[davidf560]

The FDA announced early this morning that they were definitively going to authorize it[1], but they didn't actually issue the authorization at that point, with people telling the press that authorization would come "in the next few days".

If someone called up the FDA after that and said "hey, you've already told everyone you're going to approve this, so just sign the papers and make it official today rather than going home for the weekend and finishing it up on Monday", I have no problem with that. That's not pressure to prematurely authorize it (since they already confirmed they would), that's just cutting through the red tape/BS and making it official faster (IMO).

Put it into a tech perspective - if your company's cloud product went down and you were losing $millions every hour, and the devs found the bug and fixed it, but the product manager said "hey great, we'll fill out the release paperwork in the next few days and maybe approve pushing the change to prod on Monday", would anyone go for that? No way - they'd say we're not going home until this is fixed and released. Replace $millions with actual human lives and that's basically what we have here, isn't it?

[1] https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-stat...

[lupire]

Remember when the Challenger shuttle was ready to launch so they skipped the final checks of the frozen O-ring data analysis?

[tehjoker]

This makes more sense to me. Thank you.