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.