Was the testing of Covid-19 vaccines "rushed" or "unprecedented"?

Question

Recently, a tweet was made by a Canadian politician, containing a video of a Canadian Member of Parliament, Anthony Housefather, who made some fairly outrageous claims regarding the production of Covid-19 vaccines. Among those claims are the following (quotations of the words of Housefather in the video):

• "Companies were being told to rush [COVID] vaccine [development (in the video the word "production" is used, but in context it is clear he meant "development")]"
• "[Companies were told to] do testing in an unprecedented way"
• "[Companies were told to do testing] in a way they don't normally do it"
• "[Vaccine production companies] didn't do the type of testing that normally takes these drugs years to come to market"

In the context of the rest of the video, the above quotes definitively mean that Housefather believes that there was a lack of adequate testing of Covid vaccines; the word "unprecedented" and "don't normally do it" are not meant to be positive descriptors in this case.

Some background: During the pandemic, we (at least in Canada) were told that the vaccines were developed according to proper standards and the only part that was "rushed" was the approvals process; rather than taking years to take their turn in a never-ending pharmaceutical pipeline, these vaccines were put "to the top of the inbox", as it were, to get them out the door faster. However, we were told, the testing and scientific development that went into them was still the same process that goes into all vaccines and medical treatments, and furthermore any questions thereof regarding any unconventional items in the approvals process was anti-vaxx propaganda. It is therefore noteworthy that a member of the ruling party in Canada is saying these things, when during the pandemic they were quashing these sorts of statements.^{[citation neeeded]}

Question: What evidence exists, if any, to suggest that the scientific development, including testing, of Covid-19 vaccines, was in any way "rushed" or done in any form of unconventional or "unprecedented" way? Concerns regarding the governmental approvals/regulatory processes for such are out of scope of the question, I am asking only about the scientific (development, clinical trials, etc) part of the development.

Answer 1

Disclaimer: I know nothing about Canada's approval process or what Canadian politicians said/promised was going to happen. As for the US, the question is alas ticky to answer or next to meaningless. If we're talking about the Emergency Use Authorization, which was granted prior to the mass vaccination of adults, that had some precedent, but

• said precedent was only a post-9/11 thing (so not a long history to use for comparison), and mostly had been given for vaccines that few expected to be used on a wide scale in the US: against anthrax, Ebola, etc.

• the standard for Covid-19 EUA vaccine approvals was set higher than for those prior EUAs, precisely because the Covid vaccines were expected to be mass used.

So, yeah, it was "unprecedented" in that/those regards, at least in the US. This was announced at the time as

“If we are going to do an EUA, it’s going to be like an EUA-plus,” Marks said. The bar for a typical EUA is relatively low — a company must show that a product may be effective — compared to that for full approval, which involves demonstrating substantial effectiveness in clinical trials. For Covid-19 vaccines, any EUA is “going to be closer” to full approval, Marks said.

It later came up in legal challenges, e.g.

Judge Leichty further examined the objection that the vaccines being mandated were only available under Emergency Use Authorization, and found this to be no impediment to the mandates on the basis that the Food and Drug Administration had employed an "EUA-plus" degree of examination, providing far more stringent requirements for issuance of the EUA than were required by law.

I'll note that your final request:

Concerns regarding the governmental approvals/regulatory processes for such are out of scope of the question, I am asking only about the scientific (development, clinical trials, etc) part of the development.

is rather at odds with the actual claim(s) you've quoted, which are about what companies were told to do/expect: "[Companies were told to] do testing in an unprecedented way". No company does testing for the sake of testing. They do it to get approvals, so you can't really split one issue from the other.

Now, if you're looking with a candle for some "unprecedented" aspects in more detail, perhaps this qualifies:

due to time constraints and the urgency to find a vaccine for COVID-19, Moderna and Pfizer did receive approval to run animal testing and early trials on humans at the same time, as opposed to fully completing animal trials before moving on to human trials. This, however, does not mean animal trials were skipped.

That bit was described by some academic researchers at the time as "very unusual", but understandable given the time frame constraints. One of the issues seems to have been that developing animal (in particular mouse) models for Covid-19 didn't look very promising then, so there was a chance the vaccine(s) may have worked in humans despite failing in mice.

So, if I'm to draw some conclusion from this: politician makes vague claim that interpreted in certain ways is true, but not incredibly meaningful for the general public.

Answer 2

The selected terms "rushed" and "unprecedented" are vague and effectively meaningless. Just about every single business venture can be described as "rushed", due to economic pressures to get to the market faster. Every single venture of any time can be described as "unprecedented".

During the period between the SARS-CoV-2 virus being discovered, and the first vaccines being put to market, there was incredible financial, political and humanitarian pressure to get effective, tested, safe, vaccines into production. It would be difficult to convey the sheer enormity of societal pressure placed on the medical industry during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, if it wasn't for the fact that it was only three years ago, and I can rely on the readers of this site remembering it quite well for themselves.

In June 2020, the International Vaccine Institute (selected as a pro-vaccination source) published a blog article which quoted Dr. Sang-Hwan Seo, IVI’s Research Scientist & Lab Manager:

the speed from DNA sequencing until clinical trials was unprecedented.

This single quote shows that, in at least one way, development was both rushed and unprecedented.

What cannot be concluded from these terms that the vaccine testing was therefore of a lower quality. Using the simple project management triangle model, having a short deadline doesn't necessarily imply the scope of the testing was limited... as long as the budget could be extended. With US Government alone spending $18-23 billion (with a b) on vaccine development, the budget was not small.