The World's Least Popular True Conspiracy Theory

The Feds are finally investigating what I've been pointing out since November 2020: Pfizer shut down its Operation Warp Speed vax clinical trial from late October until the day after the election.

From the New York Post:

Feds probe tip that Pfizer delayed announcing COVID vaccine’s success until after 2020 election: report

By Reuters

Published March 26, 2025, 6:57 p.m. ET

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are probing a claim by GSK that Pfizer delayed announcing its COVID shot’s success in 2020 until after that year’s election, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

The report said on Wednesday GSK’s former head of vaccine development, Philip Dormitzer, who joined the company after working at rival Pfizer, had told his GSK colleagues about the delay.

However, Dormitzer has disputed that account.

“My Pfizer colleagues and I did everything we could to get the FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization at the very first possible moment. Any other interpretation of my comments about the pace of the vaccine’s development would be incorrect,” he told Reuters in a statement.

To get FDA approval, Pfizer needed two separate things: statistically significant evidence from the clinical trial that the vaccine was at least 50% efficacious, and, after demands from Democratic-affiliated public health spokespeople, at least two months of safety evidence from at least 50% of the clinical trial participants. The latter benchmark was reached only on November 17, 2020, so it’s not technically incorrect to say that Pfizer putting all processing of efficacy information from its clinical trial on ice from late October until the day after the November 3, 2020 election did not delay getting the FDA approval.

But it obviously had immense political implications, as well as large implications for people trading in Pfizer stock during the secretly delayed week. At least two Wall Street analysts, for example, declared that Pfizer’s failing to meet its long proclaimed late October announcement data boded ill for Pfizer’s stock price (which of course instead went up after the delayed November 9 announcement).

The WSJ report said the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which includes Manhattan, is taking a closer look at what GSK has shared.

President Trump has claimed in the past that Pfizer sat on positive data from the vaccine’s clinical trials, but there has never been evidence to support the accusation.

Ackshuallllllllly …

As I may have mentioned once or twice or 59 times since Monday, November 9, 2020, the day Pfizer announced that its mRNA covid had passed all efficacy benchmarks in its protocol, that senior Pfizer executive William Gruber, Pfizer Senior Vice President and Head of Vaccine Clinical Research and Development, had admitted to reporter Matthew Herper of StatNews that Pfizer had shut down processing of samples in its clinical trial from late October 2020 to the day after the election. If not for that remarkable deviation from its publicly announced protocol, Pfizer may well have announced that its vaccine had passed efficacy benchmarks a week or so earlier, perhaps Monday, November 2, the day before the Election. If that had happened, Trump would have spent the last 24 hours of his campaign trumpeting the success of his Operation Warp Speed.

So, the evidence that Pfizer delayed announcing the efficacy of its mRNA vaccine depends not just on what Pfizer executive Dormitzer told future GSK colleagues in private, as federal prosecutors are look into, but what Pfizer executive Gruber admitted publicly to the press on the day of the announcement.

Of course, practically nobody cared. In a hilarious development, because Operation Warp Speed’s success was not announced in time to help Trump, which would have of course made Trump supporters very pro-vaccine and left liberals the main vaccine skeptics (as has historically been common), Trump supporters completely forgot Operation Warp Speed and declared vaccines a dangerous conspiracy.

I wrote in Taki’s Magazine on November 11, 2020:

Back on Nov. 1, The New York Times news section gloated:

Welcome to November. For Trump, the October Surprise Never Came.

Trump’s hope that an economic recovery, a Covid vaccine or a Biden scandal could shake up the race faded with the last light of October.

By Shane Goldmacher and Adam Nagourney

President Trump began the fall campaign rooting for, and trying to orchestrate, a last-minute surprise that would vault him ahead of Joseph R. Biden Jr. A coronavirus vaccine….

I’m not easily shockable, but I found it eyebrow-raising to discover that the November Surprise, Monday’s announcement [November 9, 2020] by the Pfizer-BioNTech team that their new vaccine was spectacularly effective (over 90 percent), likely could have been made a week earlier, which would have given Trump a late October Surprise….

But, Matthew Herper’s article on StatNews points out that we now know Pfizer chose in October to deviate substantially from its published clinical protocol for conducting the vaccine trial:

…it also means that if Pfizer had held to the original plan, the data would likely have been available in October, as its CEO, Albert Bourla, had initially predicted.

Months ago, Pfizer released its 137-page scientific protocol for how it would test its vaccine on 44,000 volunteers, half of whom would get the treatment and the other half the placebo. As StatNews summarizes:

The first analysis was to occur after 32 volunteers—both those who received the vaccine and those on placebo—had contracted Covid-19. If fewer than six volunteers in the group who received the vaccine had developed Covid-19, the companies would make an announcement that the vaccine appeared to be effective.

