Smart people adjust plans as they discover new information. Your original hopes for a solution at the start of a disaster will change drastically as you better understand the problem at hand.

There seems to be a pervasive thought that our leaders ought to somehow become superhuman and obtain clairvoyance about how to solve any problem we have. They are no different from any of us, who think a bug has a simple solution before we spend a lot of time figuring out more complicated things were happening under the hood.

"Smart people adjust plans as they discover new information."

The new information, that the world is globalized, with many countries not being able to afford vaccines and also many militant anti vaxxers around?

How was wiping out covid, a realistic goal in the first place?

The problem isn't really affording vaccines so much as being able to administer them. Africa is a big place; it is literally hard to get very cold mRNA vaccines to people even if we donate them.

Similarly, a lot of people have been claiming we're evilly withholding patents from the world, but that can't be a real issue or China and Russia would just have stolen the IP from us. They literally can't produce them any faster even with the rights.

We managed to keep SARS and MERS fairly contained.

But I believe that was a very different situation at that time, with it not already spread globally and being less infectious.

Actually originally the plan was to hope for 50% efficacy, even knowing that coronavirus immunity may wane after several months as is the case with seasonal coronaviruses