On June 24, 2024 the US House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust, led by Chairman Thomas Massie released a report detailing “how the Biden Administration pressured the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to go beyond its regulatory authority to change its procedures, cut corners, and lower agency standards to approve the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine and authorize boosters” [1, 2]
“During the pandemic, politics overruled science at the government institutions entrusted with protecting public health. The FDA abandoned its congressional directive to protect citizens from false claims and undisclosed side effects, and instead ignored its own rules to pursue a policy of promoting the vaccine while downplaying potential harms.” [1]
The FDA “cut corners in its usually rigorous BLA process to brand the Pfizer EUA vaccine as the only fully licensed “safe and effective” COVID-19 vaccine on the market at the time”