There are very few ways the world might have been considered “lucky” during the COVID-19 pandemic. But one of them is how quickly researchers were able to develop vaccines.
Scientists had already been working on vaccines against infectious respiratory diseases MERS and SARS, which come from the same virus family as COVID-19. This enabled them to use that information to quickly develop COVID-19 vaccines.
For the next pandemic, the world might not be so lucky. A virus that the scientific community knows little about might spread rapidly across borders.