Topher Spiro, vice president of health policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, has spent months researching the logistics of inoculating the public against coronavirus once a vaccine is approved.

Potential problems he’s looked at include failing to produce enough glass vials to bureaucratic snafus over who administers the vaccine to simply struggling to convince enough people that it’s safe to get vaccinated. An Associated Press poll this week found 20 percent of respondents said they did not plan to get a vaccine if it became available, with another 31 percent unsure.

“We shouldn't get ahead of ourselves and we should start preparing for the possibility we have a vaccine, but that does not mean we should stop looking for strategies to contain the virus in the meantime,” Spiro said.

Avik Roy, president of the conservative Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, co-wrote a coronavirus response framework in April that argued officials should assume for planning purposes that advances in vaccines or treatments don’t materialize.

“I spent a dozen years as an investor in biotech companies,” Roy said. “When you're close to the ground in development of novel treatments, you're acutely aware of how often they fail, how often data that looks promising in the early stages doesn't pan out in the late stages."