 Since the novel coronavirus first showed up in America in January 2020, the U.S. government has routinely impeded scientists and public health officials from coping with the COVID-19 pandemic. Early on, the Surgeon General admonished Americans for buying masks. You do not need to wear a medical mask like this one. People should not be walking around with masks. You're sure of it because people are listening really closely. There's no reason to be walking around with a mask. As recently as last August, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said people without symptoms don't necessarily need a test. The Food and Drug Administration stood in the way as independent labs worked to quickly develop COVID tests. And it wasn't until this spring that the agency finally approved an at-home test you could get without a prescription. But what about Operation Warp Speed, which even critics of the Trump administration praised for speeding up the development of COVID-19 vaccines? Government money isn't what brought us to the point of ending the pandemic via a new way of developing vaccines. Messenger RNA vaccines and a revolutionary new technology for dealing with future pandemics was underway long before Operation Warp Speed came into being. The horrors of the last year spurred humanity to quickly develop an unprecedentedly flexible and powerful toolkit that may well make COVID-19 the last true pandemic, writes reason science correspondent Ronald Bailey in his new cover story for the magazine. The amazing thing is we'll be able to forestall any further pandemics in the future because so many advancements in vaccines, treatments and so forth have come out of that. Now you can just slip any piece of genetic information into that lipid and you now have a vaccine. The COVID vaccines have not only proven to be safe, they came much faster than predicted. We hope to rush it to be able to have some impact on recycling in the next season. And like I said, that could be a year to a year and a half. I'm not changing any of the dates. But here's the really astonishing thing. Almost all of the time that it did take to bring the vaccines to market was due to safety testing and other governmental mandate. By January 13, 2020, only two days after the Chinese researchers shared the genetic sequence of the COVID-19 virus, the biotech company Moderna had devised the formula for its vaccine. BioNTech launched its COVID-19 vaccine program in January and had partnered with Pfizer to manufacture it by mid-March of last year. The first volunteer was injected with Moderna's vaccine on March 16, 2020, yet it was only approved by the FDA last December 17, a week after Pfizer's vaccine met the agency's approval. We have the model of being able to do this. It's plug and play. If we have another virus, comes along, we'll be able to identify very quickly genetics necessary to just plug it into the base of the vaccine and you could roll it out within three to four months, as opposed to a year. That the COVID vaccines have proven safe in clinical trials is strong evidence that future messenger RNA vaccines will also be safe as well. If we have another pandemic and another failure is regarded, it will be a policy failure. The technologies are there and what we just have to do is to have our bureaucracies get out of the way and let them be deployed in an expeditious way. Had the agency been faster off the mark and used human challenge trials and other innovative testing techniques, the vaccines could have been brought to market months earlier with no compromise in safety. Would the government allow a vaccine based on this plug and play model to be deployed not within months, but in a matter of weeks to stop the next pandemic in its tracks? That's an open question.