One note he makes is that most excess deaths post-vaccine were in red states, and he estimates that Trump ‘embracing scientific reality and strongly urging people to get vaccinated’ could have saved 400k lives
This is not a counterfactual. This is what Trump actually did! He himself is vaccinated, and he encouraged vaccination publicly, including continuing to do so after he lost the presidency. The only real complaint to make here is that he maybe didn’t do it enough, because he has the political sense not to continually advocate for something that his supporters hate. So your statement that it wouldn’t have moved the needle is obviously correct, not because we need to reason about what would have happened but because we can observe what actually did happen.
I do agree that the one counterfactual that would have mattered would have been releasing the vaccine in September or October and allowing Trump to take credit for it. But Public Health decided that opposing Trump was more important than getting the vaccine out a few months early.
I don’t understand the last paragraph. Who, exactly, could have released “the vaccine” in September or October but didn’t? At the time of the 2020 US elections, the vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna and AstraZeneca were all still in their Phase III trials. (Actually, I’m not sure all of them had even started their Phase III trials.)
Are you saying that the companies developing the vaccines were leaned on by antitrumpistas and pressured to schedule their trials later to make sure nothing got released before the US elections? If so, I’d like to see some evidence. (The more obvious explanation would seem to be that they did things as quickly as internal and external bureaucracy permitted, which did after all end up being quite a lot quicker than usual.)
Or are you saying that the best explanation for their choosing not to seek an EUA for their vaccines before even beginning Phase III trials is some kind of pressure not to do anything that might make Trump look good? Again, if so, I’d like to see some evidence. (The more obvious explanation would seem to be that they didn’t want to release a vaccine that either was harmful or was suspected to be.)
Regulators did, in fact, end up slowing the process: In the first week of September, the FDA told vaccine makers to extend their clinical trials by several weeks beyond what they’d planned, in order to gather more safety data. That effectively postponed Pfizer’s request for an emergency use authorization of the mRNA vaccine it had developed with BioNTech until after the election.
There exist screenshots of a government official actually bragging on Twitter about having delayed the vaccine in order to avoid giving Trump the credit. I seem to recall Zvi posting these screenshots at some point, though it might have been someone else. In any case, you can find many, many articles dating from late 2020 and early 2021 conveying dueling narratives about whether the vaccine was in danger of being “rushed” (Dem talking point) or whether the FDA sandbagged the process for political reasons (Trump talking point). In any case, the basic facts seem undisputed:
The vaccine approval process could have been further expedited, and if it had proceeded at maximum speed it would have been completed in September or October 2020.
The Trump administration did in fact pressure the FDA to approve the vaccine in October.
The FDA did not approve the vaccine until after the election.
Which is an interesting thing to observe, because the narrative has since switched and “the vaccine was a rush job and is dangerous” is now a right-wing talking point while “the vaccine is perfectly safe” is now the mainstream position.
Edit to add: On close read I realize that I was conflating the successful end of the clinical trials and their public announcement with actual shots-in-arms readiness. Shots-in-arms readiness would probably not have been accomplished in October in any case, given the production pipeline and distribution problems, but the announcement of the successful trials, according to multiple sources, could plausibly have been as early as September.
I would be interested to see those screenshots. Without some similar smoking-gun moustache-twirling, it’s not clear how to distinguish “regulators were cautious as a pretext for not giving Trump a win” from “regulators were cautious because that’s what regulators do, and this was a thing being rolled out to millions of people”.
E.g., the Atlantic article observes that using EUAs for vaccines at all was previously unheard-of because the numbers of people potentially affected are so large. The 60-day period that was used doesn’t seem absurdly overcautious to me, though I am not in any way an expert on vaccine side effects. Nothing in those two articles looks to me like good evidence for nefarious intent behind whatever level of caution the FDA adopted.
Of course it’s possible that some regulators were cautious for “good” reasons (wanting to make sure the vaccines were safe, wanting to make it harder for people to think they weren’t) and some for “bad” reasons (not wanting Trump to get electoral gains from the vaccines). It’s possible that some were cautious for both sorts of reason. It’s also (I think obviously) possible that the Trump administration’s motives were similarly-but-oppositely mixed.
