It is not very plausible that vaccine development was the speediest and lowest cost solution to an emergent and already-pandemic virus of a general type we know from the get-go a) has historically been susceptible to some antivirals and b) very difficult to vaccinate against. https://twitter.com/Comparativist/status/1246717869972283394

I mean if I told you at the outside that there's a disease which is related to other diseases we've had extremely little success vaccinating against but we have had some success with anti-virals why would you dump your money into vaccines

YEs, and because vaccines are superior responses to diseases than treatments, influenza has successfully been eliminated, while syphilis deaths are epidemic. https://twitter.com/PropterMalone/status/1247202042671742978

Look vaccines are a neat trick and all but actually it's way better if you don't have to prophylactically conduct extra procedures on your entire population on a regular basis and can instead just deploy targeted resources to defeat a condition when it arises.

If you have to choose between "save 1 million lives by vaccinating 330 million people every 3 years" and "save 1 million lives by successfully treating 1 million people every 3 years" CLEARLY the treatment is the better solution.

Folks saying "well the private sector will handle treatment."

The thing is, in a BEST CASE SCENARIO, a vaccine takes 12 months. But in 12 months time there are only 2 possibilities:
1. We have an effective treatment
2. We have achieved herd immunity

In either case we just don't need a vaccine all that much.

And the scary scenario is a subset of 2. call it 2b. We achieve herd immunity but the virus mutates and comes back for round 2.... in which case a vaccine still won't be useful but a treatment might be.