scientific essay about covid 19

May 25, 2021

How COVID Changed Science

What is unprecedented is not just the speed and focus with which the community responded to the pandemic but also the singular willingness of scientists all over the world to share new ideas and data immediately and transparently

By William A. Haseltine

Andriy Onufriyenko Getty Images

Rarely in recent memory has the world faced such an immediate and widespread global threat as complex as COVID-19. In its face, a select few have risen to the occasion, none more cherished and admired perhaps than the health care workers staffing the front lines. But standing close behind them in the trenches are the scientists and researchers who are among the very few who truly understand the scope of our evolutionary battle with the virus. Since the start of the pandemic, our scientists have acted with unprecedented speed and coordinated action to deliver us an armamentarium of medical weaponry to confront this global threat.

For someone who has spent a lifetime in science, someone who understands the pressures and constraints faced each day in every lab, it has been phenomenal to witness the transformation that has taken place within the scientific community. It is not just the speed and focus with which the scientific community responded, nor simply the use of new technologies to draw out new discoveries, but rather the singular willingness of scientists, all over the world, to share new ideas and data immediately and transparently, in some cases well before the idea or the research is fully formed.

Within weeks of the first case of COVID being reported, Chinese researchers had identified the virus they suspected of causing the disease and had decoded an initial genome sequence. It was a remarkable achievement in such a short amount of time, made more remarkable by the fact that the researchers published the sequence in an open discussion forum online, and encouraged a fellow researcher in Sydney, Australia, to share it via Twitter with the world. 

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing . By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

During the first 24 hours after publication, an evolutionary biologist in Scotland had figured out the similarities between this virus and SARS-CoV-1 and, like the Chinese researchers, shared the findings immediately online. A researcher in the U.S. openly published the new virus’ phylogenetic tree. And another started reverse-engineering a live virus from the sequence, letting colleagues around the world know that the first steps towards developing an antibody test were already underway. At each moment, the goal was not acclaim or attention, but rather the possibility that openly sharing an early finding may influence the work of others and inch the world ever closer to a treatment or a cure.

Of all the arenas in life that COVID has upended, science is perhaps the field that has been transformed the most. The pandemic has created an entirely new research environment, one that is now structured for collaboration and communication above all else. This revolution was inspired by the initial transparency of those early researchers but has since been institutionalized by some of the most well-respected research institutes in the world today, including our very own biomedical nerve center in Boston.

Shortly after the virus emerged, Harvard Medical School pulled 20 Boston-area universities, medical schools and research institutes together to launch the Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness ( MassCPR ). The initial goal was to formally join forces with researchers in China to answer the call to action to take down the emerging threat, with the hope that any lessons learned from this outbreak would enable a more rapid response to future emergencies. 

This alone was a notable step. The scientific community in Boston typically works in relatively isolated fashion, with barriers built up between departments, disciplines and entire institutions. But with COVID-19 and MassCPR those floodgates between institutes upriver and down were quickly opened.

With a collaborative research grant from the Evergrande Group, MassCPR began funding dozens of new research projects, some of which have led to field-defining studies on the epidemiology, pathogenesis and immunopathology of COVID-19. Over the past year, MassCPR clinicians have written clinical management guidelines that have influenced patient care across the globe, and the consortium’s investigators have conceptualized, designed and developed the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine and spearheaded clinical trials for the Moderna one. 

The dean of Harvard Medical School, George Daley, leads the effort, along with Arlene Sharpe, Bruce Walker and David Golan. As Daley describes it, “Our collective efforts over the last year have given us demonstrable proof that we are strongest when we work together across institutional boundaries, when we reach out across geographic and national borders. We are strongest when we transcend scientific silos and build bridges across disciplines. Cooperation to confront a common threat is what MassCPR represents, and the achievements speak for themselves.”

MassCPR’s immediate efforts are focused on the basic biology of SARS-CoV-2 and the pathogenesis of COVID-19—developing new diagnostic tools, vaccines and therapies. But while the researchers stay firmly focused on the now, they are also looking towards tomorrow. “We must refine our capacity to track the rise of new viral variants,” warns Daley. “We must refine our prevention strategies—an armamentarium of treatments—by developing new antiviral drugs, panviral therapies, and polivariant vaccines. And we must anticipate the post pandemic realities of COVID-19. A major goal of MassCPR 2.0 will be to define the scope of post-COVID-19 syndrome and understand the long-term effects of multiple organ systems. The knowledge will have relevance beyond this pandemic and, indeed, beyond this pathogen.” 

Beyond MassCPR, other critical global partnerships have emerged over the course of the past year to bring recent scientific advancements on the virus to the masses, not the least of which is the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator and its vaccines pillar, COVAX. The ACT Accelerator is a global philanthropic partnership—not a new agency or institution but rather a framework for collaboration launched by the WHO, the European Commission, France and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in April 2020. 

ACT is focused on accelerating the development and production of COVID-19 tests, treatments and vaccines (via COVAX) and, perhaps most critically, on ensuring that all people, and all countries, can access and afford these miracles of science. While richer countries have been able to roll out vaccines at no cost to residents, lower-income countries are still struggling to determine how to procure and pay for the vaccines in the first place, much less distribute them fairly across their countries. Rough estimates suggest that it would cost around $30 billion to mass-vaccinate the world—a price rich countries may not choose to shoulder. Take for example the United States, whose portion of the cost to help vaccinate the world is $7 billion. That figure is less than 0.5 percent of what was approved as part of the March 2021 economic stimulus package, mere pennies in relative terms but critical to ending the pandemic. 

Global fundraising for health is by no means without precedent, but what makes the ACT Accelerator unique is the burden-sharing formula it proposes to generate the funds. Every country is given a recommended range to contribute, which is adjusted based on GDP and the size of the country itself. The goal is to create a fair and equitable framework to respond to this crisis and future emergencies, including other pandemics—a systematic plan to prevent any country from having to choose again between who lives and who dies.

This collective solution to the problem at hand also has scientists in the lead, with researchers monitoring the vaccine landscape and advising COVAX on the most suitable candidates based on scientific merit and scalability and with major pharmaceutical companies committing to providing hundreds of millions of doses—eventually billions—to distribute around the world. Scientists have not only worked together to develop COVID treatments and vaccines, but they are among the loudest voices calling for rich countries to collaborate and to deploy their wealth across all countries to end the disease. 

