I am not entirely sure that we would learn those lessons from dealing with covid-19. Much of the policy around it has been with the assumption that a vaccine could be produced in a somewhat reasonable time line, and we just need to hold out a bit longer.

The genome was sequenced increadibly quickly, and much of the vaccine work is based on all of the research that went into dealing with SARS 20 or so years ago.

A pandemic caused by something completely novel- whether a contageous and infectious prion disease (does that even make sense?) Or T-virus or venus flu- means that there will be far greater uncertainty than what we have been dealing with. A vaccine wouldn't even make sense in the case of a pandemic prion disease.

I think that Sweden had the right of things, but as others have pointed out before (and likely will again) it is still too early to tell. Not only that, but complicating matters is that every country captures statistics differently- especially the US and UK versus Europe. Numbers get bandied about quite a bit, and I suspect it will be many years before cool heads can evaluate all of the confounding factors into what actually helped and what we should do in the future.