I am a bigger fan of the hero stories where everyone is able to fight an epidemic themselves, instead of being subject to the whims of pharma / ineffective government policy.

The moderna vaccine basically took a weekend to design, but many months to test, since they were going to give millions of doses out. What if one day, every small town had the ability to manufacture independently designed vaccines for local usage (once we have a better grasp of the background biology). It is quite likely that, while some of the vaccines may be toxic, they'll certainly be less toxic than the disease itself, and the distribution means that variation controls against new variants of the virus.

ah, we share an important idea, distributed means of production, as a way to hedge against societal collapse