> 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).