[hwillis]

> A journalist asked if this would negatively impact the safety or efficacy of the vaccine to which the FDA head confidently replied that it would have zero material impact. It makes you wonder, if they are capable of quickly making approval decisions without sacrificing safety or efficacy standards, why is that not standard operating procedure?

That's easy. The normal process has multiple trials:

Phase 1: 50 people Phase 1: 200 people Phase 3: 100,000 people

Normally, you pass each phase before exposing a larger number of people to risk. More people means you can find rarer and smaller effects, but if you haven't tested on <50 people first then you might really endanger the group of 200 or 100k.

The expedited process tests it on 100,250 people at once. THOSE people are exposed to more risk, but the safety of the vaccine is the same. And because the vaccine was proven safe, those people were not negatively impacted any more than if they had followed the normal process.

> There are no answers that don't lead one to conclude that the FDA is a bloated, bureaucratic, wasteful mess.

No, you're just not actually looking.