https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14797616
Personally, I take all quotations like the ones in the article with a huge grain of salt. There's often enough of a communication barrier that even good reporters can misunderstand an answer, or for the researcher to be answering a different question than the reporter asks. And there's also the possibility that the researcher just had a failure of memory.
... which is harm. If you've applied appropriate medication to deal with the issue, but that medication has gone bad, then you're in a position where you think you've applied a remedy but haven't.
Even if you later find out that the medication was bad, you have no idea how much effectiveness there was left, which affects future dosage calculations.
Harm due to unavailability of drugs or higher costs are much harder to track, of course.
Yet another case of a balance being hard to reach due to the visibility of costs on one side versus the difficulty of measuring on the other. So easy for the general public to see the cost of strictly enforcing overly conservative expiration dates as close to zero.
/offtopic: these issues are the achilles heals of democracies. Not that there's a better system.