Yet even with these remarkable scientific efforts, there is perhaps no better indicator of the extent to which the scientific community is focused on collaboration than by how entirely the scientific publication process has been upended. Publication in a well-respected journal is a competitive and highly prized honor, considered so by even the most accomplished scientists. Whereas in the past, researchers were willing to wait months and sometimes more than a year for the distinction, those imperatives have since been set aside. Researchers now proactively share preprint versions of their studies immediately after they determine their results, not only for recognition but in the hopes that their discoveries will help other scientists further their own. Between the start of the pandemic in December 2019 and November 2020, around 75,000 scientific papers were published on COVID-19, with one third published as preprints, released to other scientists and the public at large, before being fully reviewed and accepted for journal publication.

As scientists choose to forgo some of the academic recognition that comes with waiting for traditional publication, the journals themselves have shifted their approach as well, rethinking work flows to publish COVID-related papers much faster than normal. Yet this has not been without consequence. In the spring of 2020, two COVID studies were famously retracted over concerns about the veracity of the primary data. Some journals have admitted they may need to slow the process down again to ensure the quality of the work. Still, the knowledge gained has arguably outweighed the risks, given that the rapid advancements on vaccines, treatments and our understanding of the disease are owed in large part to the immediate and transparent release of new data. 

The question still remains whether this sense of shared purpose and transparent cooperation is a temporary measure or the beginning of a new era of scientific collaboration and global partnership. I can’t help but hope that this is indeed the beginnings of a new milestone in human achievement. Science is a tradition built on thousands of years of incremental progress. Imagine the exponential increase if our collaborative efforts continued—a global community united against the most pressing economic, social and environmental problems of our time. 

As Daley of the Harvard Medical School and MassCPR put it, “I cannot help but think that [it] provides a blueprint for moonshot projects that bring together the strongest and most dynamic forces of our formidable, biomedical ecosystem. What if we could marshal these forces against future pandemics, other diseases and larger global challenges? I dare to imagine the possibilities.”

With all the tragedy of the past year and the losses we have suffered, this revolution in the scientific community and beyond may be the one exquisite thing to emerge. 

This is an opinion and analysis article.

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• Wiley - PMC COVID-19 Collection

Effectiveness of COVID‐19 vaccines: findings from real world studies

David a henry.

1 Institute for Evidence-Based Healthcare, Bond University, Gold Coast QLD

2 Gold Coast University Hospital and Health Service, Gold Coast QLD

Mark A Jones

3 University of Queensland, Brisbane QLD

Paulina Stehlik

Paul p glasziou.

Community‐based studies in five countries show consistent strong benefits from early rollouts of COVID‐19 vaccines

By the beginning of June 2021, almost 11% of the world’s population had received at least one dose of a coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) vaccine. 1 This represents an extraordinary scientific and logistic achievement — in 18 months, researchers, manufacturers and governments collaborated to produce and distribute vaccines that appear effective and acceptably safe in preventing COVID‐19 and its complications. 2 , 3

The initial randomised trials confirmed immunological responses and generated unbiased evidence of vaccine efficacy. They were conducted in selected populations with limited numbers of participants in high risk groups, such as older people and those with serious underlying medical conditions. 2 , 3 They provided sparse information on the impact of vaccination on transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‐CoV‐2), were too small to quantify rare but serious harms, and did not take account of the logistic obstacles encountered during the community‐wide rollout of new vaccines. While large cluster randomised trials could address some of these concerns, 4 large observational studies have used large linked routinely collected population datasets in five countries to address important knowledge gaps. 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9

This article reviews findings from the initial real world studies and stresses that researchers in Australia currently do not have timely access to the linked Commonwealth and state datasets needed to perform such analyses.

Real world studies

In five countries (Israel, England, Scotland, Sweden and the United States) researchers have analysed routinely collected data to report the early outcomes of community‐wide vaccination programs with three of the first vaccines to reach market: the BNT162b2 mRNA (Pfizer–BioNTech), mRNA‐1273 (Moderna) and ChAdOx1 adenoviral vector (Oxford–AstraZeneca) vaccines. 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9

At the time of writing, two of the articles (from the US and Sweden ) have not yet been peer reviewed, so details reported here may change after revisions to these reports. 8 , 9 There is a rapidly growing literature on the community impact of COVID‐19 and it has provided very consistent evidence of substantial vaccine effectiveness with the original (Wuhan) viral strain and the Alpha variant. An important focus of future work will be the effectiveness of existing vaccines against emerging viral variants.

The vaccination programs against COVID‐19 commenced in December 2020 in the study countries, so follow‐up is limited. Most of the investigators used rigorous designs and statistical methods to analyse linked routinely collected person‐level data from large community‐wide databases that tracked outcomes in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals ( Box ). Importantly, allocation to vaccines was not by randomisation, and vaccinated and unvaccinated populations differed in respect of factors that were associated with both the probability of vaccination and with the severe outcomes of COVID‐19. Information that featured in most studies included demographic details, a vaccine register, results of laboratory polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing, records of hospitalisation and death, and some geographic measures of social deprivation. In addition, the Israeli, US and Scottish studies included linkage to clinical records from which to quantify comorbidities. 5 , 6 , 8 The Israeli study included information on previous adherence to influenza vaccination schedules. 5

Characteristics of five real world community‐based studies of effectiveness of SARS‐CoV‐2 vaccines

BNT162b2 =Pfizer–BioNTech mRNA vaccine; ChAdOx1 = Oxford–AstraZeneca adenoviral vector vaccine; mRNA‐1273 = Moderna mRNA vaccine; NHS = National Health Service; PCR = polymerase chain reaction.

