one of the head scientists, dr. andrea gambotto, said they made the vaccine so quickly because they had worked on other coronaviruses before: "we had previous experience on sars-cov in 2003 and mers-cov in 2014. these two viruses, which are closely related to sars-cov-2, teach us that a particular protein, called a spike protein, is important for inducing immunity against the virus. we knew exactly where to fight this new virus. that's why it's important to fund vaccine research. you never know where the next pandemic will come from."