If the vaccine developers fail their companies lose lots of money and their bosses are mad at them. There’s a tiny possibility they might lose their jobs and it certainly won’t look good for promotion purposes. Also, developing vaccines is something they actually know how to do. If civil servants fuck up in ways that delay or prevent progress in fighting COVID there are no consequences. No one gets fired or reprimanded, whether for what they said about masks, preventing home testing, telling the Seattle Flu Study they couldn’t test for COVID in February, fining distillers for making hand sanitizer... And note the US FDA and CDC are at worst only a little worse than the European Medical Authority. Slower at approving more or less everything, like KN95s or the J&J vaccine, but they’re not actively trying to kill people. They’re just making sure they can’t be blamed for approving something unsafe. The people who die as a result of that delay are not their problem.

I'm not sure about this.

They did have vaccine variants that failed: We abandoned those in trials. We just don't give them to the general public without this. Some failure is expected when developing drugs, actually - some simply fail and this is part of r&d costs. If someone fabricates data to say it works, well, that is another matter entirely.

And yes, government gets reprimanded as well. Civil servants can lose their jobs, politicians get voted out. Unfortunately, the average person isn't always the best person to say that something was handled poorly and react badly when folks change their minds due to changed information.

That’s nonsense government griping. In fact, we had an election and fired all of those decision makers.

Rushing through things like KN-95 has consequences. My brother is a firefighter paramedic and found out that 90% of the kn95 masks issued to him were completely defective.

That's scary. How did he find out? And were the masks manufactured after last year's shortage, or before?

The people developing the vaccine have no control over how individual countries distribute it. They were tasked with "this can't fail", and understandably so. They did their job, why some countries can't handle distributing it is a whole different can of worms that would require a discussion country by country.

It's a gamble the British government are already taking, they decided to extend the time between doses to give me people the first dose sooner. We'll start to see in 8 weeks or so if it was worth it.