[InitialLastName]

As you say, urgency and investment are key, and neither necessarily applies (or is worth applying) to the general case of medical research (in the absence of a once-in-a-century global urgent surge in demand for a particular slice of medical research). More specifically, it seems like much of this fast-tracking is due to:

a) the manufacturers being incentivized to dedicate resources to branch prediction, essentially making the failure path more expensive. and

b) the regulator expediting the bureaucracy for a specific set of approvals (essentially jumping the line). Presumably there are other applications that were delayed to support the expedited applications, and I'll bet the expediting process hurt overall bureaucratic efficiency.

For A, I'd assume that the option was already priced in by the pharma co's and is (in the non-urgent case) not particularly cost-effective. For B, I'm all for making bureaucratic systems operate more efficiently and responsively, but I'm not convinced that most circumstances are urgent enough to sacrifice throughput to the latency gods.