What "spell"?

Sure, nobody had made a successful coronavirus vaccine before, because, why bother? The only dangerous coronavirus before Covid was SARS. Luckily we had some people who had been working on SARS research/vaccines for the last ~20 years. Without their work, we probably still wouldn't have Covid vaccines.

mRNA treatments had flopped? Uhh, which ones? The only serious efforts at mRNA therapies were by Moderna and BioNTech, two companies that were small, relatively unknown, and relatively underfunded when compared to other pharmaceutical companies. Once they got the right funding and partnerships, they both knocked it out of the park, which we should be happy about, instead of suspicious of.

We should be overjoyed that 1) some people were still researching SARS since 2004 by the time Covid hit, and 2) we had two companies that had been working on mRNA treatments for 8-10 years by the time Covid hit.

It's amazing that everything aligned exactly right for us to have effective Covid vaccines within 2 years of the initial outbreak. That's a testament to human ingenuity, and also a huge amount of good luck was involved.

Hats off to everybody involved.

What have you contributed, again?