‘I hope Operation Warp Speed was as ’brilliant‘ as many say it was. If not, we all want to know about it, and why,’ the president said.
President Donald Trump on Sept. 1 said that pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, should make public information they’ve shared with him about their COVID-19 products.
“It is very important that the Drug Companies justify the success of their various Covid Drugs,” the president said in a post on Truth Social.
Trump said Pfizer and other companies have shown him information “that is extraordinary, but they never seem to show those results to the public.”
The president then linked what he said was the lack of public information to the turmoil at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, whose director he recently fired. After the termination, several top officials resigned, in part because they opposed how the CDC, under orders from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., earlier this year stopped recommending COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children and pregnant women.
Kennedy has also terminatedfunding for projects involving messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology, which is utilized by the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. Kennedy has said the technology does not work for respiratory viruses.
Trump said that he wants companies to show the information “NOW to CDC and the public, and clear up this MESS, one way or the other!”
Pfizer did not respond to a request for comment. Moderna, which also makes a COVID-19 vaccine, did not return an inquiry. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the CDC did not respond to requests for comment.
Clinical trials found that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines initially conferred strong protection, but stopped working well over time. The vaccines prevented about 2.5 million deaths around the world from 2020 through 2024, a modeling paper published in July concluded. They have also been linked to serious health issues, including heart inflammation.
Under Trump in 2020, the government launched Operation Warp Speed, a project aimed at producing vaccines and other drugs targeting COVID-19 in record time. The government spent north of $12 billion on the project.
