According to this page, the vaccines has a EU conditional marketing authorisation: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... Afaik, most drugs are not introduced through a conditional authorisation.

And most drugs are not needed so urgently or are simply not available (a vaccine against HIV for example or effective cancer treatment).

They were not using 40,000 people trials in 2015 for mRNA based technologies. That was the point. Just because something was in its infancy in the lab doesn't mean you can say its been around almost 7 years already. The concern that there is no long term data is a valid one. Adenovirus vector formulations do have a longer history but have caused leukemia's in the past that manifest 4 years later for single gene mutation correction trials.

> Yes, they were. Each of the vaccines used around 40000 people in their trials.

And for how long do most vaccine trials last? How long have they historically been in use before any mandate was instituted?

It really depends on disease prevalence, technological capability and urgency. For example during ebola epidemic RVSV-ZEBOV vaccine was administered to infected people prior any previous human testing. H1N1 vaccine was developed in number of months (3rd phase trial size was 2200 persons) but sufficient and timely mass production failed.