Why Did Pfizer Stop The Count?
Apologies, but I'm playing catch-up a bit today. As a result I don't have time to summarize this longish blog by Steve Sailer, but I'm sure all of you are aware of the controversy--among conservatives, anyway--about Pfizer's apparent decision to withhold news about a successful vaccine until after the election. And to inform Biden before they informed Trump .
Sailer asks an interesting question:
In addition to addressing that very interesting question, Sailer offers this observation--which reflects on Pfizer's honesty again:
After all, it’s not like presidential politics were much in the news in October 2020 or that many interested and influential parties were up in arms over anything that might help the re-election campaign of Donald Trump (a.k.a., Literally Hitler).
And the companies flat out reject at Trump’s claims. “What people believe is their business,” Kathrin Jansen, who heads vaccine R&D at Pfizer, told ScienceInsider. “Quite frankly, we had no time and still have no time to deal with politics. We are at this 24/7, thousands of people working diligently to make this work. And for us, it was never about politics, it was always about just the disaster that we were in the middle of, all of us globally, seeing the devastation and the deaths.”
But if you read on, it turns out that after Pfizer decided to not fulfill its protocol, it wasn’t at this 24/7 anymore In fact, it put the nasal swabs that were coming in from test volunteers for confirmation of coronavirus infection in storage until the presidential campaign was over. Science goes on:
When the companies submitted their request for a protocol change, they had yet to accumulate 32 cases. If they had 32 cases before the change was approved, the protocol would have required them to report the results to FDA. In addition, if the results could impact the way investors traded company stock, they may also have been required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to make the results public. They decided to store the nasal swabs taken from participants who had suspected SARS-CoV-2 infections: If they didn’t test the swabs, they couldn’t confirm cases and therefore would avoid a protocol violation.
LOL.
They stopped the count.