The world currently experiences unprecedented research efforts to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. A recent paper of the EGIS members J-M Cavaillon and MF Osuchowski in the Journal of Intensive Medicine puts this process into historical context by comparing the current pandemic to previous pandemics and sepsis. In particular, the paper pays tribute to Waldemar Haffkine, the scientist before Katalin Kariko, who addressed infectious epidemics by offering a vaccine approach already in the 19th century.