> All the long term studies are being skipped.
There are no long term studies. The reason vaccines take so much in "regular" circumstances are:
- Actually finding money to run the trials
- Run Phase 1, 2, 3 trials one after another
- (longest) Waiting for the events (infections) to accrue: if it's not in a pandemic, and with relatively low incidence, this takes years to happen
- Regulatory approval (if not in emergency, that's two years)
- Production scale-up (at least one year)
The fact that vaccines takes years to develop for safety is a myth. It is mostly a matter of time, and the fact that we were used to them taking years. Let's not forget smallpox and rabies vaccinations took far less to be invented, and people devising them didn't even know what viruses were. And also because most of the easy targets are now done. What's left are the harder ones (HIV). SARS-CoV-2 might have been hard, or one of the easy pickings. Luckily, it fell into the "easy" camp.
In this specific case, production was started during the trials, events, due to the fact that the virus is spreading like wildfire in the USA, took a matter of weeks to accrue (from 35 in October to 94 two weeks later, according to the Pfizer data), and the fact that an obscene amount of money was spent meant that most trials were started as soon as possible.
But, even looking at the protocols, you might notice that it ticks all the good boxes for proper clinical research.