Trump’s tweet accusing “the deep state, or whoever” of trying to delay a vaccine until after the election set off alarms not just at the FDA but at the pharmaceutical companies developing the shots. Albert Bourla, the chief executive of Pfizer, was outraged. He had launched his own company’s Project Lightspeed nearly two months before Operation Warp Speed got underway and he was not about to allow his vaccine to be politicized. Trump’s tweet, he said later, was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”[4] Bourla rallied his counterparts at eight other drug companies to issue a joint public
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