There is sometimes specific information about the actual manufacturing process or synthesis that companies provide. Given that this is an entirely new vaccine technology that has never been used before, there was probably quite a bit of confidential manufacturing content supplied as supplemental material to satisfy regulators.
You are correct that the regulators are generally concerned with safety and efficacy of the final product, not the sausage making. But if the sausage making is super complex and/or novel that could potentially have an impact on safety and efficacy. So the company may have been asked to give some amount of detail there. For example: given this vaccine requires cold temperatures or it breaks down, how are they guaranteeing the cold chain in the manufacturing process? (I'm just using this as an illustration of the flavor of question someone on the committee might have)
Given how new this vaccine tech is, there are probably quite a few manufacturing-related efficiencies and techniques that Pfizer does not want competitors getting access to. Not because they're going to copy this specific vaccine, but because it allows them accelerate efforts in this area for other vaccines.
I would argue what makes the world a better place is ensuring companies have to innovate on their own. That’s what leads to breakthroughs and new things. Constraints often breed innovation. What is the incentive to sink billions into R&D if someone can sit on the sidelines and just take what you have developed? Look at the situation right now: we have multiple vaccine candidates from multiple companies because they all had significant incentive to develop them not because they were necessarily going to make a lot of money off this particular vaccine, but because they could accelerate R&D on tech they can use for other therapies. Some of these vaccine candidates appear to be mediocre at best. If we didn’t have a competitive marketplace we wouldn’t have gotten the best vaccine possible in the shortest timeframe possible.
You are correct that the regulators are generally concerned with safety and efficacy of the final product, not the sausage making. But if the sausage making is super complex and/or novel that could potentially have an impact on safety and efficacy. So the company may have been asked to give some amount of detail there. For example: given this vaccine requires cold temperatures or it breaks down, how are they guaranteeing the cold chain in the manufacturing process? (I'm just using this as an illustration of the flavor of question someone on the committee might have)
Given how new this vaccine tech is, there are probably quite a few manufacturing-related efficiencies and techniques that Pfizer does not want competitors getting access to. Not because they're going to copy this specific vaccine, but because it allows them accelerate efforts in this area for other vaccines.