BobRingReflections

The current COVID-19 pandemic apparently started in the Wuhan region of China in December 2019, and by early 2020, had spread to all continents (except Antarctica), leading to almost 120 million people infected and over 2.6 million deaths, at the time of this writing.  Also, in early 2020, a world-wide effort began to develop a vaccine to prevent COVID-19 infections - a miraculous effort that in less than a year - in record time - produced two 95%-effective vaccines, with vaccination efforts beginning in the U.S. in late December 2020.   This is the story of COVID-19 vaccine development.   I will cover a description of COVD-19 characteristics, the research over the last 25 years that enabled such rapid development of a vaccine, the development timeline for the principal two U.S.-approved vaccines, other vaccines available or in development, the potential benefit to future vaccines of the recent stupendous efforts, and a snapshot of COVID-19 infections, deaths, and vaccinations. I w