Study designs and adjustments for confounding

The studies used different approaches to adjust for confounding ( Box ). The most advanced design was used to analyse the linked data from members of the Clalit Health Services integrated health care organisation in Israel, which covers around 4.7 million people. 5 The investigators extracted data on matched cohorts of vaccinees and non‐vaccinated controls and analysed study endpoints using rules that emulated the steps taken in a randomised trial. 10 These steps minimised selection or measurement biases and controlled for potential confounders through precise 1:1 matching of vaccinated and non‐vaccinated subjects across seven domains. The investigators took the additional step of calibrating their statistical model against the results of the pivotal phase 3 randomised trial, which found no benefit during the first 2 weeks after vaccination. 2 In contrast, this observational study found lower rates of infection in the first 2 weeks after vaccination, which remained after matching for age and sex — illustrating the potential for confounding. Only after full matching on seven factors was this source of bias eliminated. 5

In England, investigators linked data from a national vaccine register to laboratory PCR swab results, emergency department admissions, demographic and ethnicity data, care home status, and deaths in participants aged 70 years and over ( Box ). 7 The first part was a test‐negative case–control design, which compared vaccination status in those who received a positive PCR swab result with contemporaneous controls who returned a negative result. That both cases and controls had been tested for SARS‐CoV‐2 should have controlled for clinical and behavioural factors that influence the probability of having a test. The second part of the study followed participants aged 80 years and over with a positive PCR test result and analysed them according to vaccination status. The investigators calculated adjusted hazard ratios for death up to and beyond 14 days from the first vaccine dose.

A study in Scotland used an unmatched cohort design comparing hospital admission for COVID‐19 in people who received either the Pfizer–BioNTech or Oxford–AstraZeneca vaccines with an unvaccinated control group. 6 The Oxford–AstraZeneca vaccine was given later to an older population. The study adjusted for age and sex, frequency of prior PCR tests and clinical risk groups extracted from linked health records. The statistical model generated unexpectedly strong protective effects of the vaccines on hospitalisation rates in the first 2 weeks after vaccination, indicating possible bias due to a healthy vaccinee effect.

In the US, researchers working within the Mayo Clinic health system used postcode and propensity scores (based on age, sex, race, ethnicity and records of PCR testing) to match a cohort of individuals who received the Pfizer–BioNTech or Moderna mRNA vaccine with unvaccinated controls, to measure impact on infections and hospitalisations. 8

A simple unmatched cohort design using linkage of routinely collected administrative data measured infection rates in a cohort who received the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine in a single county in Sweden. 9 The unvaccinated population acted as controls ( Box ). Confounding adjustments in this study were limited to age and sex.

The Box summarises the results of these studies. All included at least one mRNA vaccine and the reductions in infections and hospitalisations were consistent and large. Two studies reported on mortality and the reductions were substantial, although based on small numbers of deaths in Israel. 5 , 7 The studies did not directly compare vaccines, but the Oxford–AstraZeneca vaccine appeared to perform as well as the mRNA vaccines in reducing hospitalisations.

Other approaches to estimating vaccine effectiveness

In the UK, over 600 000 volunteers using a COVID‐19 symptom mobile phone app recorded adverse events after vaccination with either the Pfizer–BioNTech or Oxford–AstraZeneca vaccine. 11 Based on post‐vaccination self‐reports of infections and after adjustment for age, sex, obesity and comorbidities, they estimated effectiveness rates of 60–70% beyond 21 days after administration of either vaccine.

Three studies measured the effectiveness of COVID‐19 vaccines in care home, health care and other frontline workers in the UK, Israel and the US. 12 , 13 , 14 These projects enrolled smaller numbers of participants than the community‐based studies but used similar designs and adjustment techniques. Importantly, workers in these settings undergo routine PCR testing for SARS‐CoV‐2, which enabled detection of asymptomatic infections. These studies also found large protective effects and a potential to reduce viral transmission. The latter possibility has been investigated directly in a study conducted in Scotland that showed that 14 days or more after health care workers received a second dose of vaccine, their household members had a 54% lower rate of COVID‐19 than individuals who shared households with non‐vaccinated health care workers. 15

Conclusions

We can draw important conclusions from these non‐randomised studies of vaccine effectiveness. Most importantly, the currently available COVID‐19 vaccines appear to be very effective in preventing severe complications and deaths from COVID‐19 in adults of all ages. Recent real world studies confirm that substantial protection extends to the Delta variant of SARS‐CoV‐2, although this requires two vaccine doses. 16 , 17 Follow‐up periods in all studies are relatively short, and these reports do not provide information on rare but serious adverse events, such as cerebral venous thrombosis. The use of sophisticated trial emulation methods in the Israeli study 5 replicated some key features of the pivotal randomised trial of the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine, 2 particularly by controlling for an early healthy cohort effect that confounded the incompletely adjusted endpoint analyses. This design should prove useful in enabling direct head‐to‐head comparisons of effectiveness and safety of vaccines, the duration of their protective effects, the degree to which vaccines prevent transmission of viral variants, and the impact of vaccines on so‐called long COVID.

These studies exemplify the value of advanced analyses of large multiply linked routinely collected community datasets. This resource is not yet readily available to researchers in Australia due to continued lack of agreement on the governance of linked state and Commonwealth datasets. 18 While Australia’s current low rates of community transmission of SARS‐CoV‐2 reduce the feasibility of observational studies of vaccine effectiveness, the available data can provide important information on potential harms of vaccines. With continuing questions about the comparative safety of vaccines, the emergence of viral variants, the long term effects of COVID‐19 and the likelihood of future epidemics, it is essential that Australia urgently removes barriers to allowing prequalified researchers to safely access the linked de‐identified population datasets that are needed to expeditiously conduct the types of studies reviewed here.

Competing interests

No relevant disclosures.

Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

The unedited version of this article was published as a preprint on mja.com.au on 20 May 2021.

How Science Beat the Virus

And what it lost in the process

Listen to this article

Listen to more stories on audm

This article was published online on December 14, 2020.

In fall of 2019, exactly zero scientists were studying COVID‑19, because no one knew the disease existed. The coronavirus that causes it, SARS‑CoV‑2, had only recently jumped into humans and had been neither identified nor named. But by the end of March 2020, it had spread to more than 170 countries, sickened more than 750,000 people, and triggered the biggest pivot in the history of modern science. Thousands of researchers dropped whatever intellectual puzzles had previously consumed their curiosity and began working on the pandemic instead. In mere months, science became thoroughly COVID-ized.

As of this writing, the biomedical library PubMed lists more than 74,000 COVID-related scientific papers—more than twice as many as there are about polio, measles, cholera, dengue, or other diseases that have plagued humanity for centuries. Only 9,700 Ebola-related papers have been published since its discovery in 1976; last year, at least one journal received more COVID‑19 papers than that for consideration. By September, the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine had received 30,000 submissions—16,000 more than in all of 2019. “All that difference is COVID‑19,” Eric Rubin, NEJM ’s editor in chief, says. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, told me, “The way this has resulted in a shift in scientific priorities has been unprecedented.”

