Not content to let Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. get all the credit for undermining the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines and rendering everyone utterly confused as to who still qualifies for the shot, President Donald Trump decided to weigh in on the hot-button issue.
You will not be surprised to learn that this did not make things any better. On Sunday, over on Truth Social, Trump lamented that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is being “ripped apart” over the question of COVID vaccine safety. Sort of an odd complaint coming from the person who appointed Kennedy, whose entire reason for existence is based on getting rid of vaccines based on unhinged conspiracy theories. What, exactly, did Trump expect?
The genius in the Oval Office claims the real problem is that drug companies have never shown the public that the vaccines are safe.
“I have been shown information from Pfizer, and others, that is extraordinary, but they never seem to show those results to the public. Why not???” he blathered. “They go off to the next ‘hunt’ and let everyone rip themselves apart, including Bobby Kennedy Jr. and CDC, trying to figure out the success or failure of the Drug Companies Covid work.”
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There’s an awful lot to unpack here. Trump seems to be saying that he, and he alone, has been shown information from Pfizer about the safety of the vaccine. Couldn’t Trump just show it to the rest of us? And as far as the complaint that Kennedy and the CDC can’t figure out if the vaccine was a success, have they considered looking at literally any scientific data?
Perhaps poor beleaguered Bobby Kennedy Jr. could start with, say, looking at data published over at the National Library of Medicine. That would be pretty convenient, given that it is hosted on the website of the National Institutes of Health, an agency that just happens to be part of HHS, overseen by one Bobby Kennedy.
Here’s a comprehensive review of the side effects and efficacy of four different COVID vaccines. Here’s a CDC page about vaccine reactions and adverse events for Pfizer’s vaccine. Here’s one on evaluating booster doses. Here’s a lengthy page on the CDC’s website discussing 13 different vaccine safety studies and helpfully summarizing the level of vaccine effectiveness in tables so that Trump wouldn’t have to actually read anything.
But wait, you might say. Those are just studies, not something directly from Pfizer. Doesn’t Pfizer owe us all an explanation, hmm? Well, for the layperson, Pfizer’s website has extensive debunking of misinformation regarding the safety of its COVID-19 vaccine, a thing they would not need to do if people like Kennedy were not currently overseeing the CDC. Or head on over to Pfizer’s clinical trials page and search by “Comirnaty,” the name of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. You’ll get a list of all their trials with links where you can download all the study data … links that are also helpfully available on, you guessed it, the government’s own clinical trials website. Here are Moderna’s clinical trials, some of which are still active.
The problem for Trump is that he was president for most of Operation Warp Speed, the massive public-private effort that led to the development of COVID-19 vaccines far quicker than expected. Trump ate that up, bragging in December 2020 that “Before Operation Warp Speed, the typical timeframe for development and approval, as you know, could be infinity. And we were very, very happy that we were able to get things done at a level that nobody has ever seen before. The gold standard vaccine has been done in less than nine months.”
Since Trump likes the legacy of being the fastest and bestest, he can’t really throw out the whole idea of COVID-19 vaccines the way true anti-vax conspiracists like Kennedy can. So, it has to be the fault of nefarious pharma companies that lied to the government or hid all their bad vaccine results.
“They show me GREAT numbers and results, but they don’t seem to be showing them to many others,” he claimed. “I want them to show them NOW, to CDC and the public, and clear up this MESS, one way or the other!!! I hope OPERATION WARP SPEED was as ‘BRILLIANT’ as many say it was.”
Trump can’t have it both ways, but he is certainly going to try. Even he knows that things are not looking good for Kennedy or the CDC right now. The firing of Susan Monarez, who Trump himself nominated for CDC director but who Kennedy later found insufficiently unhinged regarding vaccine conspiracies, was a haphazard mess. Actual medical professionals keep coming forward to explain that people do actually still need to get the COVID-19 vaccine, leading Kennedy to declare that pediatricians are all in the pocket of Big Pharma.
Somehow, it doesn’t seem like this will be fixed by Pfizer sending Trump clinical trial results, given that the man won’t even read a one-page memo. At least we’ll get to watch both Trump and Kennedy step on rake after rake, but that’s cold comfort without widespread access to lifesaving, necessary vaccines.
