Need to know:

The speed of the COVID-19 vaccine development raised questions about whether corners were cut in the race to develop vaccines at pandemic speed.

The short answer to these is ‘No’. Vaccine development followed all clinical trial phases, starting with pre-clinical trials in animal models, phase 1 studies in a small number of healthy adult participants and then larger phase 2/3 human clinical trials.

The phase 3 efficacy and safety trials were placebo-controlled and included over 30,000 participants with sufficient power to detect most common adverse events.²