Letter from the Editor: The Beginning of the End

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On Tuesday, December 8th, 2020 Margaret Keenan of Britain became the first person in the world to receive the Pfizer-BioNtech COVID-19 vaccine outside of clinical trials. This is the end, or at least the beginning of the end, of a very long and arduous journey.

If nothing else, this marks a new beginning, with tens of millions of vaccine doses of the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine becoming publicly available right away, multitudes more to follow as production continues to increase, and a half-dozen other vaccines come to market beyond that. The vaccine has already been shipped and stockpiled around the world. The distribution chains have been primed, prioritization groups defined, and the vaccine promotional campaigns have already begun. In the US, the FDA is expected to grant emergency-use authorization as soon as tomorrow and, according Pfizer's CEO, the vaccine would be ready to ship "within hours."

As I wrote in my Letter from the Editor last month, it will take time to bridge from now until we reach a state of wide-spread immunity to this horrible disease that has plagued us for so long. But it's time to start taking stock and planning for the future, which inevitably will occur. Some things will continue, and may never go back to the way they were before. Others, will dynamically shift as the world returns to normal in a post-COVID world. But one thing is certain, life will return to some resemblance of normal – and the time to start planning for it is now. Which is why this issue of Pipeline is so important.