Much like famous initiatives such as the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program, epidemics focus the energies of large groups of scientists. In the U.S., the influenza pandemic of 1918, the threat of malaria in the tropical battlegrounds of World War II, and the rise of polio in the postwar years all triggered large pivots. Recent epidemics of Ebola and Zika each prompted a temporary burst of funding and publications . But “nothing in history was even close to the level of pivoting that’s happening right now,” Madhukar Pai of McGill University told me.

That’s partly because there are just more scientists: From 1960 to 2010, the number of biological or medical researchers in the U.S. increased sevenfold , from just 30,000 to more than 220,000. But SARS-CoV-2 has also spread farther and faster than any new virus in a century. For Western scientists, it wasn’t a faraway threat like Ebola. It threatened to inflame their lungs. It shut down their labs. “It hit us at home,” Pai said.

In a survey of 2,500 researchers in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, Kyle Myers from Harvard and his team found that 32 percent had shifted their focus toward the pandemic. Neuroscientists who study the sense of smell started investigating why COVID‑19 patients tend to lose theirs. Physicists who had previously experienced infectious diseases only by contracting them found themselves creating models to inform policy makers. Michael D. L. Johnson at the University of Arizona normally studies copper’s toxic effects on bacteria. But when he learned that SARS‑CoV‑2 persists for less time on copper surfaces than on other materials, he partially pivoted to see how the virus might be vulnerable to the metal. No other disease has been scrutinized so intensely, by so much combined intellect, in so brief a time.

These efforts have already paid off. New diagnostic tests can detect the virus within minutes. Massive open data sets of viral genomes and COVID‑19 cases have produced the most detailed picture yet of a new disease’s evolution. Vaccines are being developed with record-breaking speed. SARS‑CoV‑2 will be one of the most thoroughly characterized of all pathogens, and the secrets it yields will deepen our understanding of other viruses, leaving the world better prepared to face the next pandemic.

But the COVID‑19 pivot has also revealed the all-too-human frailties of the scientific enterprise . Flawed research made the pandemic more confusing, influencing misguided policies. Clinicians wasted millions of dollars on trials that were so sloppy as to be pointless. Overconfident poseurs published misleading work on topics in which they had no expertise. Racial and gender inequalities in the scientific field widened.

Amid a long winter of sickness , it’s hard not to focus on the political failures that led us to a third surge. But when people look back on this period, decades from now, they will also tell stories, both good and bad, about this extraordinary moment for science. At its best, science is a self-correcting march toward greater knowledge for the betterment of humanity. At its worst, it is a self-interested pursuit of greater prestige at the cost of truth and rigor. The pandemic brought both aspects to the fore. Humanity will benefit from the products of the COVID‑19 pivot. Science itself will too, if it learns from the experience.

In February, Jennifer Doudna, one of America’s most prominent scientists, was still focused on CRISPR—the gene-editing tool that she’d co-discovered and that won her a Nobel Prize in October. But when her son’s high school shut down and UC Berkeley, her university, closed its campus, the severity of the impending pandemic became clear. “In three weeks, I went from thinking we’re still okay to thinking that my whole life is going to change,” she told me. On March 13, she and dozens of colleagues at the Innovative Genomics Institute, which she leads, agreed to pause most of their ongoing projects and redirect their skills to addressing COVID‑19. They worked on CRISPR-based diagnostic tests. Because existing tests were in short supply, they converted lab space into a pop-up testing facility to serve the local community. “We need to make our expertise relevant to whatever is happening right now,” she said.

Scientists who’d already been studying other emerging diseases were even quicker off the mark. Lauren Gardner, an engineering professor at Johns Hopkins University who has studied dengue and Zika, knew that new epidemics are accompanied by a dearth of real-time data. So she and one of her students created an online global dashboard to map and tally all publicly reported COVID‑19 cases and deaths. After one night of work, they released it, on January 22. The dashboard has since been accessed daily by governments, public-health agencies, news organizations, and anxious citizens.

Studying deadly viruses is challenging at the best of times, and was especially so this past year. To handle SARS‑CoV‑2, scientists must work in “biosafety level 3” labs, fitted with special airflow systems and other extreme measures; although the actual number is not known, an estimated 200 such facilities exist in the U.S. Researchers often test new drugs and vaccines on monkeys before proceeding to human trials, but the U.S. is facing a monkey shortage after China stopped exporting the animals, possibly because it needed them for research. And other biomedical research is now more difficult because of physical-distancing requirements. “Usually we had people packed in, but with COVID, we do shift work,” Akiko Iwasaki, a Yale immunologist, told me. “People are coming in at ridiculous hours” to protect themselves from the very virus they are trying to study.

Recommended Reading

What the Chaos in Hospitals Is Doing to Doctors

How the Pandemic Defeated America

The Logic of the Filing Cabinet Is Everywhere

Experts on emerging diseases are scarce: These threats go neglected by the public in the lulls between epidemics. “Just a year ago I had to explain to people why I was studying coronaviruses,” says Lisa Gralinski of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “That’s never going to be a concern again.” Stressed and stretched, she and other emerging-disease researchers were also conscripted into unfamiliar roles. They’re acting as makeshift advisers to businesses, schools, and local governments. They’re barraged by interview requests from journalists. They’re explaining the nuances of the pandemic on Twitter, to huge new follower counts. “It’s often the same person who’s helping the Namibian government to manage malaria outbreaks and is now being pulled into helping Maryland manage COVID‑19,” Gardner told me.

But the newfound global interest in viruses also means “you have a lot more people you can talk through problems with,” Pardis Sabeti, a computational geneticist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, told me. Indeed, COVID‑19 papers are more likely than typical biomedical studies to have authors who had never published together before, according to a team led by Ying Ding, who works at the University of Texas at Austin.

Fast-forming alliances could work at breakneck speed because many researchers had spent the past few decades transforming science from a plodding, cloistered endeavor into something nimbler and more transparent. Traditionally, a scientist submits her paper to a journal, which sends it to a (surprisingly small) group of peers for (several rounds of usually anonymous) comments; if the paper passes this (typically months-long) peer-review gantlet, it is published (often behind an expensive paywall). Languid and opaque, this system is ill-suited to a fast-moving outbreak. But biomedical scientists can now upload preliminary versions of their papers, or “preprints,” to freely accessible websites, allowing others to immediately dissect and build upon their results. This practice had been slowly gaining popularity before 2020, but proved so vital for sharing information about COVID‑19 that it will likely become a mainstay of modern biomedical research. Preprints accelerate science, and the pandemic accelerated the use of preprints. At the start of the year, one repository, medRxiv (pronounced “med archive”), held about 1,000 preprints. By the end of October, it had more than 12,000.

