This book helped me understand how the seemingly overnight success of multiple vaccines for covid-19 was 30+ years in the making. I enjoyed the long view that Zuckerman took, helping shed light on the years of effort to position us for the pandemic that was to come. I think I would have been far more confident in the pace of a vaccine if I had known more of these stories. On the other hand, I understand there was still much to prove in the ability for all these approaches to work successfully at scale.
It's also clear that there was plenty of serendipity too, reinforcing how important it is to have healthy capital markets to invest in many failures, wrong turns and pivots. It is comforting to read about the true ingenuity of our race, and hopefully there will be many more diseases these approaches can now address.
For a nice summary of the different vaccines now available, this is a helpful page from Yale medicine
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