FDA issues emergency use authorization for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine

On 11 December 2020 FDA issued an emergency use authorization for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in persons 16 and older. The EUA is a completed regulatory act. It is not a Hippocratic text. It appears here as the empirical-trial afterlife of a medical profession that still recites older oaths while using entirely new tools.

Context

Özlem Türeci, Uğur Şahin, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman are the scientific names. FDA is the regulator. Hippocratic contribution is only the profession’s ethics frame, stated as weak and complex.

Hippocrates of Cos is not the sole author of every Greek medical treatise later copied under his name, and he is not the signer of every later oath or code that quoted him. Shared work with unnamed Coan practitioners, Alexandrian compilers, Galen, Latin printers, medical faculties, and twentieth-century medical associations does not erase the Cos identity Plato used, and it does not make a fifth-century physician the author of the 1948 Declaration of Geneva.

Why it matters

High confidence on the EUA. Hippocratic weight is low and must stay low.

If the weight looks too high for Cos, that is a reason to keep contribution_size low, not a reason to omit a real regulatory date that later physicians administered under older ethics language.

A printed corpus does not vaccinate a child. An oath does not staff a clinic.