Additional interim analyses were slated to be performed after 62, 92, and 120 cases, with the final analysis after 164.

The FDA had set a cutoff of 50 percent effectiveness being required for approval: A vaccine would have to reduce the number of cases in a population at least from, say, one million to a half million.

The annual flu vaccine usually has only around a 50 percent effectiveness, while measles vaccines run at 97 percent efficacy, which is why we don’t have measles epidemics anymore (so long as most people get their kids vaccinated).

Today, RFK Jr. is working on solving the no more measles epidemics problem for us.

But it’s easy to imagine an alternate timeline in which Pfizer announced the efficacy of its vaccine on the day before the election, Trump is re-elected, and now anti-vaccine conspiracy theorizing remains what it was during the election campaign when fear, uncertainty, and doubt about a Trump vaccine were being spread by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris: a Democratic tendency with its epicenter in its traditional home of Marin County.

… StatNews writes that the aggressive schedule of Pfizer, which appeared to be the only consortium with a chance to deliver an update on efficacy before the election, was heavily criticized on safety grounds:

That study design, as well as those of other drug makers, came under fire from experts who worried that, even if it was statistically valid, these interim analyses would not provide enough data when a vaccine could be given to billions of people.

These experts were mostly pro-Democrats. They wound up getting the FDA to make up a rule that, in effect, Pfizer couldn’t announce its vaccine had passed safety tests until November 17, 2020, two weeks after the election.

That line of critique concerns safety, not efficacy. The vaccine still hasn’t been in use long enough to meet the safety criteria. Yet it apparently did meet Pfizer’s published efficacy criteria before the election, but they just didn’t tell us that until this week.

Note that with vaccines, efficacy (how well the vaccine protects you from the disease) is a separate issue from safety (how well you are protected from the vaccine). Pfizer claims that the vaccine has proven very safe so far in its trial, but it won’t file for FDA approval until the second half of November when it expects to have two months of safety data on a sufficient number of volunteers.

StatNews offers a timeline of the announcement of its effectiveness:

The story of how the data have been analyzed seems to include no small amount of drama…. In their announcement of the results, Pfizer and BioNTech revealed a surprise. The companies said they had decided not to conduct the 32-case analysis “after a discussion with the FDA.” Instead, they planned to conduct the analysis after 62 cases. But by the time the plan had been formalized, there had been 94 cases of Covid-19 in the study.

In other words, the companies skipped both the first (32 cases) and second (62 cases) scheduled interim analyses and only did the third (92 cases). But then it turned out that the vaccine was so effective (over 90 percent) that the first 32-case analysis likely would have been sufficient after all.

Gruber said that Pfizer and BioNTech had decided in late October that they wanted to drop the 32-case interim analysis. At that time, the companies decided to stop having their lab confirm cases of Covid-19 in the study, instead leaving samples in storage.

That’s pretty wild: The firms had their labs stop processing cases and just put the samples in cold storage. They stopped the count. They ran out the election clock.

The FDA was aware of this decision. Discussions between the agency and the companies concluded, and testing began this past Wednesday.

Perhaps coincidentally (or perhaps not), last Wednesday was the day after the election. As one cynic suggested: They didn’t choose a sample size for when to report, they chose a date.

So, it appears that Monday’s announcement perhaps could have been made before the election.

I don’t have proof that the shutdown of processing of lab samples for approximately one week delayed the efficacy announcement from Monday, November 2, 2020 to Monday, November 9, 2020 (36 hours after the media announced Biden the victor Saturday, November 7), but that seems plausible.

But the corporations weren’t in the mood to follow their own protocol and Trump’s FDA let them get away with stalling on telling voters and investors what had been achieved.

From a political and financial standpoint, the firms likely made the self-interested right decision to delay. Even giant pharmaceutical companies don’t want to wind up on blacklists for vengeance by Democrats. But from a scientific and ethical perspective, it was highly questionable.

Will Trump’s Securities & Exchange Commission inquire into why Pfizer did not follow its published protocol or, so far as I can tell, alert investors to its decision not to obey its announced plans? Keep in mind that a lot of people made decisions during the days when the firms had put the evidence on ice (literally)—what stocks to buy, for whom to vote, when to schedule a wedding or a family reunion—without benefit of this useful information.

The media is constantly accusing Trump of “authoritarianism,” but for a notorious authoritarian, Trump sure does get pushed around and stabbed in the back a lot, even by his own hirelings.

Trump has been a decent counterpuncher, but he’s a poor conspirator. He’s seldom been cynical enough about how low his foes would go against him. He doesn’t have the attention span to obsess enough over what his enemies are planning to do to him in the future. So he’s not often paranoid enough ahead of time about what his foes are up to. He’s just not cynical enough, expecting people to like him rather than to try to do him down.