Open data sets and sophisticated new tools to manipulate them have likewise made today’s researchers more flexible. SARS‑CoV‑2’s genome was decoded and shared by Chinese scientists just 10 days after the first cases were reported. By November, more than 197,000 SARS‑CoV‑2 genomes had been sequenced. About 90 years ago, no one had even seen an individual virus; today, scientists have reconstructed the shape of SARS‑CoV‑2 down to the position of individual atoms. Researchers have begun to uncover how SARS‑CoV‑2 compares with other coronaviruses in wild bats, the likely reservoir; how it infiltrates and co-opts our cells; how the immune system overreacts to it, creating the symptoms of COVID‑19. “We’re learning about this virus faster than we’ve ever learned about any virus in history,” Sabeti said.

By March, the odds of quickly eradicating the new coronavirus looked slim. A vaccine became the likeliest endgame, and the race to create one was a resounding success. The process normally takes years, but as I write this, 54 different vaccines are being tested for safety and efficacy, and 12 have entered Phase 3 clinical trials—the final checkpoint. As of this writing, Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna have announced that, based on preliminary results from these trials, their respective vaccines are roughly 95 percent effective at preventing COVID‑19. * “We went from a virus whose sequence was only known in January, and now in the fall, we’re finishing— finishing —a Phase 3 trial,” Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House’s coronavirus task force, told me. “Holy mackerel.”

Most vaccines comprise dead, weakened, or fragmented pathogens, and must be made from scratch whenever a new threat emerges. But over the past decade, the U.S. and other countries have moved away from this slow “one bug, one drug” approach. Instead, they’ve invested in so-called platform technologies, in which a standard chassis can be easily customized with different payloads that target new viruses. For example, the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines both consist of nanoparticles that contain pieces of SARS‑CoV‑2’s genetic material—its mRNA. When volunteers are injected with these particles, their cells use the mRNA to reconstruct a noninfectious fragment of the virus, allowing their immune system to prepare antibodies that neutralize it. No company has ever brought an mRNA vaccine to market before, but because the basic platform had already been refined, researchers could quickly repurpose it with SARS‑CoV‑2’s mRNA. Moderna got its vaccine into Phase 1 clinical trials on March 16, just 66 days after the new virus’s genome was first uploaded—far faster than any pre-COVID vaccine.

Meanwhile, companies compressed the process of vaccine development by running what would normally be sequential steps in parallel, while still checking for safety and efficacy. The federal government’s Operation Warp Speed, an effort to accelerate vaccine distribution, funded several companies at once—an unusual move. It preordered doses and invested in manufacturing facilities before trials were complete, reducing the risk for pharmaceutical companies looking to participate. Ironically, federal ineptitude at containing SARS‑CoV‑2 helped too. In the U.S., “the fact that the virus is everywhere makes it easier to gauge the performance of a vaccine,” says Natalie Dean of the University of Florida, who studies vaccine trials. “You can’t do a [Phase 3] vaccine trial in South Korea,” because the outbreak there is under control.

Read: How the pandemic will end

Vaccines will not immediately end the pandemic . Millions of doses will have to be manufactured, allocated, and distributed ; large numbers of Americans could refuse the vaccine ; and how long vaccine-induced immunity will last is still unclear. In the rosiest scenario, the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are approved and smoothly rolled out over the next 12 months. By the end of the year, the U.S. achieves herd immunity, after which the virus struggles to find susceptible hosts. It still circulates, but outbreaks are sporadic and short-lived. Schools and businesses reopen. Families hug tightly and celebrate joyously over Thanksgiving and Christmas.

And the next time a mystery pathogen emerges, scientists hope to quickly slot its genetic material into proven platforms, and move the resulting vaccines through the same speedy pipelines that were developed during this pandemic. “I don’t think the world of vaccine development will ever be the same again,” says Nicole Lurie of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.

As fast as the vaccine-development process was, it could have been faster. Despite the stakes, some pharmaceutical companies with relevant expertise chose not to enter the race, perhaps dissuaded by intense competition. Instead, from February to May, the sector roughly tripled its efforts to develop drugs to treat COVID‑19, according to Kevin Bryan, an economist at the University of Toronto. The decades-old steroid dexamethasone turned out to reduce death rates among severely ill patients on ventilators by more than 12 percent. Early hints suggest that newer treatments such as the monoclonal-antibody therapy bamlanivimab, which was just approved for emergency use by the FDA, could help newly infected patients who have not yet been hospitalized. But although these wins are significant, they are scarce. Most drugs haven’t been effective. Health-care workers became better at saving hospitalized patients more through improvements in basic medical care than through pharmaceutical panaceas—a predictable outcome, because antiviral drugs tend to offer only modest benefits.

The quest for COVID‑19 treatments was slowed by a torrent of shoddy studies whose results were meaningless at best and misleading at worst. Many of the thousands of clinical trials that were launched were too small to produce statistically solid results. Some lacked a control group—a set of comparable patients who received a placebo, and who provided a baseline against which the effects of a drug could be judged. Other trials needlessly overlapped. At least 227 involved hydroxychloroquine—the antimalarial drug that Donald Trump hyped for months. A few large trials eventually confirmed that hydroxychloroquine does nothing for COVID‑19 patients, but not before hundreds of thousands of people were recruited into pointlessly small studies . More than 100,000 Americans have also received convalescent plasma—another treatment that Trump touted. But because most were not enrolled in rigorous trials, “we still don’t know if it works—and it likely doesn’t,” says Luciana Borio, the former director for medical and biodefense preparedness at the National Security Council. “What a waste of time and resources.”

Read: How we survive the winter

In the heat of a disaster, when emergency rooms are filling and patients are dying, it is hard to set up one careful study, let alone coordinate several across a country. But coordination is not impossible. During World War II , federal agencies unified private companies, universities, the military, and other entities in a carefully orchestrated effort to speed pharmaceutical development from benchtop to battlefield. The results—revolutionary malaria treatments, new ways of mass-producing antibiotics, and at least 10 new or improved vaccines for influenza and other diseases—represented “not a triumph of scientific genius but rather of organizational purpose and efficiency,” Kendall Hoyt of Dartmouth College has written.

