> Nearly 60 years ago thalidomide was prescribed to treat morning sickness in pregnant women. What followed was the biggest man-made medical disaster ever, where over 10,000 children were born with a range of severe and debilitating malformations.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26043938/

> The thalidomide scandal may have led to 10,000 miscarriages, stillbirths and infant deaths in Britain, according to the former director of the trust that oversees payments to hundreds of people disabled by the drug taken by their pregnant mothers.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/mar/06/thalidomide-...

IMO you're playing the effect of that down a bit by saying "a few thousand birth defects occurred".

> The thalidomide scandal may have led to 10,000 miscarriages

So, over an entire century, the worse drug approval mistake caused fewer birth defects than the number of Covid per day. Deaths that at this point could be easily prevented by faster vaccine approval.

What rational person could possibly look at that state of affairs and not conclude that our drug approval process is trading off far too many type II errors relative to type I errors.

And yet it's fewer deaths than due to overly cautious vaccine approvals.

How do you know that before the cautious testing and approval procedure?

The EU recently approvied and has bought 200M J&J vaccines, I don't remember numbers of the other vaccines. If that vaccine were about as harmful as thalidomide, about 3000 babies would die during birth, and a considerably larger number would be born without an arm or similar.

Without hindsight we can still see that countries differed in approval timelines by a month even though they should have the same information available at the same time. Which means either one is taking more risks than necessary or another one is wasting time (and thus lives).

And that's just approval, then there's the whole issue with the EU taking too long to negotiate lower prices instead of pre-paying for faster production ramp-up.

Vaccines are not that different just because they are for different sickness. And there are no vaccines with any of these side effects, so there is no reason to believe the COVID vaccines will cause anything even close to that. Besides the normal stuff every drug has.

That begs the question: For which kind of medicine is there a reason to believe that they may cause anything even close to that?

Contagan, which is part of the reason why we have the drug approval process we have. And ever since, we didn't have anything comparable. At least not that I remember.

I don't think that answers the question. The question was "for which kind of…". Naming one specific past product doesn't answer that, because surely you don't mean that no future candidate warrants can pose similar risk.

Contergan (thus spelt) is thalidomide, BTW. Thalidomide is the name of the active agent, which is used in products named contergan (as well as several other names).

this is awful first order thinking. If public authorities are perceived as untrustworthy on the safety of vaccines, there's a very high chance there will be widespread rejection of vaccination altogether in the population.

People aren't utilitarian machines, trust in drugs is very easily broken, vaccines in particular. Showing neglect and lack of precaution may harm vaccination efforts for decades.

There are large swathes of the world, where significant fractions of the population refuse vaccines out of fear of witchcraft and voodoo.[1]

Do you think we should add an FDA phase five stage, where exorcists and witch doctors carefully study Covid vaccines for evidence of black magic and evil spirit? Because it's perfectly sensible to let rational people die to satisfy the whims of whoever holds the most irrational beliefs? Because you're making the exact same argument, except just substituting out Western anti-vaxxers for folk superstitions.

There's no evidence to indicate that anti-vaxxers are sensitive to clinical evidence whatsoever. A third of American adults are considering foregoing the vaccine[2], despite it being the most extensive and sophisticated safety trial in vaccine history.

Why would you believe that the minutiae of the FDA approval process would have any effect on anti-vaxxers, when the vast majority of their beliefs come from wholesale fake news.[3]

[1]https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/172046/1/884014355.p... [2]https://apnews.com/article/ap-norc-poll-3rd-adult-skeptical-... [3]https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7...

sorry, but this is an abysmal straw-man. In this case the vaccine distribution has been paused because of reports of blood-clotting. Even if that turns out to be spurious, it has to be investigated and precaution has to be used.

This stop in Germany comes from Germany's federal vaccine authority, which as far as I know, does not employ witch doctors.

If it turns out that a vaccine actually has harmful side effects (which is possible, this is not some conspiracy but a risk of all drugs), and the administration would have ignored it, you have eroded trust far beyond anti-vaxers.