Years after the biopharmaceutical industry stepped up to create COVID-19 vaccines as the virus spiraled into a global pandemic, federal prosecutors are shining a light on a long-disputed political controversy with Pfizer at the center.
Shortly after President Donald Trump won his second presidential election in the U.S. last fall, British drugmaker GSK came to federal prosecutors in New York, bearing intel from employees' conversations that rival Pfizer allegedly delayed the 2020 release of its COVID shot study results, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The tip comes from GSK employees who worked with Philip Dormitzer, M.D., Ph.D., a Pfizer-turned-GSK scientist who headed up vaccine R&D and infectious disease research at GSK for three years before leaving the company in late 2024. Before that, Dormitzer spent six years at Pfizer, where he “had a leadership role” in the development of COVID vaccine Comirnaty as chief scientific officer for RNA and viral vaccines, according to his LinkedIn.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan has already interviewed at least two people in connection to the tip, including a GSK executive who took notes on a conversation with Dormitzer, one person familiar with the matter told WSJ. The prosecutors reportedly haven’t yet spoken with Pfizer officials in the investigation.
Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine development process was “driven by science and guided by the U.S. FDA back in 2020,” a company spokesperson told Fierce Pharma in an emailed statement. “We have consistently and transparently reiterated the facts and the timeline of the tireless work of scientists, regulators, and thousands of clinical trial volunteers who made the vaccine possible. Theories to the contrary are simply untrue and being manufactured.”
Dormitzer denied the claims, telling Fierce Pharma in a statement that he and his colleagues did "everything we could" to get to the FDA at the "very first possible moment" and that "any other interpretation of my comments about the pace of the vaccine’s development would be incorrect.”
GSK declined to comment on the matter.
The COVID pandemic emerged during the final year of Trump’s first term, making vaccine development a political talking point as the president pushed for a COVID vaccine to be authorized before the 2020 election, in which he was set to face off against Joe Biden.
Despite the pressure from the administration, the CEOs of nine pharma companies, including GSK and Pfizer, inked a joint pledge in September 2020. In it, they agreed to “stand with science” and not rush their COVID vaccine development, in a move meant to “help ensure public confidence in the rigorous scientific and regulatory process" under which vaccines and other medicines are evaluated.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla issued his own open letter in October of that year, clarifying the expected timeline for the company’s COVID vaccine and setting its emergency use authorization filing date with the FDA for the third week of November, after it had collected the necessary safety data. The company and Comirnaty partner BioNTech announced that the vaccine had met the first effectiveness bar on November 9, a week after Election Day and shortly after Biden was projected to win on November 7.
Bourla quickly sought to assuage allegations that the timing related to the election, telling CNN in an interview shortly after the announcement that even he had yet to see the full dataset and had first learned about the results on November 8.
Trump, however, took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to slam the company’s timing, declaring that he had “long said Pfizer and the others would only announce a vaccine after the Election, because they didn’t have the courage to do it before.”
These days, as the second Trump administration looks to shake up the U.S. drug industry with tariffs on foreign-made pharmaceuticals, Bourla is focused on his “very long-lasting relationship” with the president, he said in a December investor call.
The Pfizer chief executive, along with Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks and PhRMA CEO Stephen Ubl, joined the president and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for dinner at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in December.
The WSJ reports that Trump has personally asked Bourla if the vaccine was delayed, according to people familiar with the conversations, and Bourla reportedly answered in the negative.