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On Tuesday, White House officials gathered scientists, pharmaceutical executives, and experts in public health at a summit to try to lay out a path toward creating better vaccines. What was the upshot?

For starters, there was tremendous optimism about the prospects for developing next-generation vaccines. And there were, in fact, glimmers of a tractable path to better products — if Congress will provide billions of dollars to speed things up.

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The danger in this situation, though, is that of giving Sisyphus Prozac. It doesn’t really matter if you feel better about rolling the boulder up a hill if it is just going to come tumbling down.

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