‘Useless And Unfortunate’: Final-Hour White House Pressure On FDA Reported
Despite a reported threat from the White House chief of staff to his job, FDA chief Stephen Hahn says that COVID-19 vaccine review and approval was based entirely on science. Operation Warp Speed's Moncef Slaoui said that if such a call happened, it was counterproductive to convincing Americans to get the shot.
Politico:
FDA's Hahn: Covid-19 Vaccine Authorization Based In 'Science And Data'
FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn on Sunday denied reports his agency was pressured by the Trump administration to get Pfizer's coronavirus vaccine authorized quickly, asserting authorization was based on a "thorough review of the science and data." "Our timeline, how we approached this was based upon our thorough review of the science and data," Hahn said on CNN's "State on the Union." "That's the promise we made to the American people, the transparency around that, and that's what we did.” (Carrasco, 12/13)
Bloomberg:
As Vaccines Move, Warp Speed Leader Rues Political Pressure
Moncef Slaoui of Operation Warp Speed was asked on “Fox News Sunday” about reports the U.S. Food and Drug Administration chief was told Friday his job was in jeopardy if the agency didn’t approve the first Covid vaccine by day’s end. If a phone call along those lines between Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, and FDA Administrator Stephen Hahn happened as reported, “I think it was useless and unfortunate, and so are some of the tweets,” he said. (Czuczka and Miller, 12/13)
Forbes:
Trump Health Officials Blast President’s Vaccine Approval Pressure As ‘Useless And Unfortunate’
President Trump’s recent attempts to speed up the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the coronavirus vaccine for emergency use, which reportedly went as far as threatening the FDA commissioner’s job, were brushed aside by high-ranking health officials on Sunday who decried the additional pressure as useless and potentially counter-productive. “I do think it’s not helpful,” Moncef Slaoui, the head of the White House’s program to accelerate the development of a Covid-19 vaccine, told Fox News Sunday in response to a question about President Trump’s tweet last week telling the FDA to “get the [damn] vaccine out NOW” and The Washington Post’s report that Chief of Staff Mark Meadows threatened Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn. (McEvoy, 12/13)
ABC News:
Refuting Trump, FDA Commissioner Says Pfizer Vaccine Could Not Have Been Authorized Sooner
As the first United States shipments of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine set out across a beleaguered nation ravaged by nine months of illness and death, the leader of the agency responsible for authorizing the immunization for emergency use, maintained Sunday that the authorization was made as quickly as possible, despite claims to the contrary by President Donald Trump. "We do not feel that this could have been out a week earlier," Dr. Stephen Hahn, the FDA commissioner, countered on ABC's "This Week." "We went through our process. We promised the American people that we would do a thorough review of the application and that's what we did. We followed our process." (Kelsey, 12/13)
