine.html

What's particularly baffling is that more than a dozen vaccines were already in trials *when that article was written*. Thus defaulting most of the purported delays, like "academic research" and "preclinical", to zero