We're gated on production capacity, not approval speed. A 3 week delay in the Moderna vaccine's approval doesn't remotely cause anything close to 21k deaths. But the risks of incorrectly approving a vaccine that does turn out to be harmful in unexpected ways to certain groups of people are much worse -- that would permanently damage the public trust in coronavirus vaccines and would contribute to more than 21k deaths in the long run.

If we had used a challenge approach we could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives globally. Most of the time it took to develop the vaccines was government red tape (only some of which is reasonable at all). You won't find very many people that want to have that conversation however, they just stick their head in the sand and hide from it. It's morally revolting and evil that the US didn't utilize a challenge trial and move far faster on the vaccines.

They talk about how fast this vaccine was delivered. We could have done it a lot faster. An incredible number of lives and livelihoods could have been saved.

Take 1,000 diverse volunteers from the US military, start an isolated challenge trial (if something very unexpected happens, they're contained). Then expand it after those first thousand show success. Done in half the time that this took. We'll send those soldiers to die in pointless foreign wars, and then we won't do something so obvious as this to actually save American lives. The US would have had as many volunteers as you could handle for a challenge trial, hundreds of thousands of volunteers would have been trivial to get.