Because the COVID-19 vaccine was made available so quickly, should I be concerned about the safety of the vaccine?

These were extremely large, extremely well-designed, clinical trials. The speed at which it was produced and made available was due to several factors: They put a lot of money into it, they put a lot of people into it, they did a lot of things in parallel that they would normally do in series. Normally they go to step A, step B, step C, mostly to try to save money, and instead they did A, B and C all at the same time. And that’s how they sped it up. In doing so, they did not compromise on the vaccine end points, the efficacy end point was just what they would use if they had done a full trial that had gotten FDA approval. The main reason that this hasn’t been FDA approved is because the FDA approval process requires six months of follow-up data. There are only two or three months of follow-up data available right now; however, they’re following for more and this was a well-designed study.