Thank you for the clarification. Hacker News tends to lean toward free market solutions, even in cases like healthcare where the free market has many significa

Thank you for the clarification. Hacker News tends to lean toward free market solutions, even in cases like healthcare where the free market has many significant failure modes. Regarding the different time scales for most approvals as compared to the coronavirus approval, my understanding is that there is a vast difference in the amount of resources being put into the preliminary studies. When you have 5-10 thousand deaths every day, it is reasonable to study as many possible routes as possible in parallel, such that one may result in a working vaccine. For diseases with a smaller impact, there may be several candidates on the back burner, but only enough funding to investigate one at a time. If something fails in Stage 3 trials, then in may mean going back to Stage 1 trials on the next option. (Caveat: I am a data scientist, but not in the medical field, so there are almost certainly considerations that I am missing here.)