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My coworker: im not gonna get the vaccine. How’d they make it so quickly?? Not a good sign

Me: it’s because we’ve known about coronaviruses for a while

My coworker: you literally said earlier that we couldnt have caught corona when we were kids because it didnt exist yet

Me: i said we couldnt have caught it when we were kids because it hadnt made the jump to humans yet, for one, and for two, there’s more than one coronavirus.

My coworker: what

Me: there’s more than one coronavirus. SARS and MERS have been studied for years, and vaccines for them have been studied for years. The COVID vaccine wasnt built from the ground up, we just already had a lot of the starting work done already.

Me: Like. Is anybody surprised when Toyota comes out with new cars every year? No. They don’t cry witchcraft and say shit like “oh they made that car too fast, it must not be safe,” because they didnt reinvent the car, they just added some new bells and whistles. Same with the vaccine. They didn’t reinvent the wheel here, they just looked at an existing wheel and altered it to make it work better.

My coworker: oh. *turns to other coworker* i cant believe you were afraid of the vaccine!! You just gotta do your research, man

Me: YOU DIDNT DO YOUR RESEARCH EITHER

just-call-me-emrys

To follow up on this since this post has been getting reblogged a lot recently, 2 other things helped get the vaccine approved in record time:

1) Demand. SO much demand for a working vaccine, which translated to SO much funding. Like fistfulls of money just being chucked at it. This wasnt the case for the earlier coronavirus-type vaccines, which is why a vaccine for those were never completed. Neither SARS nor MERS ever became pandemics, so there wasnt much funding. But for COVID, the entire world was demanding a vaccine. That much demand = a shitload of money. Money talks, man,

2) usually vaccines take so long because all the steps happen sequentially. Like Part A has to be completed, then Part B, Part C, etc. But one of the (subjectively) cool things about this vaccine is that so many governments went “yeah that’s too slow” this time, and started doing steps concurrently. It sped up production A LOT because the folks in charge of Part C didnt have to wait for Part A and Part B to finish, they could just jump on their tasks right away.

All this info is easy to find just by googling “why was the covid vaccine finished to quickly,” btw, in case y’all want to gather some more knowledge to dunk on all y’all’s antivaxx coworkers, or to bring anybody who is just genuinely under-informed up to speed.

mad-dyspunktional

It's literally just a matter of urgency, money, and the fact that a lot of the groundwork was there from past research on coronaviruses and mRNA type vaccines to draw from.

septmilleneurones

“or to bring anybody who is just genuinely under-informed up to speed.”

I love it when people remember these people. There are so many people in my country who aren’t cartoon anti vaxxers but are a bit worried, and with those people I just explain what I can without mocking them.

just-call-me-emrys

Exactly!

It’s easy to just write everyone off as willfully ignorant, but there ARE a whole bunch of people who have just yet to become informed, whether it’s because they lack an ability to access the information (like an internet connection), or because they just don’t know how to go about locating the information (because sometimes searching for info can be a pain).

It’s always better to try to get explain things to folks first. Nobody starts off just knowing things, after all.