The problem is that it's not a hypothetical. At the moment you're talking about, a wide range of vaccines were approved, not for the ancestral strain but for the most current strains of the virus at that moment in time, so there simply wasn't the need. Why would the investment have been made?
What I'm saying is, if that situation didn't exist and we didn't have a vaccine, then that certainly would have been a different circumstance. Of course, it would have to be.