Citing new information from British drugmaker GSK, U.S. lawmakers are pushing forward with a probe into a pandemic-era political controversy centered around the timing of trial results for Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine.
The House Judiciary Committee is looking into a tip that GSK brought to federal prosecutors in New York shortly after President Donald Trump won his second U.S. presidential election last fall, according to a May 15 press release.
"New information appears to suggest that senior Pfizer executives conspired to withhold data about Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine to influence the 2020 presidential election,” the committee claimed in its release this week.
Back in March, the The Wall Street Journal first reported that U.S. prosecutors were looking into claims Pfizer delayed the release of its COVID-19 vaccine until after the 2020 election.
The claims arose after former a Pfizer R&D leader, Philip Dormitzer, M.D., Ph.D., pivoted to GSK in 2021 and allegedly later told colleagues that his former employer waited on announcing the success of its COVID vaccine trial until after the 2020 election.
But, in a statement at the time, Dormitzer told Fierce Pharma that he and others at Pfizer did "everything we could" to get to the FDA at the "very first possible moment."
The scientist added that "any other interpretation of my comments about the pace of the vaccine’s development would be incorrect.”
The new information cited by the House Judiciary Committee comes from GSK’s April response to a request from the committee for more details. In its response, the British drugmaker told the lawmakers that Dormitzer had approached a GSK human resources employee to discuss a potential relocation in November 2024, “shortly after the election.”
Dormitzer, “visibly upset,” requested a move to Canada based on concerns that he could be investigated by the Trump administration due to his role in developing Pfizer’s COVID vaccine, GSK told the committee.
"According to the human resources representative, when asked what prompted his request, Dr. Dormitzer made a comment to the effect of: 'Let's just say it wasn't a coincidence, the timing of the vaccine,'" GSK wrote in its letter to the committee, according to the press release.
The former employee, who according to his LinkedIn “had a leadership role” in the development of Comirnaty, did not implicate Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla, Ph.D., as being aware of the delay, according to GSK.
Nonetheless, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, has sent letters (PDF) to both Bourla and Dormitzer asking for all documents and communications related to the reporting of the COVID vaccine data. Dormitzer was also asked to testify in a transcribed interview. Dormitzer left GSK in December 2024.
A GSK spokesperson declined to comment on the matter, while Pfizer and Dormitzer did not immediately respond to Fierce Pharma’s request for comment.
On Nov. 9, 2020, Pfizer and partner BioNTech announced that the vaccine had met the first effectiveness bar in a key study. The news came a week after Election Day in 2020 and shortly after former President Joe Biden was projected to win on Nov. 7.
Trump quickly took to social media to slam the 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."
In a CNN interview shortly after the Nov. 9 announcement, Bourla said that even he had yet to see the full data set and had only learned about the results on Nov. 8.