Vaccines are dirt cheap. Just the cost of the covid test to diagnose covid (which is required before the appropriate anti-viral may be prescribed) is probably g

Vaccines are dirt cheap. Just the cost of the covid test to diagnose covid (which is required before the appropriate anti-viral may be prescribed) is probably going to be more than the cost of a vaccine. > Would the current pandemic situation (health and economic) be different if the early focus had have been on anti-viral treatments rather than vaccines? For starters, there were no anti-viral medications that actually worked against COVID. And that was not due to lack of trying. Generally speaking, it is harder to develop a small-molecule antiviral medication than it is to develop an effective vaccine. For many viral diseases there are no drugs that work, or you need a cocktail of drugs at the same time.