Where is that AIDs vaccine that has been searched for over the last 20 years? Well if we just called something "good enough" even though its not really tested and may not be effective, heck we could claim we had one.
That seems to be the narrative some have spun, but reality is quite different.
Work on the polio vaccine began in the 1930s and it took until 1955 for a viable vaccine to emerge. So ~20 years for that one. It took 9 years for a viable pneumonia vaccine that started in the late 1960s and ended in 1977 with the first successful one. By the 1980s, it was down to 7 years for a Hantavirus vaccine which debuted in 1990. For SARS2003, there was a viable vaccine candidate developed in 1 year 8 months. In 2014, a viable vaccine candidate was developed for Ebola in 7 months. That came down to 6 months for Zika in 2016. COVID-19 took about 2 months.
In other words, this has been a gradual progression. We've gotten better and faster at vaccine development. Most of the work used to be in simply isolating the causal agent and then trying to figure out the best way to present its antigens to the immune system. Those problems are solved. We can now genetically sequence a new pathogen in hours. Within days, we know every protein and how they fold. We can model receptor binding on a supercomputer in hours. And with the mRNA platform, you simply plug in the nucleotide sequence for the desired antigen and out comes your prototype ready for testing.
The Moderna team had their initial prototype finished over a weekend. But that didn't come out of nowhere. It came out of a century of working on this problem and getting better at it incrementally over time. It's just that nobody was watching it until just now so everyone assumes it still takes a decade to produce something new. It doesn't. It hasn't for a long time.