I've amended the post's math - it's definitely not as hard a point, but the secondary consideration I didn't include was that it's also not an all or nothing proposition - a fatality rate from a vaccine is one thing, but even COVID-19 doesn't just have a fatality rate - it's got a much much higher "severe long term complications" rate. Which is also very much what you're looking for with trials.

Having things look good after 3 months in a vaccine trial doesn't tell you if they look good after a year necessarily - and all of this is really weighted against "a sensible response to limit the spread of the virus is possible, the US is just not doing it".

EDIT: The other possibility is that a vaccine that just straight up doesn't work very well would also make the situation worse - churn out millions of doses, get a limited amount of immunity in the recipient population, government is compelled to wind back "mechanical" spread prevention measures - and the epidemic cinders for a while and then rips through the population because everything thinks they're immune.

Because if it doesn't work, you haven't had a doctor give someone something with unforseen side-effects: they injected them with a deadly virus and killed them (in the worst case).

Now we have treatments like Regeneron which the President received, which most likely made a very big difference in his fairly rapid convalescence - doing it when you have more plausible interventions if it doesn't work is quite different.

I mean all of this stuff is, relatively, going at lightning pace - if we have a vaccine early next year, that's what, 1.5 years between initial detection and immunization for a novel virus? That is breakneck pace.