> Drug development has been very conservative especially in the US for the past several decades
That is actually not what I hear from people who know this stuff. In fact many are very concerned that the FDA is far too quick with drug approval based on weak outcomes. (Big recommendation: Follow Vinay Prasad on twitter, he's spot on on these issues.)
> During WWII design and production ramped up to an unprecedented degree
This isn't production, this is science. There's only so much you can do. You need to do trials to know if things work. You need people for that. If you want to test a vaccine you need to have an at-risk population that you can test and you need to wait till you get the results.
Yeah, there are certain ways to improve that and do things faster. But only so much. There are hard limits. You can't develop a drug or a vaccine over night.
> very concerned that the FDA is far too quick with drug approval based on weak outcomes
The current FDA requires strong evidence of safety, over a long period. Prasad etc are arguing the FDA should be stricter on efficacy. In a pandemic, it makes sense to lower your standards for safety to get new treatments out sooner.
This is required for good reason. It only makes sense to lower standards when there is going to be a realistic payoff. The general public place a lot of trust in the various parties to make the right decisions. Running with too much risk from adverse events is extremely problematic at different levels.
People in pharma and in authority (FDA and other organizations) are intimately familiar with the need to strike the right balance and have a lot more considerations than you seem to assume they do.
The FDA already allows lesser standards for efficacy for rare things. Which is why there are a lot of treatments for rare things - once you are on the market you can "wink wink" tell doctors about the more common thing you also work on.
It didn't involve clinical trials on humans. That's the one thing that takes time in medicine and can't be optimized away. You can't do medicine without clinical trials.
You can speed up clinical trials by running larger ones at earlier stages. This risks more deaths from bad medicines, which may still be worth it in a pandemic.
Human trials cannot be optimized away, but they sure can be optimized. For example, you can do away of IRB reviews, which require lots of effort on the side of researchers, take lots of time and heavily restrict what researchers can do, but which ultimately aren't necessary to run a human trials. Of course, IRB reviews have their purpose, and doing away with them altogether in normal times is most likely a non-starter, but in emergency pandemic time having drug earlier might justify lots of risk of harm to trial subjects.
That is actually not what I hear from people who know this stuff. In fact many are very concerned that the FDA is far too quick with drug approval based on weak outcomes. (Big recommendation: Follow Vinay Prasad on twitter, he's spot on on these issues.)
> During WWII design and production ramped up to an unprecedented degree
This isn't production, this is science. There's only so much you can do. You need to do trials to know if things work. You need people for that. If you want to test a vaccine you need to have an at-risk population that you can test and you need to wait till you get the results. Yeah, there are certain ways to improve that and do things faster. But only so much. There are hard limits. You can't develop a drug or a vaccine over night.