[binaryorganic]

There certainly is a race. The slower we go the more spread. The more spread, the more variation. The more variation, the more likelihood of a vaccine-resistant strain taking hold.

Even if it’s a long-term certainty, much better to be well-equipped to respond to it, which we simply are not at the moment.

[rcpt]

My point is that this virus spreads unbelievably fast and even with the most optimistic vaccine scenarios it has literally billions of hosts in the developing world to infect who have 0 zero chance of getting a shot anytime in the next few years.

Of course the vaccines might be good enough to ward off infection from all future variants but that's just luck.