Health > Why does Medication or Vaccines take 9 – 10 years to be approved instead of a few months?!?
There are differences between medications and vaccines. My simple understanding:
medicines – balance between risk and benefit, often can be used in severe cases if there no other hope. On the other hand, medicines taken against chronic diseases, affect patients continuously and have potential of side effects, so require a lot of testing
vaccines – on one hand, their effect is time-limited. So, complications are expected only during a short time interval. On the other hand, it is given to millions of healthy people who have low probability of getting a disease, so even very low risk is not acceptable. During pandemic, though, risk of disease is very high, allowing for faster approval due to a higher benefit.