# FDA issues emergency use authorization for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine Date: 2020 ## The fact 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. Do not inflate it. [Hippocrates](/people/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. ## Evidence and sources FDA’s COVID-19 vaccine pages record the EUA. WHO independently frames global vaccine policy. Different organisations. Official or archival record: FDA — COVID-19 vaccines (https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19/covid-19-vaccines; U.S. Food and Drug Administration). ## Significance Improving [vaccine-accessibility](/drivers/vaccine-accessibility) path. 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. ## What is established and what is not Established: FDA issued the Pfizer-BioNTech EUA on 11 December 2020. Not established: that Hippocrates caused mRNA chemistry. What would change the picture: a contradictory autograph, a securely dated Coan inscription naming a different author, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions acting in his name. The documentary trail can name an office, printer, code, trial, or treatise heading; it cannot name a complete Coan patient register. Confidence belongs on the impact path. Estimates of later harm from humoral treatment, where historians publish them, are attributed to those historians, not invented here. A Cos vita, a medieval oath manuscript, a Venetian folio, and a twentieth-century medical-association code are different instruments even when they share a heading. Hippocrates’ contribution, where it exists, is the name and the later use of treatises grouped under that name, not a modern ministry signature. Sharing labour with printers, editors, prosecutors, or assemblies is not a reason to drop the row and not a reason to treat the row as a clinical trial. Readers who want a birth certificate, a patient register, or a unique coefficient onto a modern indicator will not find those things in this instrument, and the page should not pretend otherwise. The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit to Cos in the fifth century BCE. If a number of deaths, doses, or pupils is not in the official or independent record named above, it is not supplied here. ## People - Hippocrates: https://factrail.ai/people/hippocrates ## Drivers - Vaccine Accessibility: https://factrail.ai/drivers/vaccine-accessibility ## Sources - https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/covid-19-vaccines - https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19/covid-19-vaccines ## Methodology https://factrail.ai/methodology Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/fda-pfizer-covid-eua-2020