Knowing what we know now about (1) the actual safety and effectiveness of the vaccines and (2) the extent to which people avoided them because of safety concerns, it’s not clear to me whether getting them out sooner would have been good or bad overall. More to the point, at the time it wasn’t known how safe and effective they would turn out to be, and it seems plausible to me that (a) cutting the wait-and-look-for-side-effects period would in fact have led to a better outcome but that (b) it wasn’t a good idea in expectation at the time, since there might have turned out to be worse side effects than there actually were.
I had misremembered a few details, namely that Topol is an influential physician, not a government official. The gist remains.
There exists a less-malign interpretation here, which is that Topol might have had sincere concerns about the safety of the Pfizer vaccine. But I am not inclined to extend much charity. Topol explicitly states, repeatedly, that his goal was to “disrupt Trump’s plan” and prevent Trump from “getting a vaccine approved” before Nov 3. (Read Topol’s tweets quoted in the article, and click through to see the surrounding threads for more evidence.)
Who knows how decisive his influence was. Overall, I agree with your point that slowness is the default setting for the FDA, and that most people in the agency were slowing things down out of bureaucratic habit rather than explicit political motives, but there definitiely exist malign political actors like Topol.
There exist screenshots of a government official actually bragging on Twitter about having delayed the vaccine in order to avoid giving Trump the credit.
the only discrepancies between that and reality were that (1) he is not a government official, (2) he was not in a position to delay the vaccine (though it’s possible he influenced people who were), and (3) he doesn’t say anything about doing it in order to avoid giving Trump the credit.
My reading of Topol’s tweet is not “I tried to make sure Trump didn’t gain votes by making vaccines happen faster” but “I tried not to let the Trump administration exert pressure to make vaccines faster in order to gain votes”. (Those two things are fairly similar. The first difference between them is in what they regard as the default if no one exerts any pressure. The first: if no pressure, vaccines roll out quickly; pressure is exerted to get them rolled out slowly. The second: if no pressure, vaccines roll out slowly; pressure is exerted to get them rolled out quickly. The second difference between them is in who is alleged to be acting from political motive.)
Topol’s tweets (and other things) quoted in the article are all, on the surface at least, making the argument that rushing the vaccines out would do net harm, most importantly by reducing confidence in their safety. Since in fact a lot of people didn’t get vaccinated on safety grounds (even with the release timetable that actually happened) it’s hard for me to see that as very unreasonable.
Of course it’s possible that Topol’s words are dishonest, that his real motivation was all political, that the same goes for e.g. the other medical people who signed his open letter to Pfizer, and that all of them were happy to let thousands die if it harmed Donald Trump electorally. Politics is a hell of a drug. But since there’s a pretty plausible less-malevolent explanation—they really thought that waiting a bit would reduce real and perceived side-effect risk, and they thought that there was political pressure to rush things that needed countering—and since we are agreed that slowness is the FDA’s default setting, I’d want to see some evidence of political motivation and so far I haven’t.
(1) he is not a government official, (2) he was not in a position to delay the vaccine (though it’s possible he influenced people who were), and (3) he doesn’t say anything about doing it in order to avoid giving Trump the credit.
You are right about (1), (2) strikes me as an irrelevant distinction once we’ve granted (1), and I flat disagree about (3).
Where he describes his motivation, he explicitly describes the need to frustrate Trump’s plans. He does this repeatedly. He focuses on this much more than he focuses on safety. The overwhelmingly likely interpretation, IMO, is that safety was a pretext and opposing Trump was the goal, and this interpretation is favored by Topol himself when he describes his actions as “opposing Trump” more often than “protecting Americans”.
He says he’s glad he frustrated Trump’s plans. It looks to me as if by “Trump’s plans” he means “Trump’s plans to push vaccines out before they have been adequately tested, in order to win votes”, and as if (at least as far as his explicit utterances go) he wants to frustrate those plans because he thinks pushing vaccines out before they have been adequately tested is dangerous and/or confidence-harming.
I should maybe say explicitly: I am making no claim about whether in fact Trump, or his administration, had any such plans, nor exactly what their motivations were if they did. I am just looking at what Topol’s stated motivations were, and they do not look to me the way you say they look to you. I agree that it is possible that his real motivations were more political than his stated motivations (many people’s often are), but since IIUC you are saying that Topol bragged about doing what he did in order to avoid giving Trump the credit I think it matters what his stated motivations were. And not once do I see him saying anything that’s more like “we should do this because otherwise Trump might win the election” than like “we should do this because otherwise we will be deploying the vaccines before they are known to be safe, and before the public will trust that they are known to be safe”.
