That's not entirely accurate. The case for letting covid spread hinges on whether you have the medical infrastructure to manage the pandemic. If you can handle a "more than flu season" chunk of your population needing medical care then there's no real pandemic threat. Unfortunately, many countries in the developed world reduced the size of their medical infrastructure because they could rely on flu vaccines to minimize the demands of flu season. Sure, you can try to flatten the curve, but COVID-19 proved to be difficult to contain, and initially we had little understanding of how transmissible it was, and what it would take to contain it. This meant you had to plan for a worse that was almost certainly worse than we'd actually face.
The thing is, vaccines that haven't been through phase 2 trials can potentially make a pandemic worse. That's why you have to wait for them to resolve.
> The thing is, vaccines that haven't been through phase 2 trials can potentially make a pandemic worse. That's why you have to wait for them to resolve.
You can do challenge trials. Especially if you're going to let the virus spread through the population anyway.
Isn't a challenge trial really just another way of doing a phase 2 trial?
Whether you let it run through the population anyway really doesn't matter though. If you push the untested vaccine out to the population, you might turn a manageable problem into an unmanageable problem.
The thing is, vaccines that haven't been through phase 2 trials can potentially make a pandemic worse. That's why you have to wait for them to resolve.