WTF. This is going to kill people. A lot of people. Look, the usual situation with vaccines is that we are weighing (1) the danger posed to the few people wh

WTF. This is going to kill people. A lot of people. Look, the usual situation with vaccines is that we are weighing (1) the danger posed to the few people who get sick while the trials are going on; vs. (2) the risks taken on by everybody who gets the vaccine. The vaccine might have a small likelihood of triggering reactions or otherwise having adverse effects, and spread over the entire population these edge cases can add up to do more damage than the disease itself. Again, that is for typical vaccine situations. A pandemic is totally different--the number of cases is exponentially increasing and ripping through the entire population. So our options are: 1. Wait the additional 6-12 months it would take (even accounting for the immense investments that have been made) to get a vaccine to go through all the normal regulatory hoops we would demand of vaccine development outside of a pandemic. During which time COVID-19 rips through the population leaving potentially millions dead and hundreds of millions of recovered with disease-related tissue damage. 2. Wait, but stay in lockdown to keep the disease at bay, but in the process massively drive up suicide, domestic violence, and divorce rates, wreck the economy, and force people to spend their savings and/or trigger massive inflation through pandemic relief. 3. Some horrible compromise between the above two extremes. 4. Roll out the vaccines as quickly as they can be manufactured, starting now. Don't wait for Phase III results. The Phase I and Phase II trials tell us that the vaccine successfully generates antibodies. The group sizes so far have been large enough to know that the risk of fatal interactions is less than the risk of dying from COVID-19 itself--indeed, for the most part there haven't been ANY severe reactions, at least in the major vaccines. This "wait until the vaccine is proven safe!" is politically generated nonsense. There is no data-driven argument supporting it. Ideologues on the left assume that Trump wants a vaccine ASAP to win reelection, don't trust is understanding of the science, and therefore assume that early administration of a vaccine would be some sort of unsafe political compromise. Ideologues on the right believe COVID-19 is a hoax anyway. But even a broken clock is right twice a day, and the fact that Trump wants a quick vaccine approval has no bearing on whether it is a good idea or not; and in this case it very clearly IS beneficial to distribute a vaccine as quickly as it can be manufactured.