I was having a discussion with people at work about the approval process of the Covid-19 vaccines here in Australia.

One person was raising questions as to why the Therapeutic Goods Administration, the agency responsible for approving drugs and treatments, was taking its time with approving the vaccine when a number of other countries have already started rolling it out (he had good enough reasons for asking).

There was a bit of a back and forth about the merits of speeding up the approval process vs. giving the TGA time to do a full approval, since the virus has been suppressed moderately successfully here.

The conversation ended about 10 minutes later with the approval of the Pfizer vaccine.