In medical terms it was really fast, such that WHO had to approve for emergency use so that countries could expedite their own regulatory approvals. And unprecedented event in our global history. Scientifically, SARS-Cov-2 did not exist prior to 2019.
Fact is people have died as a result of the vaccine, even though the risk is minimal holistically. I'm not going to diminish the sacrifice they have made for themselves and their family in their aim to be safe from detrimental effects of covid. If there were sufficient time to research and test, the rare effects of blood clots would possibly have been prevented.
WHO today listed the Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use, giving the green light for this vaccine to be rolled out globally. The Sinopharm vaccine is produced by Beijing Bio-Institute of Biological Products Co Ltd, subsidiary of China National Biotec Group (CNBG). “The addition of...
www.who.int
That's not necessarily true. While it is true that (a) there has been rare cases of blood clotting related to the Janssen vaccine; (b) this side effect was not identified as a concern in the trial stage; (c) had more information been known about the mechanism of operation of the adverse effect it would have been better treated, there simply is no basis to presume that additional time would have produced the information.
Arguendo the blood clotting and associated injury and fatality is a result of it not having been identified in the trials up until that point and associated precautions and treatment protocols were lacking it simply does not follow that more trials or more importantly a delayed rollout would have strengthened the knowledge base. I cannot conceive of a responsible experiment size (in terms of a number of participants) which would have included enough people to have identified the actual issue - you might have with 5 times the size phase 3 trial have gotten an idea of the existence of a possible adverse response but you'd still be wholly in the dark about what actually matters. If the Janssen vaccine was released in the 70s they'd still be figuring out how to speed up the fax machine to get the reports shared. Old methodologies to provide assurances have defects and predate our ability to share and process data as we can today.
In actual fact if it were not for the fact that the vaccinations are being administered with the monitoring in place ordinary(old school) pharmacological surveillance might have taken months or years to identify what we have learnt about the interaction in days. I can guarantee you that pharmacological products released even 10 years ago would not have seen as quick a stop of utilization while getting a clearer idea than what we saw both with Janssen on blood clotting in those countries where safety is paramount and on the Oxford vaccine as against the Beta variant. We will always learn more about medicine if we apply proper monitoring and methodology. We are still learning today about adverse interactions Asprin has - an FDA directive on packaging was issued last year - especially at particular dosages and in particular combinations for particular patients.
Basically even if the vaccination rollout had been done at a later stage the prospects of the clotting issue having been identified only at rollout is greater than the chance of the problem being understood earlier. If anything the approach done under which during trial phases enhanced collection mechanisms were brought into effect meant few injuries than would have arisen if older methodologies - in which delayed coming to market happens but there is less data sharing and processing.
Don't misunderstand me, there is a LOT of room to improve the way in which pharmacological products - including vaccines - are developed, rolled out and monitored. Most of this room for improvement relates to having fuller data sets and using the magnificent computational power that has been built. There is plenty of room for modelling and simulations. However the simple reality is that no vaccination effort before Covid19 has used the tools and scope of data which has gone into making the vaccines used for Covid19 vaccines which are being administered in functional states the safest novel vaccines for a novel virus ever. The next set of vaccines for the next pandemic producing pathogen will be better - at least it had better be - because as a species we should be better equipped. It is tragic that there are vaccine related injuries - but the biggest cause and risk of vaccine injury remains faulty administration of the vaccine - a doctor cocking up the jab, if possible you want a nursing sister with years experience at jabbing, if you find yourself in an environment where there is a doctor and a senior nurse who has been administering vaccines for years send the doctor to fetch the nurse coffee.
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