- the breakthrough of RNA based vaccins
- a deeper understanding of how air based viruses spread (although much more research still needs to be done)
- a lot of practical lessons learned about managing global virus outbreaks
Now that we know they are safe (we've just had an informal clinical trial with hundreds of millions of patients) maybe they will get used more.
This is just the first article I could find on treating cancer with mRNA immunotherapy: https://molecular-cancer.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/...
I'm sure there are many more.
You would think, but I feel like with each wave (and therefore each opportunity to learn from previous mistakes) countries repeated the mistakes of the past. I have very little confidence that if we were faced with a similar threat in the near future that things would be different.
My understanding is that we were at that breakthrough anyhow. This was just the first chance to test it. The emergency sped up that testing, but it didn't create the breakthrough.
The rest I agree with though. There's a ton of information we learned from this experience, and we're still learning.