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But the concept of developing a vaccine at "warp speed" makes many people uncomfortable. In a May survey, 49 percent of the Americans polled said they plan to get a coronavirus vaccine when one is available, 20 percent do not, and 31 percent indicated that they were not sure. The World Health Organization considers "vaccine hesitancy" a major threat to global health, and poor uptake would jeopardize the impact of a coronavirus vaccine.

If a COVID-19 vaccine went on the market before Election Day, Kamala Harris said she's not sure she'd take it. And she's not alone. In a recent poll, a majority of Americans - 62 percent - said they were worried that the Trump administration would pressure the Food and Drug Administration to release a vaccine before it's ready, and 54 percent said they simply wouldn't take that hypothetical vaccine at all, even if it were free.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has underscored the critical need to better understand the human immune system and how to unleash its power to develop vaccines and therapeutics. Much of our knowledge of the immune system has accrued from studies in mice, yet vaccines and drugs that work effectively in mice do not always translate into humans. Pulendran and Davis review recent technological advances that have facilitated the study of the immune system in humans. They discuss new insights and how these can affect the development of drugs and vaccines in the modern era.

"Each crisis will demand a combination of far-reaching responses-political, economic, social, cultural, & technical. ... Seen in these terms, the race to develop a vaccine is a test run for the political economy of the future."

Common Cold Study and others like it, while scrambling to understand the human immune response to SARS-CoV-2 using animals and cell cultures, along with the latest molecular techniques. They have catalogued antibody and immune-cell responses with uncommon speed, determined which are likely to be the most effective, and designed vaccines and therapies that, in animal studies and small human studies, provoke at least short-term immune responses. But there is no quick and simple experiment that can firmly determine whether immunity will be effective or lasting. It is just too soon to know.

RNA is the volatile 'working memory' version of DNA. DNA is like the flash drive storage of biology. DNA is very durable, internally redundant and very reliable. But much like computers do not execute code directly from a flash drive, before something happens, code gets copied to a faster, more versatile yet far more fragile system.

One of the most striking developments during the early months of the pandemic was the way state competition quickly took over. Always heralded as a textbook case of the need for global cooperation, pandemics turned out to be prime examples of global competition, albeit in an indirect and gamified version.

The billionaire is working with the W.H.O., drugmakers and nonprofits to defeat the coronavirus everywhere, including in the world's poorest nations. Can they do it?

COVID-19 Could Linger for Years-Just as Influenza Did a Century Ago