Comment by danpalmer

The other reply has better info on covid specifically, but also consider that this refers to "immortality drugs". How long do we have to test those to conclude that they do in fact provide "immortality"?

Now sure, they don't actually mean immortality, and we don't need to test forever to conclude they extend life, but we probably do have to test for years to get good data on whether a generic life extension drug is effective, because you're testing against illness, old age, etc, things that take literally decades to kill.

That's not to mention that any drug like that will be met with intense skepticism and likely need to overcome far more scrutiny than normal (rather than the potentially less scrutiny that covid drugs might have managed).