Similar triumphs occurred last year—in other countries. In March, taking advantage of the United Kingdom’s nationalized health system, British researchers launched a nationwide study called Recovery, which has since enrolled more than 17,600 COVID‑19 patients across 176 institutions. Recovery offered conclusive answers about dexamethasone and hydroxychloroquine and is set to weigh in on several other treatments. No other study has done more to shape the treatment of COVID‑19. The U.S. is now catching up. In April, the NIH launched a partnership called ACTIV , in which academic and industry scientists prioritized the most promising drugs and coordinated trial plans across the country. Since August, several such trials have started. This model was late, but is likely to outlast the pandemic itself, allowing future researchers to rapidly sort medical wheat from pharmaceutical chaff. “I can’t imagine we’ll go back to doing clinical research in the future the way we did in the past,” the NIH’s Francis Collins said.

Even after the COVID‑19 pandemic, the fruits of the pivot will leave us better equipped for our long and intensifying war against harmful viruses. The last time a virus caused this much devastation—the flu pandemic of 1918—scientists were only just learning about viruses, and spent time looking for a bacterial culprit. This one is different. With so many scientists observing intently as a virus wreaks its horrible work upon millions of bodies, the world is learning lessons that could change the way we think about these pathogens forevermore.

Consider the long-term consequences of viral infections. Years after the original SARS virus hit Hong Kong in 2003, about a quarter of survivors still had myalgic encephalomyelitis—a chronic illness whose symptoms, such as extreme fatigue and brain fogs, can worsen dramatically after mild exertion. ME cases are thought to be linked to viral infections, and clusters sometimes follow big outbreaks. So when SARS‑CoV‑2 started spreading, people with ME were unsurprised to hear that tens of thousands of COVID‑19 “long-haulers” were experiencing incapacitating symptoms that rolled on for months . “Everyone in my community has been thinking about this since the start of the pandemic,” says Jennifer Brea, the executive director of the advocacy group #MEAction.

ME and sister illnesses such as dysautonomia, fibromyalgia, and mast cell activation syndrome have long been neglected, their symptoms dismissed as imaginary or psychiatric. Research is poorly funded, so few scientists study them. Little is known about how to prevent and treat them. This negligence has left COVID‑19 long-haulers with few answers or options, and they initially endured the same dismissal as the larger ME community. But their sheer numbers have forced a degree of recognition. They started researching, cataloging their own symptoms. They gained audiences with the NIH and the World Health Organization. Patients who are themselves experts in infectious disease or public health published their stories in top journals. “Long COVID” is being taken seriously, and Brea hopes it might drag all post-infection illnesses into the spotlight. ME never experienced a pivot. COVID‑19 might inadvertently create one.

Anthony Fauci hopes so. His career was defined by HIV, and in 2019 he said in a paper he co-wrote that “the collateral advantages of” studying HIV “have been profound.” Research into HIV/AIDS revolutionized our understanding of the immune system and how diseases subvert it. It produced techniques for developing antiviral drugs that led to treatments for hepatitis C. Inactivated versions of HIV have been used to treat cancers and genetic disorders. From one disease came a cascade of benefits. COVID‑19 will be no different. Fauci had personally seen cases of prolonged symptoms after other viral infections, but “I didn’t really have a good scientific handle on it,” he told me. Such cases are hard to study, because it’s usually impossible to identify the instigating pathogen. But COVID‑19 has created “the most unusual situation imaginable,” Fauci said—a massive cohort of people with long-haul symptoms that are almost certainly caused by one known virus. “It’s an opportunity we cannot lose,” he said.

Read: The core lesson of the COVID-19 heart debate

COVID‑19 has developed a terrifying mystique because it seems to behave in unusual ways. It causes mild symptoms in some but critical illness in others. It is a respiratory virus and yet seems to attack the heart, brain, kidneys, and other organs. It has reinfected a small number of people who had recently recovered. But many other viruses share similar abilities; they just don’t infect millions of people in a matter of months or grab the attention of the entire scientific community. Thanks to COVID‑19, more researchers are looking for these rarer sides of viral infections, and spotting them.

At least 20 known viruses, including influenza and measles, can trigger myocarditis—inflammation of the heart. Some of these cases resolve on their own, but others cause persistent scarring, and still others rapidly progress into lethal problems. No one knows what proportion of people with viral myocarditis experience the most mild fate, because doctors typically notice only those who seek medical attention. But now researchers are also intently scrutinizing the hearts of people with mild or asymptomatic COVID‑19 infections, including college athletes, given concerns about sudden cardiac arrest during strenuous workouts. The lessons from these efforts could ultimately avert deaths from other infections.

Respiratory viruses, though extremely common, are often neglected. Respiratory syncytial virus, parainfluenza viruses, rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, bocaviruses, a quartet of other human coronaviruses—they mostly cause mild coldlike illnesses, but those can be severe. How often? Why? It’s hard to say, because, influenza aside, such viruses attract little funding or interest. “There’s a perception that they’re just colds and there’s nothing much to learn,” says Emily Martin of the University of Michigan, who has long struggled to get funding to study them. Such reasoning is shortsighted folly. Respiratory viruses are the pathogens most likely to cause pandemics, and those outbreaks could potentially be far worse than COVID‑19’s.

Read: We need to talk about ventilation

Their movements through the air have been poorly studied, too. “There’s this very entrenched idea,” says Linsey Marr at Virginia Tech, that viruses mostly spread through droplets (short-range globs of snot and spit) rather than aerosols (smaller, dustlike flecks that travel farther). That idea dates back to the 1930s, when scientists were upending outdated notions that disease was caused by “bad air,” or miasma. But the evidence that SARS‑CoV‑2 can spread through aerosols “is now overwhelming,” says Marr, one of the few scientists who, before the pandemic, studied how viruses spread through air. “I’ve seen more acceptance in the last six months than over the 12 years I’ve been working on this.”