Here are all the things in that MIT Technology Review article that tell us (by quoting or otherwise; unless I’ve goofed, things with quotation marks around them are alleged to be Topol’s actual words) what Topol said.
(article text) Topol [...] aimed to prevent Trump from greenlighting a vaccine before scientists could prove it to be safe and effective. To Topol, developing an effective vaccine against covid-19 is “the biggest event in our generation” and one that should be evaluated on the basis of scientific data, not political implications.
Article explicitly claims Topol’s concern is that political pressure is leading to bad medical decisions.
To prevent such a scenario, Topol led online calls for FDA commissioner Steve Hahn to resign after his agency was criticized for cowing to political pressure—and then phoned Hahn a number of times to urge him to resist Trump’s influence. Topol also targeted Pfizer, the only pharmaceutical company likely to seek approval of its vaccine before Election Day, which eventually set up a meeting for him with its vaccine team.
Hahn: Article explicitly claims Topol was complaining about political influence and urging that it be resisted.
Pfizer: No specific claims about Topol’s (real or claimed) motivation.
(Topol tweet) “We were on a path for a vaccine emergency authorization (EUA) before November 3rd. Thanks to the FDA, Trump’s plan was disrupted. That won’t happen. First real sign of the independence of FDA since the pandemic started. And that’s important.”
Not very explicit either way, but does claim that being slower about it means the FDA is being more independent which seems like a clear claim that if they’d done it quicker it would have been because of political pressure.
(article text) What alarmed Topol and other critics is that Hahn played along and badly misrepresented the facts, saying plasma transfusions would save 35 out of 100 covid-19 patients. [...] “That was the moment I decided, it’s time to become an activist,” says Topol. “I got very upset. I said he should resign or tell the truth. There was just this complete subservience to Trump.”
Topol is explicitly claiming that Hahn (FDA Commissioner) was making false medical claims because of political pressure.
(article text; referring to the stuff about plasma transfusions) “That event was fundamental,” says Topol. “I think [the FDA was] sensitive to external pressure that this cannot be tolerated with a vaccine.”
Doesn’t say anything about Topol’s stated or real motivations.
(article text) Topol says he and Hahn had several private phone conversations in the weeks following the debacle. What they said is confidential, but all signs indicate that Topol urged Hahn to defy the White House effort to deliver a vaccine by Election Day. “I came to respect him,” says Topol. “I was convinced he’d do the right thing.”
Doesn’t say much about Topol’s stated or real motivations, other than that he claimed to want Hahn to do the right thing. (Which of course is equally consistent with “the right thing, namely to keep the vaccines safe and confidence high by not putting them out prematurely” and with “the right thing, namely to avoid giving Trump a political win that might help him win the election”.)
(Topol tweet) “So the choke point here is that a company has to apply for an EUA. @realDonaldTrump @SecAzar cannot get a vaccine approved unless that happens. So our attention turns to Pfizer since it has been outspoken about its intent and timetable. 7/”
Nothing about motivation here at all. It’s part of a Twitter thread in which Topol says he’s explaining why he and some other doctors wrote to Pfizer. Later in the thread he says he believes Pfizer’s safety people “would share the concerns in our letter and want as strong an evidence base as possible, without holding up the vaccine approval, to support any vaccine’s safety & efficacy. That would *exceed* the recent FDA EUA tightening of 2 months median follow-up”; I think by “exceed” he means that Pfizer’s safety team would want to be slower rather than that they would want to be faster. He also says “the efficacy proof is lower than ideal” (i.e., we’d get better evidence by being less hasty), “the stakes here could not be higher. It’s our main exit strategy from the pandemic and we have to get it right” (i.e., he’s explicitly claiming that his motivation is to make sure that “we get it right”), and “That will help engender the public trust that is desperately needed. It will set the stage for high standards and success of multiple vaccine programs, which we also need. And the phenomenal science and velocity that got us to this point will not be put at risk.” (i.e., haste runs the risk of wasting all that hard work if it means the public doesn’t trust the vaccines that result).
