Because they care 6 orders of magnitude more about people who die from taking the vaccine than people who die from them witholding the vaccine.

The AstraZeneca vaccine has been approved for use in the UK since December, but the FDA isn't currently scheduled to approve it in the US until April.

The FDA isn't scheduled for anything. They told AZ long ago that their trail wouldn't meet FDA standards, and so AZ started a new trail that would. Everyone assumes the approval will happen in April, but that is just an educated guess.

That’s just semantics around the word “scheduled”. The FDA insisted on a course of action that makes it unlikely the AZ vaccine will receive an EUA before April. They did this despite the fact that pretty much no one with vaccine expertise doubts that it will meet the safety standards or the (relatively low) efficacy standards required to grant that EUA.

No one disputes that AZ screwed up their trial, but it doesn’t make sense to prevent people from accessing a safe and reasonably effective vaccine just to make a point about that. That’s why the UK and EU have approved it and are moving forward with distribution, while the US waits months for absolutely perfect data before doing anything.

The FDA has banned it I'm the US, it's holding them back.

No, they haven't. Johnson and Johnson hasn't applied for emergency authorization yet. Assuming they do next week and all goes well it will likely be available by March.

flagged for misinformation