Another pandemic is inevitable, but it will find a very different community of scientists than COVID‑19 did. They will immediately work to determine whether the pathogen—most likely another respiratory virus—moves through aerosols, and whether it spreads from infected people before causing symptoms. They might call for masks and better ventilation from the earliest moments, not after months of debate. They will anticipate the possibility of an imminent wave of long-haul symptoms, and hopefully discover ways of preventing them. They might set up research groups to prioritize the most promising drugs and coordinate large clinical trials. They might take vaccine platforms that worked best against COVID‑19, slot in the genetic material of the new pathogen, and have a vaccine ready within months.

For all its benefits, the single-minded focus on COVID‑19 will also leave a slew of negative legacies. Science is mostly a zero-sum game, and when one topic monopolizes attention and money, others lose out. Last year, between physical-distancing restrictions, redirected funds, and distracted scientists, many lines of research slowed to a crawl. Long-term studies that monitored bird migrations or the changing climate will forever have holes in their data because field research had to be canceled. Conservationists who worked to protect monkeys and apes kept their distance for fear of passing COVID‑19 to already endangered species. Roughly 80 percent of non-COVID‑19 clinical trials in the U.S.—likely worth billions of dollars—were interrupted or stopped because hospitals were overwhelmed and volunteers were stuck at home. Even research on other infectious diseases was back-burnered. “All the non-COVID work that I was working on before the pandemic started is now piling up and gathering dust,” says Angela Rasmussen of Georgetown University, who normally studies Ebola and MERS. “Those are still problems.”

The COVID‑19 pandemic is a singular disaster, and it is reasonable for society—and scientists—to prioritize it. But the pivot was driven by opportunism as much as altruism. Governments, philanthropies, and universities channeled huge sums toward COVID‑19 research. The NIH alone received nearly $3.6 billion from Congress. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation apportioned $350 million for COVID‑19 work. “Whenever there’s a big pot of money, there’s a feeding frenzy,” Madhukar Pai told me. He works on tuberculosis, which causes 1.5 million deaths a year—comparable to COVID‑19’s toll in 2020. Yet tuberculosis research has been mostly paused. None of Pai’s colleagues pivoted when Ebola or Zika struck, but “half of us have now swung to working on COVID‑19,” he said. “It’s a black hole, sucking us all in.”

While the most qualified experts became quickly immersed in the pandemic response, others were stuck at home looking for ways to contribute. Using the same systems that made science faster, they could download data from free databases, run quick analyses with intuitive tools, publish their work on preprint servers, and publicize it on Twitter. Often, they made things worse by swerving out of their scholarly lanes and plowing into unfamiliar territory. Nathan Ballantyne, a philosopher at Fordham University, calls this “ epistemic trespassing .” It can be a good thing: Continental drift was championed by Alfred Wegener, a meteorologist; microbes were first documented by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a draper. But more often than not, epistemic trespassing just creates a mess, especially when inexperience couples with overconfidence.

On March 28, a preprint noted that countries that universally use a tuberculosis vaccine called BCG had lower COVID‑19 mortality rates. But such cross-country comparisons are infamously treacherous. For example, countries with higher cigarette-usage rates have longer life expectancies, not because smoking prolongs life but because it is more popular in wealthier nations. This tendency to draw faulty conclusions about individual health using data about large geographical regions is called the ecological fallacy. Epidemiologists know to avoid it. The BCG-preprint authors, who were from an osteopathic college in New York, didn’t seem to . But their paper was covered by more than 70 news outlets, and dozens of inexperienced teams offered similarly specious analyses. “People who don’t know how to spell tuberculosis have told me they can solve the link between BCG and COVID‑19,” Pai said. “Someone told me they can do it in 48 hours with a hackathon.”

Other epistemic trespassers spent their time reinventing the wheel. One new study, published in NEJM , used lasers to show that when people speak, they release aerosols. But as the authors themselves note, the same result—sans lasers—was published in 1946, Marr says. I asked her whether any papers from the 2020 batch had taught her something new. After an uncomfortably long pause, she mentioned just one.

In some cases, bad papers helped shape the public narrative of the pandemic. On March 16, two biogeographers published a preprint arguing that COVID‑19 will “marginally affect the tropics” because it fares poorly in warm, humid conditions. Disease experts quickly noted that techniques like the ones the duo used are meant for modeling the geographic ranges of animal and plant species or vector-borne pathogens, and are ill-suited to simulating the spread of viruses like SARS-CoV-2. But their claim was picked up by more than 50 news outlets and echoed by the United Nations World Food Program. COVID‑19 has since run rampant in many tropical countries, including Brazil, Indonesia, and Colombia—and the preprint’s authors have qualified their conclusions in later versions of the paper. “It takes a certain type of person to think that weeks of reading papers gives them more perspective than someone with a Ph.D. on that subject, and that type of person has gotten a lot of airtime in this pandemic,” says Colin Carlson of Georgetown.

The incentives to trespass are substantial. Academia is a pyramid scheme: Each biomedical professor trains an average of six doctoral students across her career, but only 16 percent of the students get tenure-track positions . Competition is ferocious, and success hinges on getting published—a feat made easier by dramatic results. These factors pull researchers toward speed, short-termism, and hype at the expense of rigor—and the pandemic intensified that pull. With an anxious world crying out for information, any new paper could immediately draw international press coverage—and hundreds of citations.

The tsunami of rushed but dubious work made life harder for actual experts, who struggled to sift the signal from the noise. They also felt obliged to debunk spurious research in long Twitter threads and relentless media interviews—acts of public service that are rarely rewarded in academia. And they were overwhelmed by requests to peer-review new papers. Kristian Andersen, an infectious-disease researcher at Scripps Research, told me that journals used to send him two or three such requests a month. Now “I’m getting three or five a day,” he said in September.

The pandemic’s opportunities also fell inequitably upon the scientific community. In March, Congress awarded $75 million to the National Science Foundation to fast-track studies that could quickly contribute to the pandemic response. “That money just went ,” says Cassidy Sugimoto of Indiana University, who was on rotation at the agency at the time. “It was a first-come, first-served environment. It advantaged people who were aware of the system and could act upon it quickly.” But not all scientists could pivot to COVID‑19, or pivot with equal speed.