(article text, initially quoting Topol) “Whether you are Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, or Moderna, you want to win the race. But that is a different motivation than Trump has. He’s in a different contest,” says Topol. “Trump wants to win, but we need all the companies to win, because none can make enough vaccine [on] their own.” Any push to rush through a vaccine approval, in other words, would be motivated politically more than medically. Even though the pandemic is killing more than 600 people a day in the US, Topol doesn’t believe very much can be gained by declaring success a few weeks early. “We’re still going to be physical distancing and wearing masks after a vaccine. It’s not magic,” he says. “It’s more important that we get it right.”
I don’t really understand Topol’s argument in the first quoted bit. The article claims it means he’s worried that the push for quicker vaccine release is politically motivated, and that Topol is explicitly considering the tradeoff where faster release starts helping people sooner.
(article text) The White House had been holding up publication of an FDA recommendation that companies developing any covid-19 vaccine should search for side effects for at least two months in half their trial patients. [...] the FDA transmitted its recommendation to a key vaccine advisory committee, in what outside observers viewed as an end run past the White House. [...] But Topol believes Hahn and his deputies “stood up to Trump for the first time” and executed a “masterful” tactical maneuver.
Doesn’t say anything about Topol’s motivations, real or feigned.
That was rather long and tedious; my apologies. But the point is: Topol claims many times (and the article does, too) that Topol’s motivation was to do what is actually and visibly safe, and that the politically-motivated pressure was coming from the White House. Once again, of course he might have been lying, or he might have been motivated both by wanting the vaccines to be known to be safe and by wanting to deny Trump a political win. But, at least as far as this goes, it is simply not at all true that Topol said that his motivation was to deny Trump a political win. He said, over and over, that his motivation was to make sure the COVID-19 vaccines were known to be safe, despite (what he claimed to be) political pressure from the White House that put that at risk.
(For what it’s worth, my guess is that Topol genuinely believed that being slower about getting the vaccines authorized was better on medical and public-confidence grounds. And given what we actually saw with public confidence in the vaccines’ safety it’s not at all clear he was wrong about that. My guess is that he also much preferred Donald Trump not to get a political win. I don’t know what influence that had on his actions but, again, since his main argument was “if we rush these out then the public might not trust their safety” and what actually happened after they were not-quite-so-rushed out was that big chunks of the public didn’t trust their safety and many explicitly said that that was because they were rushed out, it seems like “he would have done the same even if he’d had no political motive at all” is pretty plausible.)
I oversold my original statement due to having remembered a slightly more sensational version of events. Nonetheless I stand by my interpretation of the tweets; others can read them for themselves and make up their own minde.
This is not a counterfactual. This is what Trump actually did! He himself is vaccinated, and he encouraged vaccination publicly, including continuing to do so after he lost the presidency. The only real complaint to make here is that he maybe didn’t do it enough, because he has the political sense not to continually advocate for something that his supporters hate. So your statement that it wouldn’t have moved the needle is obviously correct, not because we need to reason about what would have happened but because we can observe what actually did happen.
I do agree that the one counterfactual that would have mattered would have been releasing the vaccine in September or October and allowing Trump to take credit for it. But Public Health decided that opposing Trump was more important than getting the vaccine out a few months early.
I don’t understand the last paragraph. Who, exactly, could have released “the vaccine” in September or October but didn’t? At the time of the 2020 US elections, the vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna and AstraZeneca were all still in their Phase III trials. (Actually, I’m not sure all of them had even started their Phase III trials.)
Are you saying that the companies developing the vaccines were leaned on by antitrumpistas and pressured to schedule their trials later to make sure nothing got released before the US elections? If so, I’d like to see some evidence. (The more obvious explanation would seem to be that they did things as quickly as internal and external bureaucracy permitted, which did after all end up being quite a lot quicker than usual.)
Or are you saying that the best explanation for their choosing not to seek an EUA for their vaccines before even beginning Phase III trials is some kind of pressure not to do anything that might make Trump look good? Again, if so, I’d like to see some evidence. (The more obvious explanation would seem to be that they didn’t want to release a vaccine that either was harmful or was suspected to be.)
Or what?
https://nypost.com/2022/09/12/it-seems-clear-dems-pressured-the-fda-to-delay-the-covid-vaccine-to-hurt-trump/
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/01/fda-covid-vaccine-slow-rollout-trump/621284/
There exist screenshots of a government official actually bragging on Twitter about having delayed the vaccine in order to avoid giving Trump the credit. I seem to recall Zvi posting these screenshots at some point, though it might have been someone else. In any case, you can find many, many articles dating from late 2020 and early 2021 conveying dueling narratives about whether the vaccine was in danger of being “rushed” (Dem talking point) or whether the FDA sandbagged the process for political reasons (Trump talking point). In any case, the basic facts seem undisputed:
The vaccine approval process could have been further expedited, and if it had proceeded at maximum speed it would have been completed in September or October 2020.
