 The COVID-19 pandemic caused a sense of vulnerability and urgency which prompted governments, funders, regulators and industry to take action to overcome traditional challenges for developing vaccine candidates and to reach authorization. Unprecedented financial investments, massive demand, accelerated clinical trials and regulatory reviews were among the key factors that contributed to the rapid development and approval of COVID-19 vaccines. Previous scientific innovations such as mRNA and recombinant vectors and proteins have created a new era of vaccinology with powerful platform technologies and a new model for vaccine development. These lessons learned highlight the need for strong leadership to bring together governments, global health organizations, manufacturers, scientists, private sector, civil society and philanthropy to generate innovative, fair and equitable access mechanisms to COVID-19 vaccines for populations worldwide and to build a more efficient and effective vaccine ecosystem to prepare for other pandemics that may emerge. In the long term, new vaccines should be developed with incentives to build expertise for manufacturing that can be leveraged for low-middling. This article was authored by Peter Jay-Atez, Lois Pruvedum, Melanie Saville and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.