Among scientists, as in other fields, women do more child care, domestic work, and teaching than men, and are more often asked for emotional support by their students. These burdens increased as the pandemic took hold, leaving women scientists “less able to commit their time to learning about a new area of study, and less able to start a whole new research project,” says Molly M. King, a sociologist at Santa Clara University. Women’s research hours fell by nine percentage points more than did men’s because of the pressures of COVID‑19. And when COVID‑19 created new opportunities, men grabbed them more quickly. In the spring, the proportion of papers with women as first authors fell almost 44 percent in the preprint repository medRxiv, relative to 2019. And published COVID‑19 papers had 19 percent fewer women as first authors compared with papers from the same journals in the previous year. Men led more than 80 percent of national COVID‑19 task forces in 87 countries . Male scientists were quoted four times as frequently as female scientists in American news stories about the pandemic.

American scientists of color also found it harder to pivot than their white peers, because of unique challenges that sapped their time and energy. Black, Latino, and Indigenous scientists were most likely to have lost loved ones, adding mourning to their list of duties. Many grieved, too, after the killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and others. They often faced questions from relatives who were mistrustful of the medical system, or were experiencing discriminatory care. They were suddenly tasked with helping their predominantly white institutions fight racism. Neil Lewis Jr. at Cornell, who studies racial health disparities, told me that many psychologists had long deemed his work irrelevant. “All of a sudden my inbox is drowning,” he said, while some of his own relatives have become ill and one has died.

Science suffers from the so-called Matthew effect, whereby small successes snowball into ever greater advantages, irrespective of merit. Similarly, early hindrances linger. Young researchers who could not pivot because they were too busy caring or grieving for others might suffer lasting consequences from an unproductive year. COVID‑19 “has really put the clock back in terms of closing the gap for women and underrepresented minorities,” Yale’s Akiko Iwasaki says. “Once we’re over the pandemic, we’ll need to fix it all again.”

COVID-19 has already changed science immensely, but if scientists are savvy, the most profound pivot is still to come—a grand reimagining of what medicine should be. In 1848, the Prussian government sent a young physician named Rudolf Virchow to investigate a typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia. Virchow didn’t know what caused the devastating disease, but he realized its spread was possible because of malnutrition, hazardous working conditions, crowded housing, poor sanitation, and the inattention of civil servants and aristocrats—problems that require social and political reforms. “Medicine is a social science,” Virchow said, “and politics is nothing but medicine in larger scale.”

This viewpoint fell by the wayside after germ theory became mainstream in the late 19th century. When scientists discovered the microbes responsible for tuberculosis, plague, cholera, dysentery, and syphilis, most fixated on these newly identified nemeses. Societal factors were seen as overly political distractions for researchers who sought to “be as ‘objective’ as possible,” says Elaine Hernandez, a medical sociologist at Indiana University. In the U.S., medicine fractured. New departments of sociology and cultural anthropology kept their eye on the societal side of health, while the nation’s first schools of public health focused instead on fights between germs and individuals. This rift widened as improvements in hygiene, living standards, nutrition, and sanitation lengthened life spans: The more social conditions improved, the more readily they could be ignored.

The ideological pivot away from social medicine began to reverse in the second half of the 20th century. The women’s-rights and civil-rights movements, the rise of environmentalism, and anti-war protests created a generation of scholars who questioned “the legitimacy, ideology, and practice of any science … that disregards social and economic inequality,” wrote Nancy Krieger of Harvard . Beginning in the 1980s, this new wave of social epidemiologists once again studied how poverty, privilege, and living conditions affect a person’s health—to a degree even Virchow hadn’t imagined. But as COVID‑19 has shown, the reintegration is not yet complete.

Politicians initially described COVID‑19 as a “great equalizer,” but when states began releasing demographic data, it was immediately clear that the disease was disproportionately infecting and killing people of color . These disparities aren’t biological. They stem from decades of discrimination and segregation that left minority communities in poorer neighborhoods with low-paying jobs, more health problems, and less access to health care—the same kind of problems that Virchow identified more than 170 years ago.

From the September 2020 issue: How the pandemic defeated America

Simple acts like wearing a mask and staying at home, which rely on people tolerating discomfort for the collective good, became society’s main defenses against the virus in the many months without effective drugs or vaccines. These are known as nonpharmaceutical interventions—a name that betrays medicine’s biological bias. For most of 2020, these were the only interventions on offer, but they were nonetheless defined in opposition to the more highly prized drugs and vaccines.

In March, when the U.S. started shutting down, one of the biggest questions on the mind of Whitney Robinson of UNC at Chapel Hill was: Are our kids going to be out of school for two years? While biomedical scientists tend to focus on sickness and recovery, social epidemiologists like her “think about critical periods that can affect the trajectory of your life,” she told me. Disrupting a child’s schooling at the wrong time can affect their entire career, so scientists should have prioritized research to figure out whether and how schools could reopen safely. But most studies on the spread of COVID‑19 in schools were neither large in scope nor well-designed enough to be conclusive. No federal agency funded a large, nationwide study, even though the federal government had months to do so. The NIH received billions for COVID‑19 research , but the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development—one of its 27 constituent institutes and centers—got nothing.

The horrors that Rudolf Virchow saw in Upper Silesia radicalized him, pushing the future “father of modern pathology” to advocate for social reforms. The current pandemic has affected scientists in the same way. Calm researchers became incensed as potentially game-changing innovations like cheap diagnostic tests were squandered by a negligent administration and a muzzled Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Austere publications like NEJM and Nature published explicitly political editorials castigating the Trump administration for its failures and encouraging voters to hold the president accountable. COVID‑19 could be the catalyst that fully reunifies the social and biological sides of medicine, bridging disciplines that have been separated for too long.

“To study COVID‑19 is not only to study the disease itself as a biological entity,” says Alondra Nelson, the president of the Social Science Research Council. “What looks like a single problem is actually all things, all at once. So what we’re actually studying is literally everything in society, at every scale, from supply chains to individual relationships.”

The scientific community spent the pre-pandemic years designing faster ways of doing experiments, sharing data, and developing vaccines, allowing it to mobilize quickly when COVID‑19 emerged. Its goal now should be to address its many lingering weaknesses. Warped incentives, wasteful practices, overconfidence, inequality, a biomedical bias—COVID‑19 has exposed them all. And in doing so, it offers the world of science a chance to practice one of its most important qualities: self-correction.

* The print version of this article stated that the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines were reported to be 95 percent effective at preventing COVID-19 infections. In fact, the vaccines prevent disease, not infection.

This article appears in the January/February 2021 print edition with the headline “The COVID-19 Manhattan Project.”