US President Donald Trump has accused Food and Drug Administration and Pfizer of withholding their covid-19 vaccine candidate before November 3 elections to halt his winning chances.
The US Food and Drug Administration “and the Democrats didn’t want to have me get a Vaccine WIN, prior to the election, so instead it came out five days later – As I’ve said all along!” Trump said in a tweet.
Trump’s tweet came after Pfizer announced that it vaccine has been found 90 per cent effective after it was tested among tens of thousand volunteers, without any adverse effects.
The first set of results from our Phase 3 Covid-19 vaccine trials provides the initial evidence of our vaccine’s ability to prevent Covid-19,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla had said in a statement.
Trump alleged, “If Joe Biden were President, you wouldn’t have the Vaccine for another four years, nor would the @US_FDA have ever approved it so quickly. The bureaucracy would have destroyed millions of lives!”
The US president further said that FDA withheld the announcement for politicial reasons, adding that they lacked courage.
“As I have 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. Likewise, the @US_FDA should have announced it earlier, not for political purposes, but for saving lives!” Donald Trump tweeted.
Earlier in September, Trump had assured that a covid-19 vaccine would be availble in October.
“We’re very close to that vaccine as you know and I think much closer than I think most people want to say,” Trump had said while speaking to reporters, according to a report by Reuters. He had also said, “We think we can start sometime in October. So as soon as it’s announced we’ll be able to start. That will be from mid-October on. It may be a little bit later than that,” he had said.
Meanwhile, President-elect Joe Biden said that while the vaccine gives us hope, it is to understand that the battle against covid-19 is far from over.
“I congratulate the brilliant women and men who helped produce this breakthrough and to give us such cause for hope,” he said. “At the same time, it is also important to understand that the end of the battle against COVID-19 is still months away,” Biden said.
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