No vaccine yet exists. Usually it takes a decade to come up with effective vaccines and a mechanism to safely manufacture them. But some of these upcoming vaccines are promising, and people are working flat out.

Still, it seems almost impossible to believe that the United States could manufacture and deliver 200 million doses of a vaccine within nine months, considering America’s complete inability so far to act in a coherent fashion to combat this menace.

More, it seems that about half of Americans are planning not to get a vaccine — source. And that 50% won’t be uniformly geographically distributed but of course, will be predominantly in Republican states.

Even worse, historically vaccines don’t work nearly as well on viruses as they do on bacteria. (Fungal infectious agents and parasites are even harder to fight, but luckily quite rare.)

Suppose we do come up with a COVID-19 vaccine — but that it’s only as effective as flu vaccines are today, which means about a 50% effectiveness rate. The combination of the poor effectiveness rate, and the strong possibility of a poor compliance rate, mean that herd immunity would be completely out of America’s reach.

I am hopeful for a vaccine. I believe it is probably possible, and even effective — it might well have a better effectiveness than the flu shot, because the big issue with flu shots is how fast the flu mutates and we believe that COVID doesn’t mutate as fast. Hard data is so scarce that it’s really hard to know for sure — it’s early days and it really is the case that dedicated scientists and doctors are working full out to find more.

But I am a lot less optimistic about changing the mind of the American people. Over 40% of Americans still adore the evil pathological liar who is Donald Trump. They choose to believe what is most convenient for them. They will never change until it all collapses and likely not even then.