> Without that we delay treatment, increase costs, and slow research. And people die while we wait.

This is for new vaccines: we're not halting administration of existing vaccines. And the time taken for testing new vaccines seems reasonable for safety purposes, as it would be for any other medicine.

"New vaccines" in this case includes, as an example, influenza vaccines that use the same mechanism that has already been proven safe and effective and which need to be developed and deployed in the (short) time between determining the most likely influenza strains for the year and the beginning of flu season.

If annual influenza vaccines cannot be approved in time for flu season and flu deaths increase significantly over the years to come, would you consider that justifiable?

That’s a good question. No I wouldn’t consider it justifiable. I think newer versions of existing vaccines shouldn’t qualify as ‘new vaccines’.

The article mentions ‘ four years ago is unacceptable so it sounds like they want to retest new versions every four years, rather than every new version.

> The article mentions ‘ four years ago is unacceptable so it sounds like they want to retest new versions every four years, rather than every new version.

Your choice of quote makes it seem like you are misunderstanding or deliberately misrepresenting the article. In more context:

> "As we've said before, trials from four years ago conducted in people without natural immunity no longer suffice. A four-year-old trial is also not a blank check for new vaccines each year without clinical trial data, unlike the flu shot which has been tried and tested for more than 80 years," Nixon said in a statement he had earlier sent to The Washington Post. "The public deserves transparency and gold-standard science — especially with evolving products."

This states that a Covid vaccine passing the placebo-controlled study requirement 4 years ago will not suffice to accept updated versions of the same Covid vaccine -- not that vaccines and/or delivery mechanisms will only need to be tested every 4 years. More concisely: it's an upper bound, but not a lower bound.

Edit: Fixing up some grammar.

> This states that a Covid vaccine passing the placebo-controlled study requirement 4 years ago will not suffice to accept updated versions of the same Covid vaccine

Yes. That is what the comment you were replying to states.

> More concisely: it's an upper bound, but not a lower bound.

You can’t say it’s any bound at all. Maybe more than two milliseconds old (less than four years) is unacceptable, maybe 16 millennia (more than four years) is unacceptable. They’re just thinking about four years as being unacceptable. Which sounds reasonable.