Trump accuses Pfizer of delaying COVID-19 vaccine announcement until after election result

Outgoing American President Donald Trump has accused the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Pfizer of withholding the announcement on COVID-19 vaccine before elections to prevent him from getting a "vaccine win". On November 9, Pfizer-BioNTech announced that their COVID-19 vaccine was showing more than 90% efficacy in preventing the highly-infectious disease. However, Trump, who recently lost the Presidential vote to Joe Biden asserted that the Democrats conspired to not let him win and thus, the vaccine came five days after the poll.

In a subsequent tweet, he alleged that if Biden was the President instead of him, the Americans wouldn’t have got the vaccine for “another four years”, nor would the FDA ever approve it “so quickly”. Calling out Pfizer, he said that the company lacked “courage” to announce the vaccine before Nov 3. In addendum, he also slammed FDA asserting that they could have announced it earlier, not for political gains but for saving lives.

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Vaccine shows promising results

While the novel coronavirus infections recently passed the grim milestone of 50 million cases, American pharmaceutical company Pfizer said on November 9 that the interim analysis of its vaccine produced along with German partner BioNTech group has shown promising results, meaning it is on track to file an emergency use application with American regulators as early as later this month. 

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"Healing the development, Dr Bill Gruber, Pfizer’s senior vice president of clinical development told The Associated Press, “We’re in a position potentially to be able to offer some hope...We’re very encouraged.”

However, the November 9 announcement does not imply that the mRNA-based vaccine called BNT162b2, is imminent. The results are based on the interim analysis which considered at least 94 infections in a study that had enrolled at least 44,000 people in six nations including the United States. The American drugmaker has not yet provided any further details about the cases included in the analysis from an independent data monitoring board but informed that the initial protection rate might vary by the time the study would end. 

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