Our friend who is a virology researcher at Stanford mentioned today a meeting he’d had with the chief technical officer at Moderna. Who told him that when the covid-19 virus was discovered and sequenced and it became clear what this was quickly becoming, (she, I think he said) vowed that the lights would never go off at night till they had this beat. And they did not. Round the clock, they were on it and they stayed on it.

“And they are not a big company,” he told us.

But they knew they could do something about it and that every day fewer that it took to test and then get those vaccines out there could be thousands upon thousands of lives saved around the world.

And then there was Dolly Parton, who jump-started the effort with a million dollars in seed money while they waited for the Federal grants to come through.