Virology was in a comparative state of infancy when HIV happened. Many virologists say the inside/out, intimate knowledge of how viruses function, not to mention harnessing technologies like PCR for testing and analysis, accelerated dramatically because so many scientists focused so hard on HIV, which finally got recognized as a true existential threat to humanity. If that effort hadn’t happened, the odds that the pharmaceuticals could have been able to rapidly snip out coronavirus genetic fragments to engineer RNA vaccines would have been minuscule. Of course, lot of other developments in virology are responsible too; science is a rapidly moving world. But few people outside specialists realize just how much HIV research made coronavirus vaccines possible and possible so very quickly.