What can mRNA treat next?
It's an indictment of something that we've had this amazing new tool for vaccine production in existence for a decade but we never even tried to use it for that until COVID because "vaccines typically don’t make much money" and "vaccines just aren’t that exciting" scientifically: "it’s nice and easy," to quote Rossi from the article.If it really does turn out that effective mRNA vaccines can be created in a straightforward way for a host of new diseases, that's ten years of deaths and misery that we as a society just allowed to happen unnecessarily. I don't know how to fix that: maybe the market-based incentive structures that work for acute disease treatments aren't a good fit for broad preventative public health measures like vaccines.