The 3 phases are standard. Guess what the covid vaccines went through? That's right: Mitt Romney. I mean, all 3 phases of testing.
"Why does it usually take so long to get them developed then?"

::ponders::

This has been beaten to death by many people with a lot more experience, so I'm going to leave this as an exercise for the reader minus a couple of points:
1) Typically you expend a lot of effort and time applying for and receiving money. Guess what wasn't necessary this time? The gov't gave them essentially a blank check, including a promise of a buttload for vaccine doses.
2) As someone who has worked on gov't projects, red tape can be a real time destroyer. Some of it is necessary, but a lot of it is designed to keep some pencil pushers employed. Guess what removed as an impediment this time?
BUT THERE HAVE BEEN SIDE EFFECTS!!!

Yes, and there always are at least a few because no test involves millions of people. See also the 3 phases.
Real life experience interjected:

Back when I was a programmer, I used to send my results to a programmer who used an entirely different language and he see if he got the same results. He tested a sample of 2 million or so out of 200 million computations.
Worked great until it didn't. Got the email one morning:

"Hey, we found 13 results that came out different than we expected!"

So I did a hand check of my code vs the data and the result was perfect. Turns out the other guy's code had the error.
The situation was so rare that it had never been noticed in the samples before. One of those once in a million situations. Literally.
End result was that he corrected his code and our results then matched.
Back to the vaccine kerfuffle:

Let's say you test 3000 people in phase 3 and it works. Yay, right? But there are in excess of 300 million people in this country alone. You never know who smokes, is on the pill, has an egg allergy, or just has a weird recessive gene.
Women age 18-48 experienced a problem: blood clots. A handful of women. Guess what women in that age group also have in common? A lot of them are on the pill which (checks notes) has a 1/1,000 occurrence of blood clots. Call this one of the things that make you go "hmm".
It's also possible they smoked, although I have no way of knowing. Smoking also puts you at higher risk for clots. As does sitting in an airplane seat for hours, or sitting in general for hours.
So sure, investigate. It might be that women smokers on the birth control pill shouldn't take the J&J vaccine, or it might be redhaired midget left-handed women who shouldn't get it. But stop with the f*cking hysteria.
"Gee, why are so many people hesitant to get the vaccine?" - said the deeply unserious person

And now the stupid anti-vaxxers are going to say "Here, use these essential oils because they'll work just as well" and people will do it. Kudos on your message-killing stupidity.
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