"Unlike sacrificing everything for the sake of not getting coronavirus, that can actually go on indefinitely."
Not even remotely true.
If people go back to normal (against the advice from every agency with experience handling communicable diseases) the disease will spread at an exponential rate. Healthcare systems across the globe will be overwhelmed (like Italy and China but vastly worse) and people start suffering and dying from curable illnesses due to lack of capacity.
Then, once people start dying by thousands, everyone will quarantine themselves anyway.
The vaccine will take like 1 year to test and be sure that it is effective and that it is safe and cause no nasty side effects. So for 2020, let's ignore (a).
I don't know why this is being downvoted. A year is actually a fairly aggressive schedule. Of course there may be certain elected officials who will push to certify anything at all before November but nothing will be proven safe in that little time.
It might not take that long. If the vaccine candidate is viable, Stage 1 trials could be completed in a few months since there's already tons of patients with COVID-19 going to hospitals where they can be monitored for a maximum safe dose trial. The FDA might be able to waive most of Phase 1 similar to some oncology drugs and once it hits Phase 2, they just needs enough data about efficacy and safety to declare it a breakthrough therapy. The reality is that many clinical trials take time because of how long it takes to set up the infrastructure, get patients, and coordinate with an understaffed and underfunded FDA. If the entire agency is ordered to focus on COVID-19, I think it could happen a lot faster.
That's only if the vaccine works though. If do that process and it turns out it doesn't, it could make the situation a whole lot worse.
There is a high probability that at least many candidate vaccines could have induce a deadly autoimmune reaction upon exposure to the virus, because of antibody dependent enhancement (ADE), which is shared by other coronaviruses like the previous SARS. At least one paper I read trialing multiple vaccine candidates on animals reported failures in all cases due to autoimmune damage to lung tissue.
Can a vaccine be released in such a short timeframe? I don't think anyone is suggesting a vaccine can be released in less than several months. But it is suggested that the pandemic itself could subside within that timeframe.
Not even remotely true.
If people go back to normal (against the advice from every agency with experience handling communicable diseases) the disease will spread at an exponential rate. Healthcare systems across the globe will be overwhelmed (like Italy and China but vastly worse) and people start suffering and dying from curable illnesses due to lack of capacity.
Then, once people start dying by thousands, everyone will quarantine themselves anyway.
There is no scenario where this doesn't ripple.