Given that the FDA’s two most experienced vaccine reviewers felt that fast of an approval was impossible (and furthermore they were excluded from participating in or managing the review process) I believe it is fair to assume many critical steps were skipped in a review process which ultimately took a third to a half as much time as it should have. In turn, after extensively investigating the events that transpired, the Congressional Oversight Committee concluded that this accelerated timeline was done to enact those Federal, state, and workplace mandates and was a result of significant pressure from the Biden administration to ensure their target mandate date could be met.
Note: on July 8, 2022 the FDA fully approved Pfizer’s vaccine for children ages 12-15, while on October 29, 2021, it gave an EUA for children 5-11, and on June 17, an EUA for children 6 months to 4 years of age. These approvals are noteworthy, as young children have close to a 0% risk of dying from COVID (making it difficult to categorize it as an “emergency” requiring an EUA). At the same time, the existing vaccine schedule gives infants multiple COVID vaccines in the first few weeks of life (despite vaccines not being FDA-approved). Likewise, college students were required to get boosters despite having no FDA approval.
