The speed at which the vaccines were developed was entirely due to taxpayers socializing the financial risk of development. Normal vaccine and medication development takes time because companies have to be cautious prior to paying out the money for large stage III trials. They do smaller studies to make sure it’s worth the financial risk and that usually takes years to get enough people enrolled, do the study, read it out, then get corporate approval to move from stage 0 to stage I then stage II and finally stage III.

For the COVID vaccines the companies had already sold their vaccines to the federal government so they were free to start manufacturing even before the final studies were complete. If they failed the studies taxpayers would have been out a few billion dollars but in exchange we knocked YEARS off of development. In addition so many people actually wanted to be a part of the study they were able to enroll enormous sample sizes extremely quickly. That level of engagement from the public is unheard of in the research world and it allowed a rapid evaluation of the efficacy.

Everyone wants to decry socialism but when it comes to public health socialism beats capitalism any day of the week. Now that the federal funding has dried up be ready for future updates to the vaccine to be much slower and for future monoclonal antibodies to basically disappear.