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.