Salk to Silicon: How COVID Changed the Vaccine Game

Back in the 1950s, Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine with a team of fewer than a hundred researchers and about as much computing power as a toaster. No cloud servers, no AI, no billion-dollar grants—just lab coats, microscopes, and enough coffee to keep Pittsburgh buzzing through the Cold War.

It took six long years of grit and glass slides. And when it was finally ready, 1.8 million kids, me included, lined up to test it in one of the biggest public health trials this country’s ever seen. The vaccine worked. Salk got a parade. And the world let out a breath it didn’t even know it was holding.

Fast forward to 2020. When COVID hit, the world didn’t just rally—it launched a scientific D-Day.

• Over 100 vaccine candidates were in development globally within months.

• Moderna, Pfizer, BioNTech, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson—all racing in parallel.

• Entire nations and their treasure threw their scientific, logistical, and military weight behind the effort.

• And this time, they had a secret weapon Jonas Salk never imagined: artificial intelligence.

AI didn’t just speed things up—it reshaped the game. It crunched genomics data in hours, simulated protein structures in silico (no lab coat needed), and modeled trial designs with precision. Moderna designed its mRNA vaccine just two days after China released the viral genome. AI helped them pick the right target: the now-famous spike protein.

And here come the naysayers. “It takes five years!” they hollered. “This is too fast!” they warned. Yes, under normal conditions, it used to take that long. But normal left the building with the TP shortage. When you throw every scientific resource on Earth at one problem—and add AI to the mix—you don’t get slow. You get results.

Yes, it still took thousands of scientists. Yes, it still required trials, testing, and logistics. But make no mistake—AI didn’t replace people. It amplified them.

And now, just as AI is proving it can rewrite the vaccine playbook, crack protein folds, and maybe even help with Alzheimer’s and cancer… the Trump administration is slashing billions in medical research.

They’re gutting NIH cancer programs, cutting Alzheimer’s research, choking off funding for university labs, and dialing back AI development inside military medical centers. It’s like yanking the jumper cables just as the engine finally turns over.

We’re talking about the same public research network that made mRNA vaccines possible in the first place. The same machine-learning infrastructure that found a medical miracle in record time. And now it’s being told to do more—with less—while private tech firms race ahead with algorithms and no guardrails.

AI didn’t just write code. It went to med school, did its rounds, and helped save the damn world. And now the administration wants to kill the residency program.

Jonas Salk gave us a miracle with a microscope and moral clarity. The COVID vaccine? That was a miracle with a motherboard—and one hell of a deadline.

In 1955, we waited six years.

In 2020, we did it in under 12 months.

And we not going back to six years again, folks—unless we let politics defund the very future we just barely unlocked.

How Did AI Speed Up COVID Vaccine Development?