[maxerickson]

Lots of reason for optimism. The vaccines can be retargeted, and like the flu vaccine, approved with a faster trial. And the mRNA vaccine production can continue to scale up.

So if there is a need for a new vaccine, we can likely deploy it with a shorter interval to availability and much larger initial volume.

We can also become more disciplined. We don't need to go all the way to a strictly enforced lock down to improve on the social distancing that we've done the last year (at least, not in the US). And we can try to get people to more widely accept contact tracing/tracking.

[macintux]

Right, but for the most part your optimism is about better managing an ongoing pandemic, which is certainly not what most are hoping for.

[maxerickson]

Get the active infections down and roll out a (well targeted) vaccine quickly and you end a pandemic.

I'm saying there's reason to be optimistic that we will be able to respond successfully even if the current vaccines don't end the pandemic (and it likely would be reasonably quick too, our tools are much better now than 12 months ago).

At some level of production capacity, convincing people in high risk areas to social distance and convincing people to get another vaccination are the hard parts.