Unproven Vaccine Technology and Rapid ‘Crappy’ Tests

Many of the Covid-19 vaccines in development are known as genetic vaccines, which in theory can be made and scaled up much more quickly than traditional vaccines. Rather than using a weakened or killed pathogen (or a piece of one) to elicit an immune response, genetic vaccines use the genetic material of the pathogen itself. This elegant and potentially game-changing technology — which is being pursued by Moderna, Inovio, and Pfizer — has just one drawback: It hasn’t actually been proven to work in humans yet. As Emily Mullin reports at OneZero, this vaccine…