In fact they already have at least a dozen, probably several dozen different vaccines laying around in freezers in labs globally, that work and grant immunity in humans to SARS-CoV-2, the race is on about being the first to prove their vaccine is safe enough to outweigh the costs of giving it on a population basis at least to risk groups. But there are already functional vaccines, so no need to doubt that. :)
Bovine coronaviruses Im sure costs billions a year globally. This virus costs trillions a month.
Difference is that you can easily throw more money towards a vaccine to SARS-CoV-2 than the US and Soviet union spent both on acquiring nuclear weapons and landing/trying to land on the moon, put together, inflation adjusted.
You might not understand this fully because you probably have not worked as a scientist but science has mostly always been stifled by not having open access to journals, by funding issues that force scientists to spend a significant portion of his/her time on securing research grants, by the need to hide results and intentions of what to study in order to be first to publish. What you are seeing now is a car that has been driven with the breaks on and the driver suddenly took his foot off the break pedal. That push of the break pedal is a systemic issue imposed largely by politics and traditions but has now been removed very quickly.
I used to need a university or company login to see published papers in medical scientific journals(some of which I couldn't reach even then), either that or I'd have to pay upwards of several hundred dollars to read it. Now I can, from my phone or home computer, without logging in anywhere, subscribing anywhere or paying anything, see 99.9% of all finished papers, plus many unfinished and even planned studies that are listed so that those who research in these fields can choose to build on them or find another subject to study instead of working in parallell to solve the same problems like scientists are used to.
The review process is more open now as well, leading to faster reviewing and probably better science.
Some people in the medical field expressed it as "we are sciencing the fluff out of this virus".
When it comes to mutations, coronaviruses dont actually mutate very fast, reason being that they are rather complex and with many moving parts that all have to work rather optimally. This virus has been around for quite some months now and the mutations that occurred so far are all small enough not to change the way immunity works against them, ie getting immunity from one variation, either by being infected and recovered from it or by being vaccinated, will grant immunity to all current variants in circulation. Not only that but last week studies on T-cells in recovered AND non-exposed subjects (30-60% of non-exposed subjects) showed reactivity towards SARS-CoV-2 which for the current discussion means that some virus that broad populations have been affected by in the past has given us some kind of cross-immunity towards this current one:
https://www.sciencemag.org/...e-well-long-term-immunity
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30610-3
https://www.medrxiv.org/...101/2020.04.17.20061440v1
What virus gave this? I'd guess it's one of the 4 known human coronaviruses that give us colds, and they are vastly different than SARS-CoV-2, therefore it is very unlikely that mutations in the short term will create any reinfection or vaccine efficacy issues whatsoever.