This is by far the fastest turn-around I've ever seen between the actual research and winning the Nobel. The internet has changed the rate of recognition to some extent, but this is a bonkers time-frame compared to most. The first time Kariko pubished on this, it was only in 2005 and it was a highly tentative idea at the time, and they didn't have much in the way of positive results until 2010. I mean, for context, the guy who came up with the idea of "frontier orbitals" and their importance (aka HOMO/LUMO) had to wait 30 years, and that work was hugely important in organic chemistry (and has applications in numerous other fields like semiconductors and nanotechnology). Hell, I can't think of a single time when the research was conducted less than 20 years before winning the Nobel (at least in physics and chemistry; physiology is not my field, so maybe things move faster over there).

That said, Kariko and Weissman absolutely deserve the award and I'm happy that people were so quick to recognize the impact of their research (even if did take a global pandemic to bring it to the attention of the average citizen).