The Trump administration did in fact pressure the FDA to approve the vaccine in October.
The FDA did not approve the vaccine until after the election.
Which is an interesting thing to observe, because the narrative has since switched and “the vaccine was a rush job and is dangerous” is now a right-wing talking point while “the vaccine is perfectly safe” is now the mainstream position.
Edit to add: On close read I realize that I was conflating the successful end of the clinical trials and their public announcement with actual shots-in-arms readiness. Shots-in-arms readiness would probably not have been accomplished in October in any case, given the production pipeline and distribution problems, but the announcement of the successful trials, according to multiple sources, could plausibly have been as early as September.
Thanks.
I would be interested to see those screenshots. Without some similar smoking-gun moustache-twirling, it’s not clear how to distinguish “regulators were cautious as a pretext for not giving Trump a win” from “regulators were cautious because that’s what regulators do, and this was a thing being rolled out to millions of people”.
E.g., the Atlantic article observes that using EUAs for vaccines at all was previously unheard-of because the numbers of people potentially affected are so large. The 60-day period that was used doesn’t seem absurdly overcautious to me, though I am not in any way an expert on vaccine side effects. Nothing in those two articles looks to me like good evidence for nefarious intent behind whatever level of caution the FDA adopted.
Of course it’s possible that some regulators were cautious for “good” reasons (wanting to make sure the vaccines were safe, wanting to make it harder for people to think they weren’t) and some for “bad” reasons (not wanting Trump to get electoral gains from the vaccines). It’s possible that some were cautious for both sorts of reason. It’s also (I think obviously) possible that the Trump administration’s motives were similarly-but-oppositely mixed.
Knowing what we know now about (1) the actual safety and effectiveness of the vaccines and (2) the extent to which people avoided them because of safety concerns, it’s not clear to me whether getting them out sooner would have been good or bad overall. More to the point, at the time it wasn’t known how safe and effective they would turn out to be, and it seems plausible to me that (a) cutting the wait-and-look-for-side-effects period would in fact have led to a better outcome but that (b) it wasn’t a good idea in expectation at the time, since there might have turned out to be worse side effects than there actually were.
Found it (scroll down to “Eric Topol is the worst”).
Related news article that goes over the key points
I had misremembered a few details, namely that Topol is an influential physician, not a government official. The gist remains.
There exists a less-malign interpretation here, which is that Topol might have had sincere concerns about the safety of the Pfizer vaccine. But I am not inclined to extend much charity. Topol explicitly states, repeatedly, that his goal was to “disrupt Trump’s plan” and prevent Trump from “getting a vaccine approved” before Nov 3. (Read Topol’s tweets quoted in the article, and click through to see the surrounding threads for more evidence.)
Who knows how decisive his influence was. Overall, I agree with your point that slowness is the default setting for the FDA, and that most people in the agency were slowing things down out of bureaucratic habit rather than explicit political motives, but there definitiely exist malign political actors like Topol.
So when you said
the only discrepancies between that and reality were that (1) he is not a government official, (2) he was not in a position to delay the vaccine (though it’s possible he influenced people who were), and (3) he doesn’t say anything about doing it in order to avoid giving Trump the credit.
My reading of Topol’s tweet is not “I tried to make sure Trump didn’t gain votes by making vaccines happen faster” but “I tried not to let the Trump administration exert pressure to make vaccines faster in order to gain votes”. (Those two things are fairly similar. The first difference between them is in what they regard as the default if no one exerts any pressure. The first: if no pressure, vaccines roll out quickly; pressure is exerted to get them rolled out slowly. The second: if no pressure, vaccines roll out slowly; pressure is exerted to get them rolled out quickly. The second difference between them is in who is alleged to be acting from political motive.)
Topol’s tweets (and other things) quoted in the article are all, on the surface at least, making the argument that rushing the vaccines out would do net harm, most importantly by reducing confidence in their safety. Since in fact a lot of people didn’t get vaccinated on safety grounds (even with the release timetable that actually happened) it’s hard for me to see that as very unreasonable.
