> Doctors and lawyers have very steep tradeoff curves for their work. One lawsuit can ruin them. Yet they're still liable. Why should companies be any different?
If a few doctors decide the liability tradeoff doesn't work for them, a few patients that could have been saved might die. If Pfizer decides the liability tradeoff isn't worth developing a COVID-19 vaccine... Well, we're already past 600,000 dead in the US alone.
> If the world was certain of the vaccine's safety
Define "certain." The preponderance of evidence is that it's safer than catching COVID-19. Long-term effects are by definition unknown. The PREP act allows HHS to basically say to a private company "We will assume the unknown risk of long-term vaccine consequences by shielding your company from direct civil liability" (and Uncle Sam will foot the bill for treating long-term effects of the vaccine in the population).
> It's crazy how people are just shrugging their shoulders at this
I think few people who understand medical risk profiles are shrugging their shoulders at this (note: I don't consider most of the public to be in that category; this stuff requires college math to really grasp and the average American tops out around a 6th-grade level). The decisions government officials are making are literally life-or-death. But the regular risk / reward profile goes out the window during a pandemic and is replaced with "apparent best course of action" tradeoffs, because society lacks the luxury of doing nothing. Do nothing, and a lot of people definitely die (back-of-the-napkin math suggests the US would look down the barrel of 5.9 million dead at the end of the pandemic). Deploy a vaccine with possible (but low-probability) side-effects, and far fewer people die unless there's an extremely unlikely set of unknown-unknowns.
To give a (bad) software development analogy: unit, integration, and functional tests are best practice. But at a startup company, there are occasional instances of "we need a demo by 6:30 tomorrow or the company will run out of money and die." In those circumstances, regular best practices go out the window because the company lacks the luxury of time. Project managers in such circumstances will declare that if the quick hacks result in pain down the road, they'll cover the team's ass (and devote resources later to fixing any pain caused by less-than-best practice).
Pandemic time is risk tradeoff time.