To be fair, "designing" a vaccine is not the same as testing it to show that it is acceptably safe and effective in humans. That said, the time from design to deployment was amazingly short.
I know my argument is not solid at all. But you seeing a headline that is demonstrably not what we are even talking about does not convince me. If it took two days to create a cure and manufacture a billion doses we would be all fine now. Clearly nobody had a leg up on anyone in the race to a vaccine otherwise someone would have come out with “we have the vaccine and all the doses ready to go” in mid 2020.
"Moderna designed its coronavirus vaccine in 2 days" was a headline I saw. And it's been approved by the FDA. So that seems demonstrably false.
Multiple companies have come up with a vaccine by now, too.