Of course it’s possible that Topol’s words are dishonest, that his real motivation was all political, that the same goes for e.g. the other medical people who signed his open letter to Pfizer, and that all of them were happy to let thousands die if it harmed Donald Trump electorally. Politics is a hell of a drug. But since there’s a pretty plausible less-malevolent explanation—they really thought that waiting a bit would reduce real and perceived side-effect risk, and they thought that there was political pressure to rush things that needed countering—and since we are agreed that slowness is the FDA’s default setting, I’d want to see some evidence of political motivation and so far I haven’t.
You are right about (1), (2) strikes me as an irrelevant distinction once we’ve granted (1), and I flat disagree about (3).
Where he describes his motivation, he explicitly describes the need to frustrate Trump’s plans. He does this repeatedly. He focuses on this much more than he focuses on safety. The overwhelmingly likely interpretation, IMO, is that safety was a pretext and opposing Trump was the goal, and this interpretation is favored by Topol himself when he describes his actions as “opposing Trump” more often than “protecting Americans”.
He says he’s glad he frustrated Trump’s plans. It looks to me as if by “Trump’s plans” he means “Trump’s plans to push vaccines out before they have been adequately tested, in order to win votes”, and as if (at least as far as his explicit utterances go) he wants to frustrate those plans because he thinks pushing vaccines out before they have been adequately tested is dangerous and/or confidence-harming.
I should maybe say explicitly: I am making no claim about whether in fact Trump, or his administration, had any such plans, nor exactly what their motivations were if they did. I am just looking at what Topol’s stated motivations were, and they do not look to me the way you say they look to you. I agree that it is possible that his real motivations were more political than his stated motivations (many people’s often are), but since IIUC you are saying that Topol bragged about doing what he did in order to avoid giving Trump the credit I think it matters what his stated motivations were. And not once do I see him saying anything that’s more like “we should do this because otherwise Trump might win the election” than like “we should do this because otherwise we will be deploying the vaccines before they are known to be safe, and before the public will trust that they are known to be safe”.
Here are all the things in that MIT Technology Review article that tell us (by quoting or otherwise; unless I’ve goofed, things with quotation marks around them are alleged to be Topol’s actual words) what Topol said.
(article text) Topol [...] aimed to prevent Trump from greenlighting a vaccine before scientists could prove it to be safe and effective. To Topol, developing an effective vaccine against covid-19 is “the biggest event in our generation” and one that should be evaluated on the basis of scientific data, not political implications.
Article explicitly claims Topol’s concern is that political pressure is leading to bad medical decisions.
To prevent such a scenario, Topol led online calls for FDA commissioner Steve Hahn to resign after his agency was criticized for cowing to political pressure—and then phoned Hahn a number of times to urge him to resist Trump’s influence. Topol also targeted Pfizer, the only pharmaceutical company likely to seek approval of its vaccine before Election Day, which eventually set up a meeting for him with its vaccine team.
Hahn: Article explicitly claims Topol was complaining about political influence and urging that it be resisted.
Pfizer: No specific claims about Topol’s (real or claimed) motivation.
(Topol tweet) “We were on a path for a vaccine emergency authorization (EUA) before November 3rd. Thanks to the FDA, Trump’s plan was disrupted. That won’t happen. First real sign of the independence of FDA since the pandemic started. And that’s important.”
Not very explicit either way, but does claim that being slower about it means the FDA is being more independent which seems like a clear claim that if they’d done it quicker it would have been because of political pressure.
(article text) What alarmed Topol and other critics is that Hahn played along and badly misrepresented the facts, saying plasma transfusions would save 35 out of 100 covid-19 patients. [...] “That was the moment I decided, it’s time to become an activist,” says Topol. “I got very upset. I said he should resign or tell the truth. There was just this complete subservience to Trump.”
Topol is explicitly claiming that Hahn (FDA Commissioner) was making false medical claims because of political pressure.
(article text; referring to the stuff about plasma transfusions) “That event was fundamental,” says Topol. “I think [the FDA was] sensitive to external pressure that this cannot be tolerated with a vaccine.”
Doesn’t say anything about Topol’s stated or real motivations.
(article text) Topol says he and Hahn had several private phone conversations in the weeks following the debacle. What they said is confidential, but all signs indicate that Topol urged Hahn to defy the White House effort to deliver a vaccine by Election Day. “I came to respect him,” says Topol. “I was convinced he’d do the right thing.”
