this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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The first mRNA vaccine for covid was synthesized within a month of the national emergency declaration. But there was about a year of trials and approvals before it was allowed to be mass distributed.
Which is still blindingly fast. It got EUA or emergency use authorization. Most drugs take 5-10y of trials not including the decade+ of basic R+D to reach approval.
A large reason for that speed was other mRNA vaccines in trials safely for a few decades and the adenovirus being in use for other vaccines already.
The Oxford/AstraZeneca adenoviral vaccine has some human testing history, but the mRNA technology had only previously been tested on animals.
Not the specific diseases(cause covid-19 didn't exist), the technique/methodology. MERS and SARS are different things.
Adenovirus was used as far back as the 1963 (it had problems then), for "resporatory disease". and was used for ebola vaccines as recent 2020. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9543183/#B84
mRNA (very much not DNA) was trialed in the 1990s to treat flu in mice and in a human rabies vaccine attempt in 2013. https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2021/the-long-history-of-mrna-vaccines
That long history link isn't very long. This seems to be better.
Before Covid only 132 humans over 2 efficacy (not safety) trials had experienced mRNA. Saying mRNA has had decades of safety trials is misleading.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRNA_vaccine
The first (indirect) human mrna vaccine was trialed in 2001. A different direct infection trial was reported (completed and analyzed) in 2008 it was a safety and efficacy trial. Then there was the 2013 rabies trial (101 participants safety trial) then others for flu, zika, cmv, and chikungunya. This isn't a very complete list of the trials that occurred as many of the early ones were for cancers.
You can see a more complete but not necessarily full list of in progress and completed mrna trials https://clinicaltrials.gov/search?intr=Mrna easily noted is that between the rabies vaccine and the HIV (both before covid19 existed) there are already over 151 people that received it and both trials were safety trials. That's before the aforementioned cancer trials, your source is wrong. Unless it is for something rare safety trials are always done first or(more recently) in combination with the efficacy trial.