Necessity drives invention: How COVID-19 sparked unprecedented innovations

The COVID pandemic touched almost every part of daily life. Cities became ghost towns. Schools and workplaces worldwide shut their doors. Millions of families now have an empty seat at their table. 

But while COVID took a sizable toll on society, it also served as a time of profound research and innovation. It enacted change and pushed forward science at an unprecedented rate with the support of organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization, focusing most of their research efforts and funding on controlling the virus.  

The speed at which scientists developed the vaccine garnered national attention. It was only 11 months after the virus was first identified and sequenced that the vaccine was made publicly available. With this level of attention came misinformation, fear, and anti-vaxxer resistance.

The biggest pharmaceutical companies to create a COVID-19 vaccine — Moderna and Pfizer — produced what remains the only approved messenger RNA, or mRNA, vaccine. 

The advent of mRNA vaccines dates back to the 1990s when Dr. Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, researchers from University of Pennsylvania Medicine, discovered the potential of mRNA for the development of vaccines. They found that they only had to plug in the sequence of the protein “they want to create or replace in order to target a specific disease,” according to Penn Medicine. mRNA vaccines are also deemed more efficient because they do not require an electrical impulse to push the genetic message into the cell. 

Moderna and Pfizer harnessed this knowledge to develop their vaccines and began rolling them out in December of 2020. 

Once the vaccines were developed, administering them to the public became the next hurdle. The planning, execution, and troubleshooting of such quick changes often forced scientists to quickly adapt their approach to research. It was well understood that gathering people in a hospital was a high risk. Thus, instead of patients coming to the providers, the providers began going to the patients. 

According to a paper published in 2022 about the impact of COVID on healthcare, mobile nursing services “were used to a limited extent prior to the pandemic.” Moreover, one of the long-lasting effects impacting location from this is telemedicine, which allows patients to consult with healthcare providers or researchers remotely. 

But outside of healthcare, society was forced to adapt quickly to living, working, and socializing from home. This allowed the popularization of remote meeting services like Zoom and Google Meet. Large venues that were previously for sports and concerts were repurposed as testing sites. 

COVID-19’s effects transcended just the medical field; it changed how society functioned altogether. Today, the effects of it are still seen with increased popularization of working remotely, the massive burnout among healthcare professionals, and the wide-spread availability of telehealth. 

On March 29, 2023, Dr. Anthony Fauci — who became a leading figure in COVID-19 research — spoke to students at Georgetown University about five lessons he learned from the pandemic. 

“You have to act early and rapidly with public health interventions,” Fauci said to the crowd of students. “When you’re dealing with a pandemic, what you’re experiencing today was caused by something that happened two to three weeks ago. What’s going on now is going to manifest itself three weeks from now … Pandemics are not linear; they’re exponential.”