How could we research if the approval was politically motivated? How can I know if this is actually safe?
(1) https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/12/white-house-delays-p...
(2) https://www.wsj.com/articles/modernas-covid-19-vaccine-is-cl...
If you're worried that it was rushed by US politics: the "Pfizer" vaccine was made by Biontech, a German company, and has also been accepted (earlier, even) by regulators in Canada and the UK.
Have there been a lot of disease outbreaks preventable with an mRNA vaccine before? To make a product, you need customers. Whatever research we did to deal with SARS and MERS became moot when people stopped spreading the diseases; maybe Moderna could have delivered a vaccine, but there would have been no customers because other containment measures limited the spread.
My outsider impression of Moderna is that they had all the technology ready to deal with something like COVID-19, but there was no COVID-19 until now.
The fact that Pfizer/BioNTech independently produced a similar product on a similar timeframe is a pretty good indication that the technology was ready, and was just waiting for a market.
The analysis of the clinical trial was published in a very reputable and peer reviewed scientific journal [1,2].
> How can I know if this is actually safe?
In the reports [1,2].
If you believe that data is fake then I am afraid you just not want to be convinced.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2622-0 [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32991794/