Nearly everything Donald Trump said about the left-wing and RINO deep state has turned out to be right, and that includes his previous claims that COVID-19 vaccine makers he made wealthy by pushing for a rapid treatment via "Operation Warp Speed" purposely refused to announce a breakthrough before the 2020 election.
According to data-crunching political journalist Nate Silver, Pfizer was pressed by "liberal public health elites" to wait until after all balloting was over until announcing that the company had developed a vaccine for the virus, according to the New York Post, which added:
The number-crunching data journalist reacted to an article by Politico that cited a House report that claimed the Trump administration sought to expedite approvals for both vaccines and “unproven treatments” for COVID-19.
“‘Trump pushed for vaccine approvals too fast’ is the worst possible critique of the Trump administration’s COVID policy,” Silver, founder of the Disney-owned FiveThirtyEight political news and analysis website, wrote in a tweet.
“That probably saved a lot of lives. If anything approval should have been faster," he added.
In a follow-up tweet, Silver noted that “liberal public health elites” pushed Pfizer to “change its original protocols” pertaining to the authorization to release vaccines so the decision would not be made until after Election Day, The Post noted further.
Silver went on to say that Pfizer’s decision “had the convenient side-effect of delaying any vaccine announcement until after the election” and that the story “deserves more scrutiny.”
The editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight went on to say that public health officials in government "tend to be strong [Democrat] partisans" and as such, their push for the vaccine maker to take its time in announcing the COVID shot "may have been politically motivated in whole or in part."
“It’s a story that deserves more reporting and I’ve done some poking around myself,” Silver added on Twitter.
The Post notes further:
The Politico story that Silver linked to quotes several public health experts who criticized Pfizer for going too fast in seeking FDA authorization of its vaccine.
The pharmaceutical giant was under intense pressure by the Trump administration and its allies to announce the success of its vaccine at clinical trials before Nov. 3, 2020.
Six days after the election, Pfizer announced that its COVID vaccine was 90% effective.
Also, the late 2020 push from liberal public health elites that persuaded Pfizer to *change* its original protocols - and had the convenient side-effect of delaying any vaccine announcement until after the election - deserves more scrutiny.https://t.co/1v3ueTNqur
I don't know for sure but yes the implication is that it may have been politically motivated in whole or in part. Especially given the people making the push, who tend to be strong D partisans. It's a story that deserves more reporting and I've done some poking around myself.
Needless to say, at the time, the same left-wing media that trashed Trump incessantly and attempted to 'fact-check' him said at the time his claims that Pfizer intentionally sandbagged and slow-walked the announcement were false.
The Washington Post's headline blared: "Trump rails against ‘medical deep state’ after Pfizer vaccine news comes after Election Day: But company insists the election didn’t affect timing of the promising data."
"Shortly after Trump heard the news...he demanded Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar “get to the bottom” of what happened with Pfizer, according to a senior White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the president’s actions," the Post reported.
"A few hours later, the issue was front and center at a meeting of the White House coronavirus task force when FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn briefed members about the vaccine data," the paper continued. "Hahn said the timing was the sole result of independent decisions made by Pfizer on collecting and reviewing the information, according to three senior administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal affairs."
It turns out that is true -- but as Nate Silver pointed it, Trump was right in that Pfizer slow-walked its approval on purpose, very likely to deny Trump any credit for the rapid development of a vaccine for a virus he was wrongly being blamed for.
