https://thenextweb.com/syndication/2020/11/25/the-covid-19-vaccine-was-developed-in-less-than-a-year-and-thats-totally-fine/

I’m a clinical trials geek. I keep hearing people talk about the seven to ten years it takes to make a vaccine and how dangerous speeding this up might be. The word that keeps popping up is “rushed,” and it is making the average person nervous about vaccine safety. So, as a clinical trials doctor, I am going to tell you what I do for most of those ten years – and it is not very much.

I’m not lazy. I submit grants, have them rejected, resubmit them, wait for a review, resubmit them somewhere else, sometimes in a loop of doom. When I am lucky enough to get trials funded, I then spend months submitting to ethics boards. I wait for regulators, deal with personnel changes at the drugs company and a “change of focus” away from my trials, and eventually, if I am very lucky, I spend time setting up trials: finding sites, training sites, panicking because recruitment is poor, finding more sites. I then usually have more regulatory issues and, finally, if my big pot of luck is not used up, I might have a viable therapy – or not.