Pharmaceutical company Pfizer is touting its collaboration with the first Trump administration to rapidly produce one of the major Covid-19 vaccines, as the Trump administration has sewn doubt about vaccines and cut funding for research in recent weeks.
“The success of Operation Warp Speed and U.S. development of mRNA vaccines is a profound public health achievement,” Pfizer chairman and CEO Dr. Albert Bourla wrote in an online statement on Wednesday. “Under President Trump’s leadership, American innovation led the world, helping prevent economic collapse and saving more than 14 million lives globally.”
“This American leadership also delivered a new platform that may drive significant innovation in cancer research,” Bourla added, referring to the cutting-edge mRNA technology used in the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. “Such an accomplishment would typically be worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize, given its significant impact.”
The statement appears to align with the president’s long-running desire for a Nobel Prize and recent trend of leaders, including foreign leaders, calling for the Republican to get the diplomatic honor.
Most immediately though, the comments from Pfizer, as well as a similar Trump-praising statement from fellow vaccine maker Moderna, come in response to the president demanding drug makers “justify the success” of their Covid interventions amid ongoing vaccine skepticism, some of it fueled by the Trump administration.
“Many people think they are a miracle that saved Millions of lives,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday. “Others disagree! With CDC being ripped apart over this question, I want the answer, and I want it NOW.”
The comments were an apparent reference to the ouster last week of CDC Director Susan Monarez, less than a month after she was confirmed. HHS wrote on X that Monarez was no longer director, amid reported clashes with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., over pulling approval for certain Covid shots.
Monarez claimed she did not resign and wasn’t notified about the change and her lawyer later said she was “targeted” because she “refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts she chose protecting the public over serving a political agenda.”
Despite funneling billions into the rapid development of the Covid vaccines during the first Trump term, the president has in second term elevated vaccine-skeptic Kennedy to lead HHS. The administration has also rolled back recommending the Covid vaccine to healthy children and pregnant women, while canceling $500 million in mRNA-related vaccine projects.
More than 1,000 current and former HHS employees called on Kennedy to resign on Wednesday.
In the face of turmoil at the nation’s top health bodies, the liberal state governments of Washington, Oregon, and California have formed an alliance to coordinate public health policies.
“The CDC has become a political tool that increasingly peddles ideology instead of science, ideology that will lead to severe health consequences,” the governors of these states said in a joint statement on Wednesday.
Republican-led Florida on Wednesday became the first state to end all vaccine mandates, policies the state’s surgeon general compared to “slavery.”
