Many reasons to think there might not be tix available, but I'll put myself in the hopeful optimist camp for next year.
1) I hope but don't know that the optimistic but carefully lawyered press releases are as optimistic as they feel after nine months of thinking it might be years...
2) There are known downsides to the first-to-market vaccine regarding logistics around the temperature; the second to market apparently plugged the virus into some fatty substance that helps beat that, leaving less major concerns in implementation... so I hope that's good...
3) At least the first, and I believe both no. 1 and no. 2, are two-shot vaccines; it's really important to emphasize the importance of getting both shots.
4) we're in the midst of a 2-month safety testing period on them... and what happens in months 3-infinity is not yet known, of course. We're rolling the dice on that because of exigency, you have to remember. That's not a slam-dunk of "oh no we'll never make it it'll never work." It just means exactly what it means. This is fast-tracking a normally slower process. It's not slower b/c people usually LIKE not having access to a vaccine; it's usually slower because of the effect that a bad vaccine can have, both on the individuals affected directly, and on public trust in the vaccine.
Finally,
5) Assuming these are all just great flawless vaccines... the first polio vaccines (2 different ones) were tried in 1935, and abandoned because competitors said they killed children. Interestingly, the net outcome was that it was effective, but the vaccines themselves were blamed for the deaths that did happen. The Salk vaccine was introduced in 1952 and in 1955 mass vaccination campaigns were launched. As far as funding and backing goes, you might remember that the March of Dimes was entirely polio-specific for decades. I don't know where we are with compulsory immunization these days, after the anti-vaxxer movement... but when I was a kid every school child had to be immunized.
After all that, Polio was only finally eradicated in the Americas in 1994.
It's a big psychological break to say we have promising vaccines and we got them fast. Hopefully, the politics around good public health measures will change; if not, getting an R0 under the value of 1 is doubtful (i.e., stopping the spread because you spread on average to fewer people with each contact).
Do we have the will to mandate compliance anymore? And/or, are we suddenly finished with politicizing vaccines?
Just sayin', we not at eradication. We're at press releases. We're at a very hopeful point in the story right now with good headlines.
Will this virus be eradicated by fall of 21? I'll hope for it but I sure won't plan on it. You have to realize we have 11 million cases. The vaccines are not cures. The 11 million is likely an undercount, and that total is growing fast again.
So the main reason that tix might not be available is that we have not beaten the coronavirus pandemic in America. This isn't Australia or NZ, where we can go all red alert at an isolated outbreak and be past the danger.
I can't stress this part enough: One of the worst mistakes we can make would be to use the excuse that a vaccine will soon be available to act recklessly. I don't know whether the positive vaccine news is influencing the reckless behavior that we do see around TG. It's probably good that there's about a month between TG and the winter holidays, so we can see the results. But we seem to be largely result-proof these days.
OTOH, what better way than a contagious virus in a naive population to celebrate the colonization of the Americas?
Okay, so that's why tix availability isn't a slam dunk. Like I said, cautiously optimistic.
How about that Brady double-pass though, that was something.
