Not necessarily. The vaccine design work took all of a day, at least for the mrna vaccines.

You could have frontloaded manufacturing by commissioning companies to produce doses while waiting for trials. But we didn’t do that with the knowledge we had, so unclear earlier knowledge would have worked.

Trials were the big bottleneck and for that you need infected patients. So I guess if they had got a vaccine to wuhan for trials it would have sped things up, but not clear it could have been used in trials there before this all seemed serious.