Quarantine, besides buying time for a vaccine, buys time for an effective treatment that can lower the mortality rate for those who are infected. Vaccines and herd immunity are great, of course, but effective treatment is also a life-saver.
You are right... the thing that is needed is an effective readily available treatment. That will allow everyone to get infected & build up a natural immunity to it, which is likely more effective than a vaccine anyway. As soon as a treatment is found that is effective, and expensive enough to pad all the right pockets, it will be approved. The combo of hydroxychloroquine, z-pac & zinc was too cheap to fit that final requirement, and thus had to be squashed so a more appropriately priced replacement could be found.
Vaccine is never going to be a "cure all" fix... the Flu vaccine has a 37% effective rate and the world thinks that's an acceptable level. Covid-19 is a Corona virus... same family as the "Common Cold"... how's that common cold vaccine working out??? SARS was a corona virus as well... and eventually "they claimed" to have created a viable vaccine for it around 2005... but it's effective rate is unknown, as its still in the meat locker somewhere, because SARS died off (or mutated it's way to non lethal) before they finished testing it.
The reason the flu vaccine has a low effective rate is that they have to guess which out of many strains is going to be the one that spreads. Flu shots can have 2 or 3 vaccines to try and cover their bases, but sometimes a dark horse flu virus will fool the prognosticators and will be the one to spread - when that happens, the flu shot isn't totally useless but it's definitely not going to knock out the flu. Getting a flu shot and then catching a different strain will usually lessen the impact/duration of the flu to some degree.
For now, since there is little genetic variation in the Covid-19 virus, when vetted, vaccine should be much more effective than a "flu" vaccine.
