evidence: COVID-19 vaccines: breaking record times to first-in-human trials [...] Over the last century, control of epidemics has been achieved successfully thanks to vaccines developed using various technologies, predominantly by classic pathogen inactivation or attenuation. This has worked efficiently for Cholera, Typhoid, Polio, Measles, Plague or Tetanus. Conjugate-vaccines and subunit vaccines have also provided effective triumphs in vaccinology for pneumonia, sepsis and meningitis4. The pace of these vaccine developments is comparatively slow to that imprinted by 21st-century vaccines that use recombinant genetic technology. During the recent pandemic of COVID-19, six vaccine candidates encoding or presenting SARS-CoV-2 antigens have entered phase I clinical trials to assess their safety and immunogenicity, including those based on mRNA (NCT04283461), adenoviral vector 5 (NCT04313127); chimpanzee adenoviral vector ChAdOx1 (NCT04324606), DNA (NCT04336410), a lentiviral vector (NCT04276896) and artificial antigen-presenting cells or aAPC (NCT04299724). Despite the fact that most of these COVID-19 vaccine candidates are being evaluated in phase I trials, some are experimental (DNA/RNA vaccines) and may have a longer journey ahead to achieve licensure. Available information indicates that various candidates express the COVID-19 spike (S) glycoprotein to neutralise the virus and prevent attachment to the human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2) receptor, known to be the co-receptor for viral entry of SARS-CoV-25.