Pfizer CEO dismisses Trump Jr’s claim Covid vaccine announcement was held back to damage Trump

Pfizer’s chief executive officer has dismissed suggestions that the timing of their announcement about a highly-promising coronavirus vaccine was delayed until after the election, in a bid to deny Donald Trump any electoral boost.

Albert Bourla, the CEO and chairman of the New York-based pharmaceutical giant, told CNBC on Monday that his company was “not working with the election as a timeline” and that they always planned to rely on the “speed of science.”

It is a phrase he has used before: on 1 October, he published an open letter after the presidential debate saying he was “disappointed that the prevention for a deadly disease was discussed in political terms rather than scientific facts”.

When Pfizer announced that their vaccine had been proven 90 per cent effective in preliminary trials, the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr, remarked: “The timing of this is pretty amazing. Nothing nefarious about the timing of this at all right?”

Meg Tirrell, the CNBC host, asked Mr Bourla why they said they planned to see results before the election, by the end of October, but were then delayed until shortly after.

She asked how Mr Bourla would respond if the president accused him of waiting until after the election.

“For us, the Election Day was always an artificial date," he said. 

"We were not working with the election as a timeline. We were working — I released a letter, if you remember, Meg, to our employees some time ago, saying that the only pressure we feel it is the pressure of the billions of people that are hoping on our vaccine. 

“And we are going to follow the speed of science so science spoke, and I was predicting that this will happen at the end of October, it happened a week later. 

“I think the most important thing right now for everyone, it is to feel the joy that it happened and it happened so well. 90 per cent.”

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Mr Bourla’s assurances did little to convince the president’s allies, who were framing the announcement as a bid to thwart his electoral chances.

“So Trump was right about the vaccine after all,” tweeted Fox News host Laura Ingraham.

Mr Trump Jr replied: "And they all knew it but kept it from the public on purpose.“Big Pharma hates Trump for taking on the gouging of Americans with drug pricing while offering the same drugs elsewhere in the world for pennies in the dollar.”

Officials within Pfizer are urging caution, however.

They say that it will take several weeks for the data to be analysed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which will ultimately give the green light.

Many thousands of doses will then begin to be distributed across the country, with frontline workers being vaccinated first. It will take several months until enough vaccinations have been given to make the virus disappear, and healthcare experts warn not to expect a return to “normality” until the summer.