Didn't the covid significantly reduce trial times? I thought that was such a success that they continued on the same foot.

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).

trial times were very brief for Covid vaccines because 1) there was no shortage of volunteers, capital, and political alignment at every level 2) the virus was everywhere and so it was really, really easy to verify if it was working. Compare this with a vaccination for a very rare but deadly disease: it's really hard to know if it's working because you can't just expose your test subjects to the deadly disease!

No it didn’t. At least not for new small molecule drugs. It did reduce times a bit for the first vaccines because there were many volunteers available, and it did allow some antibody drug candidates to be used before full testing was complete. The only approved small molecule drug for covid is paxlovid, with both components of its formulation tested on humans for the first time many years before covid. All the rest of the small molecule drugs are still in early parts of the pipeline or have been abandoned.