The final version of the mRNA vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna came together with the help of a multibillion dollar program under the Trump administration called Operation Warp Speed. The Food and Drug Administration determined in 2020 that the BioNTech vaccine has an efficacy rate of 95 percent.
“This is not trivial technology,” said John P. Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medicine. “So trying to reverse engineer it from scratch is one of those things where you ask, ‘What could possibly go wrong?’”
If China is pursing a program similar to Operation Warp Speed, it has not said anything about it publicly. One of the private companies helping to develop ARCoVax is Suzhou Abogen, a start-up founded in 2019 by a scientist who used to work at Moderna. Before the pandemic, Abogen was developing mRNA drugs for cancer, one of China’s biggest epidemics.
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