In this circumstance as well, taking a chance is worth it. Even if the virus mutates, changing the mRNA vaccines shouldn’t take more than a week.
> In this circumstance as well, taking a chance is worth it.
Nope nope nope nope. This is the literal example of survivor bias. You can't look at the results and use them to inform prior behaviour. The vaccine could have had catastrophic side effects.
The last stage of the trial (which took three months) was not about if they were safe - but simply if they worked. Meaning, they were cleared to have minimal side effects, just unclear if it worked.
If you had approved people to choose to take the vaccine in August we could have had 50M people with shots already.
A lot of people have my skepticism that the main reason that the FDA didn't want to do that since it might be a bit of a media heartache for them, but so what. Even if you thought it would only work 20% of the time that 20% of the time it saves 100,000+ lives.
The three month time of phase III had nothing to do with safety. That long period was only used because it took that long time for enough people to catch Covid naturally for them to prove statistical effectiveness. In the current system, if Covid had been raging at an extreme rate they would have had enough positives in the control group after a month and ended the trial then. If it had been under control, it actually would have taken many more months to declare effectiveness even though the extra wait time would have shown no more data on safety.
Whether or not phase II was sufficient on its own they could have declared the vaccine probably safe a month after phase III began instead of after three months. This would have still saved 50,000 lives in the US at minimum.
Do you think there were a bunch of experimental vaccines just floating around on the . . . dark web? ... That's not how it works. The vaccine makers themselves have no interest in distributing unproven vaccines. I myself was highly confident (and posted such on HN) that we would have a successful coronavirus vaccine, based on the scientific information available early in the pandemic. But it wasn't a surety. You must have a randomized trial or you risk very very bad outcomes. Some experimental vaccines (e.g., dengue) actually make the viral infection worse. Some don't work at all (e.g., Sanofi's covid vaccine). Heck Sanofi's vaccine is likely the easiest to manufacture and distribute. If we followed your "plan", it would likely be that most got the ineffective Sanofi vaccine and we would be moving dead bodies around with bull dozers as "vaccinated" people failed to practice social distancing.
I'm under the impression that's precisely what the world governments did? There were bar charts going around saying that XX% of each country's supply commitments came from Pfizer or Astrazeneca or Moderna or whatever.
It would not only be costly to throw out the vaccines, but also stupid.
This is exactly what they did - funded by governments.
Example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed
>The program promotes mass production of multiple vaccines, and different types of vaccine technologies, based on preliminary evidence, allowing for faster distribution if clinical trials confirm one of the vaccines is safe and effective. The plan anticipates that some of these vaccines will not prove safe or effective, making the program more costly than typical vaccine development, but potentially leading to the availability of a viable vaccine several months earlier than typical timelines.