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If they had actually tested it swiftly and effectively, I'd have fewer problems with it.
They developed the vaccine in April, then they were testing it all the way to November. But the actual testing they did was with extremely small sample sizes, against early versions of COVID. How could they have discovered the heart condition issue with a few hundred people? And they had to be aware that the virus was mutating, that every day they waited the effectiveness of their vaccine was declining. So we get a semi-obsolete vaccine with moderately severe side effects. This is not a good outcome.
I would've preferred if they tested quickly and effectively, vaccinating people and then infecting them with COVID in human challenge trials. I'm confident you could get tens of thousands of volunteers if you offered a cash payment. Or put 0.1% of the media firepower devoted to fear campaigns and demonizing people who go outside into praising the brave volunteers. Large sample sizes would let you find the heart issues as opposed to discovering them after mass vaccination had begun, when it was too late to turn back without extreme embarrassment.
The vaccines weren't pushed through fast and they weren't adequately tested. Then they were mandated anyway, including for those who face very little risk from COVID like young people with no comorbidities like obesity or lung conditions.
February. (For the sake of accuracy; this makes your conclusions stronger, not weaker.)
It's easy to imagine minds legitimately too constrained to think as far outside the box as "human challenge trials"... if only I was sure that was the problem. It would be easier to forgive the use of mindless bureaucratic "we have to follow trial protocol!" to replace thinking if they'd actually mindlessly followed protocol, rather than changing it after the fact to totally-coincidentally delay trial results until after the election. If we could easily change study design after all, post facto with hand-waved justification, it becomes much harder to justify making changes that added delays and let thousands more die instead of changes that removed delays.
I was actually thinking of Pfizer which started trials in April but your point stands - Feb for Moderna. I suppose it was too broad and an oversimplification to talk about 'the vaccine' when there were several.
The delay issue is also very serious, I agree.
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Moderna had a sample size of 30K for their phase 3 testing. Not sure where you got the few hundred number….
https://www.fda.gov/media/144434/download
The sample size for Moderna's trial was 30K, 15K actually got the vaccine and of those, only 800 caught COVID. And how long did this process take? It took until November, during which the vaccine was getting less effective and people were dying en masse. They had only 30 cases of severe COVID in the whole test.
Gotcha that makes more sense. I agree the FDA should be more open about experimental treatments being an option.
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