From the WSJ article that fact is sourced from: "A vaccine was developed relatively quickly—researchers had learned from the other two 20th-century influenza pandemics, the Spanish Flu of 1918 and the Asian flu of 1957—but wasn’t widely available before the disease had reached its second peak in most countries." So basically, there was a vaccine much faster than we could expect one for this coronavirus, but it was still too late to help much. (See https://archive.is/5pYqk for the full text of the article, which is quite interesting.)