One should always mea culpa, so here is mea culping.
I was very skeptical we'd have a vaccine in anything like this short a time. And if these various firms' offerings do work and have few side effects, I'll be delighted to be wrong. I'm eager to get life back to normal and to see many lives saved, both those that would otherwise have died from Covid-19 and those that would die from lockdowns and other deleterious anti-Covid responses.
And let's not take this for granted. We live in an amazing world of technology that does incalculable good for humanity. It's easy to underestimate, as I did.
Not only 3 vaccines in well under a year, but it seems two of them use an entirely new (mRNA) technique that bodes great promise in the future. I suspect, like cell phones, we'd have had many medical breakthroughs years or even decades earlier were it not for government regulations.
This has broken records for speed in getting through the process (in a strange way doing it in the middle of a pandemic seems to have helped in that regard as it made the testing process easier) but it's the way a completely new technology has been used that is massively important, for viral disease in general. It's a huge health breakthrough. Now, how about a functional alternative to antibiotics to get round the problem of broad-spectrum resistance before that kills us?
