You mean 737MAX. The 737 and 737NG have been around for decades (almost 60 years for the 737, almost 30 for the 737NG). IIRC the 737NG has a reasonable case for being the safest airliner ever built. There are some designs that have no fatalities, but they also have very low production numbers to go with it.
If one model has 5 million flight hours and zero crashes, and another model has 500 million flight hours and 50 crashes, is it possible to say which model is safer?
For reference, the most-produced passenger/cargo aircraft:
16K Douglas DC-3 (1935)
11K Boeing 737 family:
1K Original (1967)
2K Classic (1984)
7K NG (1998)
1K MAX (2016)
11K Airbus A320 family (1988)
Look at this list[0]: the soviet IL-2 plane has produced more planes the the entire list of planes mentioned above over a period of 4 years!
That is just one type of plane, for one country during a very short period..
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-produced_aircraft
A brand new plane will undoubtedly have brand new problems.
They seem more keen on getting legislative change and regulation bypass or exemption.
- There is no reason to assume that the learnings from the 50 crashes weren't also applied to the newer model. In fact you'd expect that they all were. - Faults in a new design are likely to be front-loaded, meaning most of the crashes would have happened earlier than later. Therefore the new model seems to be a much safer design if it flew 10% of the miles without even 10% of the crashes (actually 0%).
Zero fatalities does not mean the aircraft is statistically safer unless it has an order of magnitude more flight hours.