We had a fairly clear idea by then, and honestly, a % of a few thousand people having LC is a very reasonable sacrifice compared to the lives saved from getting a vaccine available months earlier

I think that you need to sit down and let the medical scientists deal with this. LC is not rare

Insofar there were any postviral symptoms at all, it wasn't rare. But for most people it was mild and receded pretty quickly. It's pretty rare! And I can say what I want, it is not only OK it is good for laymen to understand and critically evaluate the data!

That's a bad reason to slow down vaccination roll out.

The trials for mRNA vaccine for SARS were scheduled to start in 2020. Because of the Chinese scientist who posted the COVID-19 sequence, they were able to substitute the RNA sequence. I was concerned about the rapid rollout until I learned that this project had been going on for a decade

Moderna in fact had a platform and phase 1 trials for Zika completed but then interest fizzled out when Zika fizzled out. IIRC that's why the FDA had Moderna on speed dial. "Remember those folks who did the zika vaccine?"

But "stay away from each other while we complete the most ambitious and accelerated phase 3 trial in history" was not an unreasonable request. (The only reason the trials got to their endpoints so fast was that people ignored this advice).

The novel thing was the mRNA platform and I think the specific antigen was relatively easily swapped in and out. The research on SARS-1 spike did give researchers a significant head start in guessing which spike antigens to use for SARS-2

And the platform was (and still is) being actively developed as a cancer therapeutic. Bancel took a huge bet to pivot the company’s focus to COVID vaccine production.