[flukus]

Nothing goes through decades of testing, they go through human trials and then monitor safety at a mass scale for a year or two and then they're done. Same as with the covid vaccines.

[eric-hu]

I read spaceman’s comment as saying decades of public use is the additional testing.

[logic_beats_pro]

The previous average vaccine testing duration was ~5 years. Let's not pretend that the mRNA vaccines were even close to that.

Fun fact, the Omicron BA.5 booster isn't tested at all.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

You can amass 1000 person-years of testing with 10 subjects and 100 years, or with 1000 subjects and 1 year. Or with some intermediate ramp-up plan.

The "decades of public use" metric needs to also take into account how widespread that use is.

Now consider how many doses of mRNA vaccines have been given worldwide (1), since the public rollouts began in December 2020. mRNA vaccines are no longer unknown, at all.

1) Billions of doses https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-glo...