Lately, I've been thinking about how certain terms from the pandemic are just part of our vocabulary now.

Words and phrases that were utterly unfamiliar to us in 2019.

Super spreader, social distancing, PPE.

And one of those for me is emergency use authorization or EUA.

You know, I realized that I as a reporter have been using the term emergency use authorization

and EUA a lot since December.

And yet at the same time, I'm not sure I could actually define what it

means. Can you define it? So emergency use authorization is something that came about in 2005,

so it's relatively recent to the history of drugs and regulation. Sarah Overmall is not new to the term.

She covers health care for Politico.

Right now, she's mostly focused on COVID and vaccines.

It came about for an anthrax vaccine

that the armed services needed because of biological threats

and has been used since then for desperately needed vaccines

or treatments for things like Ebola, for other viruses, and most recently the coronavirus.

The three coronavirus vaccines that are on the market in the U.S. now, Pfizer, Moderna, and Jansen, also known as J&J, all got emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration.

The whole point of an emergency use authorization is that you can get something to market fast,

even if there are some lingering questions about who it is best for.

As long as the benefits outweigh the risks.

So they still are asking for a certain bar of information about whether it's safe and how effective

it might be.

But for the vaccines, for instance, they only had a few months data when they made those

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