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Comment by sonicggg | Hacker News Reader

The FDA moved mountains to get these first vaccines rushed out of the door. And while they are better than nothing, it has not met the high expectations that were set. People fully boosted are still developing symptoms, some even developing long covid.

But the worst is that any newer vaccines or even therapies are not getting the same type of priority anymore. There are a lot of really interesting products on the pipeline, moving at a really slow pace, like Novavax.

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Novavax might have underfunded their lobbying department. /s

Any vaccine was great for the most at risk population but, as you stated, it's not a solution to covid; only a tool to mitigate its threat to the individual. I know a lot of people who didn't want any of the vaccines but they wanted the Novavax. I think quick approval would have pumped vaccination rates. And now, I don't think people will bother.

> The FDA moved mountains to get these first vaccines rushed out of the door.

Did we follow the same pandemic? It looked to me like they were slow as snails. The whole idea of Operation Warpspeed was that the manufacturers will work hard to make the vaccines and run the tests, and they'll share all the data with the FDA and the FDA will evaluate as the data came, and when the manufacturers were sending the final results, the FDA will be able to review everything quickly and make the decision ASAP.

Instead, they decided in the middle of the testing that there are not enough minorities in the tested population, and they need to add a few thousand more participants (and about 2 months to the timeline). Then, after the submissions happened, it took them more than a month each time to give their EUA. Where "E" stands for "emergency". That's at a time when between 1000 and 3000 people were dying daily of Covid in the US.

It's quite likely that tens of thousands of people died because of how inefficient the FDA was.

And also suspicious, that if they had stuck to the original plan, these vaccines would have come out in October, before the 2020 election, instead of just after the election, like they did.

If you actually look at the details of the vaccine rollouts from both Moderna and Pfizer, you will see that it doesn't fit that narrative very well. For one, only moderna was subject to the delays mentioned above.

There's not much indication that they had the manufacturing in place to do an earlier roll out.

The shelf life and apparent initial demand were both compatible with starting ASAP.

The decision to add minorities to the test group was not an FDA decision, that was part of the operation warp speed program and only applied to the Moderna vaccine because they accepted public funds for R&D. Pfizer came first and was privately funded.

And it's still based on the original strain. So,it's questionable how good it is on the new variants.

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