It’s not quibbling over definitions but over causes. Vaccine development has always been and will continue to be relatively slow compared to COVID due to lack of commercial incentives.

Insofar as there is any progress made on vaccines in the absence of strong market incentives, it’s due to government funding, not benevolent capitalists choosing to take on decades-long loss-leading blue sky research projects.

The approval happened quickly not because there was some crazy regulatory overhaul but because drug regulation is always a cost-benefit analysis. In this case, the vaccines themselves worked phenomenally well, their risk profile was extremely good, and the costs of doing nothing was extremely high.

It’s not strange for drugs to conclude trials early based on strong early data and strong patient need, just most drugs in most scenarios don’t meet that bar.