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Should they have delayed the emergency authorization of the vaccines until these 330,000 pages had all been reviewed and redacted? It would have cost hundreds of thousands of lives, but I can't see any benefit from that course of action.

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emergency authorization != approval.

These shenanigans show that the approval can't have been based on all the information. They should have delayed the approval, at least until Phase III trial officially ended.

How many lives would that have cost, though, and for what benefit? The size of the sample that had already received the vaccine without issue made it basically impossible [0] for there to have been an unexpected danger. And without approval, the govt couldn't mandate federal employees take the vaccine, and that mandate has saved tens of thousands of lives.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_of_a_test

Should they delay the FOIA release until these 330,000 pages had all been reviewed and redacted? I don’t think the answer to either of these questions are “no”, though ofc the standard could vary.

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