text: Delivering his talk at a session titled “Meet the expert: Anthony Fauci, US National Institutes of Health” – moderated by AVAC’s (AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition) Mitchell Warren and Catherine Hankins – Dr Fauci said COVID-19 vaccines didn’t come through in a year but were based on a 10-year research platform. “We have considerable experience of decades with coronaviruses as 15 to 30 percent of all common colds are caused by coronaviruses. For instance, we dealt with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2002, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in 2012, and now third pandemic is caused by novel coronavirus SARS CoV-2, commonly known as COVID-19.
  Although COVID-19 vaccine research did not start from scratch in 2019, Dr Fauci believes, these vaccine platforms luckily turned out to work for us within a year following turn of a pandemic around the close of penultimate year. “So speed was not reckless, speed was science,” he said while maintaining, science has designated vaccine platform technology as the breakthrough of the year 2020.