T he integrated US Public Health Emergency Medical Countermeasures Enterprise (PHEMCE) has made great strides in strategic preparedness and response capabilities. There have been numer-ous advances in planning, biothreat countermeasure development, licensure, manufacturing, stockpiling and deploy-ment. Increased biodefense surveillance capability has dramatically improved, while new tools and increased aware-ness have fostered rapid identification of new potential public health pathogens. Unfortunately, structural delays in vac-cine design, development, manufacture, clinical testing and licensure processes remain significant obstacles to an effec-tive national biodefense rapid response capability. This is particularly true for the very real threat of "novel patho-gens" such as the avian-origin influenzas H7N9 and H5N1, and new coronavi-ruses such as hCoV-EMC. Conventional approaches to vaccine development, production, clinical testing and licen-sure are incompatible with the prompt deployment needed for an effective public health response. An alternative approach, proposed here, is to apply computational vaccine design tools and rapid production technologies that now make it possible to engineer vaccines for novel emerging pathogen and WMD biowarfare agent countermeasures in record time. These new tools have the potential to significantly reduce the time needed to design string-of-epit-ope vaccines for previously unknown pathogens. The design process—from genome to gene sequence, ready to insert in a DNA plasmid—can now be accom-plished in less than 24 h. While these vaccines are by no means "standard," the need for innovation in the vaccine design and production process is great. Should such vaccines be developed, their 60-d start-to-finish timeline would rep-resent a 2-fold faster response than the current standard.