President Donald Trump on Saturday accused the “deep state” in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of delaying a vaccine for the coronavirus.
“The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics,” Trump wrote on Twitter, specifically calling out FDA administrator Dr. Stephen Hahn.
He accused “deep state” bureaucrats of delaying the vaccine for political reasons.
“Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd,” Trump wrote. “Must focus on speed, and saving lives!”
It is unclear where Trump got information about the difficulty for pharmaceutical companies to get test subjects.
Pfizer and BioNTech announced Thursday that they were on track to seek regulatory review of a coronavirus vaccine as early as October 2020.
The two companies said they planned to supply up to 100 million doses worldwide by the end of 2020 and approximately 1.3 billion doses by the end of 2021 if they received approval.
Peter Marks, the director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, also made news on Friday for telling Reuters he would resign rather than let an unsafe coronavirus vaccine get approved.
“You have to decide where your red line is, and that’s my red line,” he said. “I would feel obligated [to resign] because in doing so, I would indicate to the American public that there’s something wrong”: