There are several reasons our vaccine options have outstripped treatments. The first is cost-effectiveness: While vaccines are expensive and time-consuming to develop, they have the potential to stop the pandemic. Treatments only help those already sick, so are less valuable to governments overall. “I’m not surprised that there’s been more aggressive funding to work with vaccines, because I think, in the end, that’s how we’re going to turn the tide on this,” Taison Bell, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Virginia, said.