FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver made a claim on Twitter that’s getting a lot of attention, quite understandably.
Silver was commenting on Twitter on a Politico article about the Trump Administration pushing for fast-track approval of the COVID vaccine in 2020. It makes perfect sense that you would want to fast-track it, to help people as soon as it was possible.
Silver said, “‘Trump pushed for vaccine approvals too fast’ is the worst possible critique of the Trump administration’s COVID policy. That probably saved a lot of lives. If anything approval should have been faster.”
His next comment, though, was the barn burner. He said that “liberal public health elites” pressured Pfizer to “change its original protocols” and delay that vaccine approval, which “had the convenient side-effect of delaying any vaccine announcement until after the election” That action “deserves more scrutiny,” Silver declared.
President Donald Trump was thus denied the political “win” of the vaccine before the election.
Silver further noted that most public health officials “tend to be strong [Democratic] partisans” and that pushing Pfizer to slow-walk the approval “may have been politically motivated in whole or in part.” He said that it was a “story that deserves more reporting and I’ve done some poking around myself.”
This was something that President Donald Trump and others have speculated on in the past. Pfizer has denied delaying things for political reasons.
Silver said, “There is direct evidence. Pfizer changed (delayed) its original protocols as a result of a pressure campaign and then published its results on literally the first possible working day after the election outcome was determined.” Silver then referenced another point, a letter from September 25, urging that “no trial results be published “through at least late November”.
Silver of course was immediately fallen upon by folks on the left, suggesting he was spreading MAGA conspiracy.
But of course, we’ve seen a lot of efforts to hurt Trump that are far from a conspiracy, including the Clinton team’s involvement in the Steele dossier, which was then pushed to the FBI and used in an investigation against him for years. Even now, we see the Biden team’s involvement in the process that led to the FBI raid on Trump’s home. So, it’s not hard to believe at all.