Good article. Its hard not to see the FDA as responsible for >50% of the deaths in the US. Using our prior knowledge about vaccines, we could reasonably expect

Good article. Its hard not to see the FDA as responsible for >50% of the deaths in the US. Using our prior knowledge about vaccines, we could reasonably expect them to be safe and effective, with no long term side effects (there has only been 1 long term effect ever recorded). So the right thing to do here was not ban the vaccine, which was what happened. Instead, they should have focused on informed consent and to limit the max size of the rollout. Informed consent mitigates any ethical concerns and limiting the rollout minimizes the chance of something being horribly wrong. For example something like 10 people max in week 1, 100 people max in week 2, 500 people max in week 3, up to no restrictions after 8 weeks or so. This has nearly equivalent safety checks and balances as separate phase 1, 2, and 3 trials, but moves much faster. If we followed this approach, then we would have Moderna's vaccine available on a widespread basis by April or so. Yes, manufacturing needed to be improved, so Moderna couldn't have shipped 100M doses in Q2 2020, but we probably could have had everyone over 75 vaccinated before the second wave with moderna alone. Doing the same for J&J, Astrazeneca, Pfizer, and Novavax means in hindsight we would not have any serious COVID issues right now.