It was not "put on hold", rather as many experts expected, especially with the state of the current administration, mass distribution and coordination is a clusterfuck. Which, to be fair, is a very challenging problem with a lot of minutia and moving parts. But "your amazon product will take another day to ship" is very different from "your amazon product is broken".

If you're worried that it was rushed by US politics: the "Pfizer" vaccine was made by Biontech, a German company, and has also been accepted (earlier, even) by regulators in Canada and the UK.

It's also expected to be accepted in EU on 21st december. And, if approved, vacination would be started across the whole EU on 27th december.

Shipping and distribution problems have nothing to do with safety. There's a lot of data on what side effects the trial participants got, how the vaccine compared to placebo, etc. which has been published by the FDA. With tens of thousands of trial participants, we can be pretty confident that serious side effects are rare.

> I am also concerned that Moderna has never produced ANY drug beyond the third stage before.

Have there been a lot of disease outbreaks preventable with an mRNA vaccine before? To make a product, you need customers. Whatever research we did to deal with SARS and MERS became moot when people stopped spreading the diseases; maybe Moderna could have delivered a vaccine, but there would have been no customers because other containment measures limited the spread.

My outsider impression of Moderna is that they had all the technology ready to deal with something like COVID-19, but there was no COVID-19 until now.

The fact that Pfizer/BioNTech independently produced a similar product on a similar timeframe is a pretty good indication that the technology was ready, and was just waiting for a market.

> How could we research if the approval was politically motivated?

The analysis of the clinical trial was published in a very reputable and peer reviewed scientific journal [1,2].

> How can I know if this is actually safe?

In the reports [1,2].

If you believe that data is fake then I am afraid you just not want to be convinced.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2622-0 [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32991794/