Yes, they were, at least to the extent that we required children in schools to be vaccinated, people in the military, etc.

This is literally how we eradicated polio in children.

Christ, y'all are weird.

There was 3 years of testing between polio vaccine development and deployment, and polio was much more of a problem in term of YLL per capita.

Components of MMR and TDaP were tested for some 5-8 years before deployment (and then some for combinations).

I'm weird for sure.

3 years is not decades, and there was not 3 years between testing and wide-spread deployment for the polio. There was basically a year.

There was also only 3 years between the testing of the combination MMR vaccine and its license and deployment in 71. But there wasn't significant new data gathered in between those years.

Let me know when you've stopped moving the goalposts.

Salk developed his vaccine in 1952 and licensed in 1955. That's 3 years of staged testing over some millions of kids and adults.

Covid vaccines were tested on tens of thousands in 8-10 months.

As I said, MMR components were 5-8 years tested and then mass-deployed by the time of combination.

Mandates didn't come until the late 60s/70s for either MMR or Polio vaccines, therefore decades.

All that dealing with much higher (by YLL/DALY) impact than Covid.

There was one field scale test of the polio vaccine, in 1954. It included about ~700,000 children. There was not three years of staged testing, let alone millions of children within those three years.

Please look up these timelines.

The field test involved more people that this. Either way even 700k is more than covid vaccine tests, and monitored for longer.

There were 623,000 children in the field trial (placebo/non-placebo). There was an additional million who acted as controls (not directly a part of the study, but used a baseline measure of polio incidents in the population surrounding the subject).

While the entire study took over a year, different populations were "monitored" for, at best, six months, many less.

The trial size was massive, but its generally agreed to have been overkill.

The results didn't differ much from the first 150 kids they tried it on.