Luckily we've been studying mRNA vaccines for over 50 years, which gave us a very good understanding of the long-term effects. What we really needed to test for

Luckily we've been studying mRNA vaccines for over 50 years, which gave us a very good understanding of the long-term effects. What we really needed to test for was short-term effects + efficacy. These are easy to determine when 1% of the population is infected at the time of your clinical trial. I can't stress how much the COVID mRNA deployment wasn't a "#yolo" moment like some folks still continue to insist. It was a product of years and years of meticulous research and development. This put us at the finish line, and all we had to do was get over it. We also got the J&J vaccine out in basically the same amount of time - because like the mRNA vaccines, the adenoviral vector vaccine platform had about 50 years of research and development behind it. To use your analogy, we started with 10 ladies each 8 months pregnant, and we got them over the line in a month. That doesn't mean the pregnancy took a month - just that we had a head start.