Doesn’t say much about Topol’s stated or real motivations, other than that he claimed to want Hahn to do the right thing. (Which of course is equally consistent with “the right thing, namely to keep the vaccines safe and confidence high by not putting them out prematurely” and with “the right thing, namely to avoid giving Trump a political win that might help him win the election”.)
(Topol tweet) “So the choke point here is that a company has to apply for an EUA. @realDonaldTrump @SecAzar cannot get a vaccine approved unless that happens. So our attention turns to Pfizer since it has been outspoken about its intent and timetable. 7/”
Nothing about motivation here at all. It’s part of a Twitter thread in which Topol says he’s explaining why he and some other doctors wrote to Pfizer. Later in the thread he says he believes Pfizer’s safety people “would share the concerns in our letter and want as strong an evidence base as possible, without holding up the vaccine approval, to support any vaccine’s safety & efficacy. That would *exceed* the recent FDA EUA tightening of 2 months median follow-up”; I think by “exceed” he means that Pfizer’s safety team would want to be slower rather than that they would want to be faster. He also says “the efficacy proof is lower than ideal” (i.e., we’d get better evidence by being less hasty), “the stakes here could not be higher. It’s our main exit strategy from the pandemic and we have to get it right” (i.e., he’s explicitly claiming that his motivation is to make sure that “we get it right”), and “That will help engender the public trust that is desperately needed. It will set the stage for high standards and success of multiple vaccine programs, which we also need. And the phenomenal science and velocity that got us to this point will not be put at risk.” (i.e., haste runs the risk of wasting all that hard work if it means the public doesn’t trust the vaccines that result).
(article text, initially quoting Topol) “Whether you are Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, or Moderna, you want to win the race. But that is a different motivation than Trump has. He’s in a different contest,” says Topol. “Trump wants to win, but we need all the companies to win, because none can make enough vaccine [on] their own.” Any push to rush through a vaccine approval, in other words, would be motivated politically more than medically. Even though the pandemic is killing more than 600 people a day in the US, Topol doesn’t believe very much can be gained by declaring success a few weeks early. “We’re still going to be physical distancing and wearing masks after a vaccine. It’s not magic,” he says. “It’s more important that we get it right.”
I don’t really understand Topol’s argument in the first quoted bit. The article claims it means he’s worried that the push for quicker vaccine release is politically motivated, and that Topol is explicitly considering the tradeoff where faster release starts helping people sooner.
(article text) The White House had been holding up publication of an FDA recommendation that companies developing any covid-19 vaccine should search for side effects for at least two months in half their trial patients. [...] the FDA transmitted its recommendation to a key vaccine advisory committee, in what outside observers viewed as an end run past the White House. [...] But Topol believes Hahn and his deputies “stood up to Trump for the first time” and executed a “masterful” tactical maneuver.
Doesn’t say anything about Topol’s motivations, real or feigned.
That was rather long and tedious; my apologies. But the point is: Topol claims many times (and the article does, too) that Topol’s motivation was to do what is actually and visibly safe, and that the politically-motivated pressure was coming from the White House. Once again, of course he might have been lying, or he might have been motivated both by wanting the vaccines to be known to be safe and by wanting to deny Trump a political win. But, at least as far as this goes, it is simply not at all true that Topol said that his motivation was to deny Trump a political win. He said, over and over, that his motivation was to make sure the COVID-19 vaccines were known to be safe, despite (what he claimed to be) political pressure from the White House that put that at risk.
(For what it’s worth, my guess is that Topol genuinely believed that being slower about getting the vaccines authorized was better on medical and public-confidence grounds. And given what we actually saw with public confidence in the vaccines’ safety it’s not at all clear he was wrong about that. My guess is that he also much preferred Donald Trump not to get a political win. I don’t know what influence that had on his actions but, again, since his main argument was “if we rush these out then the public might not trust their safety” and what actually happened after they were not-quite-so-rushed out was that big chunks of the public didn’t trust their safety and many explicitly said that that was because they were rushed out, it seems like “he would have done the same even if he’d had no political motive at all” is pretty plausible.)
I oversold my original statement due to having remembered a slightly more sensational version of events. Nonetheless I stand by my interpretation of the tweets; others can read them for themselves and make up their own minde.