We could also have achieved nothing at all for our money, or have given thousands of healthy people permanent autoimmune conditions or killed them through adverse reactions and after all that we still wouldn't have known if what we were doing actually did anything to slow the pandemic. People on hacker news should know just how hard it is to really know something, the human immune system is far more complex than any code base, the only way to know if something works is to test it, and test it thoroughly, which is exactly what the "burdensome" regulation requires.

This 'don't test it, just do it' idea really shows how paniced and irrational people are. The reasons to not rush out a population wide vax campaign are significant.

For example: the otherwise promising and effective candidate from QUT accidentally causes you to test positive for HIV on the common/cheap/simple assays, which would make effective HIV testing vastly more expensive in the population and cause a huge anti-vax movement. I think we are happy that this side effect is constrained the the small trials group.

Maybe this needs to be explained in computer terms: would you be upset if Apple rushed out a security patch and that caused every iphone to reboot randomly during odd numbered months, and was unpatchable?