This week marks three years just about to the day since large swaths of America plunged into lockdown and the Covid-19 pandemic irrevocably disrupted the rhythms of most people's lives. Sorry to be the one to remind you! Thinking back on it, that time feels like a fever dream: scrubbing food packages with Clorox wipes, worrying about the health of loved ones, wondering whether things would be back to normal by summertime, or if not then, by fall, or perhaps by 2021. I left WIRED's offices in the World Trade Center thinking I'd be back in a few weeks and didn't reenter them for a year and a half. No one seemed to know anything, really, about anything.
But by mid-March 2020, when New York City and San Francisco, among other places, issued their shelter-in-place orders, a team of scientists was already well on its way to formulating the first vaccine for fending off SARS-CoV-2. In fact, the very first trial mRNA jab was administered on March 16, 2020. In those confusing, scary, crisis-ridden early days of the pandemic, writer Brooke Jarvis followed scientists hard at work at Moderna and the patients who volunteered themselves to help bring about what would be the fastest vaccine development of all time.
The resulting feature, "The First Shot: Inside the Covid Vaccine Fast Track," is astonishing to read now. It underscores how much we owe to the experts who were hard at work before we laypeople had any idea how bad things were going to get, and to the laypeople among us who received those first shots without entirely knowing what would happen. But Jarvis' account was also published on the fast track, that May. When it came out there was still so much we did not know.
How does it feel to read about the spring of 2020 now? What memories does it bring back for you? How did the pandemic alter how you think about the future, and what it looks like to be prepared without knowing what's coming next? Let me know in the comments below the story.
See you next week!
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حبيبي ليس يعدله حبيب *** ولا لسواه في قلبي نصيب حبيب غاب عن بصري وسمعي *** ولكن في فؤادي ما يغيب يا حبيب ...
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