Dose Of Truth: How Did Vaccines And Rollouts Happen So Fast?

There’s a lot of false information out there about the two leading COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S. We wanted to provide the facts and answer some questions.

I’m not a doctor but know a few, so we asked. Why is this happening so fast?

“This technology has kind of been around and been tested for a while. It's the first time that we've actually seen it on a larger scale to create vaccines. But various companies, Moderna and Pfizer, have been experimenting with this for a while," explained Dr. Khalilah Gates, a pulmonary care specialist with Northwestern Medicine.

“The reason why the vaccine development happened over such a short, new, just rapid timeline is because of the sheer amount of money and resources that have been put into vaccine development from all over the globe, including the scientists that are collaborating to do this," said Dr. Jasmine R. Marcelin, an infectious diseases physician with the University of Nebraska Medical Center. 

“In the future, I think we're going to be facing more and more infectious disease outbreaks. And so as a community and as a group of scientific researchers, we need to focus on ways to get vaccines out in a good way efficiently, that work well, faster," said Dr. Payal Patel, an infectious diseases physician at the University of Michigan.