As clinicians and researchers, we followed the COVID-19 pandemic right from its start in 2020.

During the first month, immediately after its appearance in China, we all considered the disease as we would seasonal influenza. We thought “they are making a mountain out of a molehill”. We could not have been more wrong: the disease was not a molehill but a soaring peak. As soon as we realized the severity of the viral infection in March 2020, we immediately started looking for ways to treat it and possible preventive measures since we were aware that it would take longer to come up with a specific vaccine than it normally takes to design one for seasonal flu.

More specifically, the information reaching us from China was very limited and sometimes contradictory. Likewise, the indications provided by the World Health Organization (WHO) were very incomplete, and it was soon evident that the pandemic was becoming more of a political issue than a medical problem.