What's behind the FDA's controversial strategy for evaluating new COVID boosters

npr.org

7 pointswhitepoplar5 comments

> The billions of people who have gotten Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccines show how safe they are, those experts say.

I don't like that "testing in production" is now a norm in healthcare.

There were trials before they started giving them to the public.

They never finished all the phases of the trials.

It looks more like "an acceptable tradeoff in emergent crises" than a norm. It's possible that it becomes more common, but this might mean shorter time to market for some products. It's possible we had overindexed on caution and this is a reasonable correction.

It will absolutely become more common. Launching a PR campaign to convince the public that a given disease is an "emergency" can save billions by side-stepping expensive clinical trials.

With the relatively low deadliness-to-panic ratio of COVID, the pharma industry now knows that this is possible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com