Let me clarify what I think the parent meant.

This announcement was made very shortly after Trump started making claims that a vaccine could be ready "late October/early November". Trump is a known fool, and even were he not, his losing prospects at re-election, combined with the criticism of his administration's response to the pandemic make it seem like he could be pushing vaccine makers to rush a treatment to pump up voter support.

I believe vaccine makers are diplomatically responding to the Trump headline by saying "We aren't going to rush this for the wrong reasons."

Thanks for clarifying! This is exactly what I meant

I'd rather more people die to Covid than find out 20 million people have failing livers and 5 million were born with birth defects because they rushed a vaccine without enough testing.

Source?

Vaccines shouldn't be rushed because that's how you kill people with vaccines. Phase 3 vaccine trials take 18-24 months for very good reasons.

The bigger issue is if they rush a drug that does long term harm to people, it could destroy the company. This is a drug that they will be giving out to 300+ million people in the US along. Screwing it up would result in a massive amounts of lawsuits that they may not recover from. They don't want to risk that just for some political capital with a person who may not be in power in a few months.

The fix for that is easy: have the FDA authorization grant them immunity from vaccine safety or efficacy liability.

Man that is a good solution. That way we get a vaccine immediately! Who cares if it’s saline. Or arsenic.

The way these things are worded only protect from unintentional damage.

Reputational damage would be a greater risk; this could quite easily turn into the greatest pharmaceutical scandal in history.

I feel like ending the pandemic is not a motivation that is likely to make a researcher (an expert) rush things and end up hurting more people. Greed or glory is much more likely to be a motivator for that kind of mistake.