There are several interesting nuggets in this MIT Technology Review article:

• A lot of the technology was developed by the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (which I have mixed feelings about – it’s essentially a giant evil greedy corporation in most ways, but it does provide a lot of jobs locally – much like any giant inefficient Soviety industry, and obviously it created this technology for greedy purposes which now has the potential to save hundreds of millions of lives while making a few greedy people extraordinarily rich.)
• The technology essentially gets your body to make its own medicine, “turning a human body into a bioreactor”. However, doesn’t work well (so far) for medicines that need to be taken repeatedly, which is most medicines except vaccines. So vaccines are the most obvious candidate for now. Combining it with gene editing technology holds the promise of permanent protection against disease, even handed down the generations, but there are also some scary risks here.
• It may work for herpes, malaria, flu, sickle cell anemia, cancer and HIV. For flu and coronavirus, there is a possibility of “universal vaccines” that would protect against thousands of strains with a single shot.
• The vaccine was designed within 48 hours of the scientists receiving its DNA sequence, and ready for animal trials in less than six weeks. (This is exciting, because it suggests the possibility of responding to new threats quickly in the future, whether natural or manmade.)
• “vaccine programs for emerging threats like Zika or Ebola, where outbreaks come and go, would deliver a -66% return on average.” (sounds like an obvious, clear textbook market failure to me and an obvious moral requirement for government to step in)
• The researchers are advocating for the government to create “megafactories” for producing mRNA that could be leased to companies in normal times, but taken over by the government to pump out vaccines quickly in times of crisis. They liken this to how governments “governments spend billions on nuclear weapons they hope to never use”. (They have this one wrong – it’s trillions! And if we need a military reason to do this, we need this to protect against biowarfare and bioterrorism in addition to naturally arising pandemics. It’s an existential threat and like I said, an absolute moral imperative for government to make this happen.)
• The article also mentions an experimental gene therapy cure for blindness. Exciting but costs about a million dollars right now for two eyes.