While I don't know about vaccine development, I do know a little bit about drug discovery, and there is
plenty of "dumb", brute-force work going on to finding drugs to treat all sorts of things, including COVID-19.
Thanks to robotics, you don't have to run experiments manually in a single test tube any more. If, say, you want to find a drug that interferes with the action of a a particular protein, you can do that experiment hundreds of thousands of times with libraries of hundreds of thousands of different candidate molecules until you find ones that achieve the effect you want.
I'm sure it takes some of the fun out of drug discovery, but it's also plenty effective.