I see plenty of conservative media. Have you watched Hannity or Tucker lately or just Newsmax OAN now that Trump attacked Fox. Regardless when does Hannity or Tucker present any facts??? Now Fox during the day is fine. Hard news just like CNN so if that’s what you’re talking about, I see very little difference what channel you watch. But most people aren’t watching during the day…they’re tuning into Looney Tunes at night.
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Yes they are facts. Nancy Pelosi wore red lipstick. Ok that’s something that happened, a fact. One of these wacko artists would take that and paint a picture that her lips were red not because of red lipstick but because she painted the children’s blood she drank onto her lips. This isn’t a fact but is being painted as one.
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You’re oh so wrong!!
You mentioned Hannity or Tucker. who are both on FOX, & another station OAN.
Two Conservative stations & you consider equality of the media.
Now lets consider Liberal stations, ABC, CNBC, CNN, MSNBC,CBS + all the Liberal Newspapers.
These are the Looney Tune stations.
No comparison for facts from the media. Truly Liberal media & constantly beating Trump… Terrible!!
Just because you don’t like what the media is saying does not mean that the media is wrong.
Also Hannity and Tucker are not news, they are opinions. Unlike real news, they are legally allowed to lie and speculate (but not to slander, as they keep getting sued for that). And, as clearly demonstrated by one recent lawsuit, even a judge agreed that nobody who watches them takes them seriously.
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Haha. I mean, of course the talk shows do say whatever they want, but difference that sure doesn’t stop the rest of the media from lying and speculating. Just look at their Trump coverage the last 4 years… it was chock full of speculation and more than a few lies, or as we say these days, “baseless claims” presented as facts. A bit off topic here, but still.
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I think much of your argument for… let’s call it “theory #2” (as numbered in OP) relies on the truth of this statement. I have no reason to doubt RCP, but I have many reasons to doubt anything that came out of that White House (because, you know, they operated on “alternative facts”). It’s possible that they had the information Sunday night and might have even traded on it, then chose to mislead people like yourself by pretending they didn’t know. I think it is more likely that Pfizer shared the news with both administrations. The CEO said they were in communications with both, though he didn’t detail the timing, which certainly leaves open the possibility of foul play, but there’s no way to know by whom without an investigation. As to why they were communicating with an incoming administration is a separate question, though I think it’s entirely appropriate as that’s kind of the whole point of a transition. My biggest gripe is that they released material information prematurely, but again we don’t actually know who traded on it. Quite a large group of people were privy the day before, and you’re taking an enormous leap to blame Biden or anyone close to him without a single shred of evidence.
The initial purpose and goals of Operation Warp Speed was to fund vaccine, theraputic, and diagnostic development and enable faster approval and production. What the CEO said was: “We were never part of the Warp Speed… We have never taken any money from the U.S. government, or from anyone." And it was true that they did not take any money at that time and they didn’t take anything for research, development, or production, the original functions of Warp Speed. All Pfizer had was an agreement to sell their final product to the US Government. The money for that agreement just happens to come from the funds allocated to Operation Warp Speed. And Pfizer quickly clarified this too, so I don’t buy your argument that they tried to “disclaim association with Warp Speed”. Seems like an honest mistake that was quickly corrected.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply.
The argument that PFE intentionally delayed the trial is outlined in their prior statements for how it would likely go and what they would disclose, as contrasted with what they eventually did do and when they disclosed it. It’s clear how they did the delays - not testing trial samples, not reporting to the data monitoring committee, etc. Whether that was intentional by PFE or for some other reason is open for discussion but it doesn’t depend on believing anything out of the White House. I would have given PFE a lot more benefit of the doubt if they disclosed more about the delays rather than how they didn’t follow through on their prior promises and issued legally accurate but very misleading press releases regarding their trial status just ahead of the election.
I’ve got to think that if Trump had been told the good news on Sun afternoon, he’d have tweeted about it as soon as he knew and not waited nearly a day later, just based on his personality. He was an hour after the 6:45am Mon press release before his comment on it via Twitter and I’m sure he would have tweeted it sooner if he was up that early on Mon once he noticed. Some of the trading chat rooms I follow for my work had every one of his tweets posted due to their potentially market moving impact, and after seeing a few years of that for context, let’s just say he wasn’t shy about commenting quickly on news events or talking up anything he thought would be viewed positively.
As for trading, for anyone in the government told this information in the context of their job, it would have been illegal under the STOCK act for them to trade off it (although of course they could have broken the law and done so, hoping not to get caught). This is part of why it was particularly suspicious to me to tell a non-government person inside information in advance of the public - looks like a big disguised campaign contribution and they don’t even have to pay for it! The money comes out of the losses of their trade counterparties. At the very least, it exposes a large loophole in our already lax insider trading and government corruption laws.
Well you’re willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, but I’m not given how they mislead the public and their investors about their vaccine trial disclosures just a week or two prior. I was making investing decisions based off their CEO’s official comments and negative inferences when they failed to disclose further results, so this isn’t some hypothetical situation. There was huge huge money riding in the results of that first trial in terms of the outlook for the whole world economy and everyone knew it.
As for technically getting paid, they had a contact for sale conditional on FDA approval, so it wasn’t money in the bank yet but with a 90% efficacy and no safety issues to date, it was pretty much a shoe in at that point. Technicalities either way, though, I agree, but they were the one who choose to emphasize this distinction and that goes a bit towards their motivations and state of mind.
I covered the transition point in OP, showing that any decision making regarding this actual vaccine wouldn’t happen for many weeks later since it was still waiting for more safety data and FDA review. All of the planning for vaccine rollout had been begun and the states informed months before, for all the good it seems to have done. In short, there wasn’t any special or timely need to tell Biden 12 hours in advance of the public and to apparently not extend the same courtesy to the current administration who might have had more case to actually use it in the preparations or planning somehow.
As for whether Biden or his family traded on it, you’re right - I don’t have any evidence. But if you followed the heavily suppressed reporting of Hunter’s shady financial dealings and how Biden was also implicated in those, it’s certainly not a stretch to think this… ethically challenged and financially motivated family would act on extremely valuable information when it was
- legal for them to do so,
- very unlikely to be discovered in any event, and
- nearly a sure thing
Heck, I would bet if you gave a bunch of Wall Street bank traders that type of information / setup, you’d have a good number of them trading on it even if it was illegal (just because many are greedy and unethical).
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I wasn’t talking about your argument #1, which is about delays at PFE. I was talking about #2 – “PFE told only Biden’s campaign hugely important market moving information ahead of the public”. I didn’t go through the things in #1 as it’s way too much to read.
I tend to agree. My thinking is that he himself was not informed, but some PFE contact point in the government was, whoever that is. It could be someone at the FDA, the task force, White House, etc.
Another thing that’s interesting, is that the memo from Biden specifically says that he was informed the night before. He could have easily omitted those few words and you’d have nothing to go on. I would think that if he had acted on that information, he would’ve also been smart enough to omit this little detail.
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Main caveat is we always knew the timing was going to be tight. The time horizon for vaccines being very end of Q4 2020 to early Q1 2021 was anticipated from way back when candidates first emerged. Plus, at that point a lot of the early voting and voting by mail had already been done so a few days may or may not have changed the outcome. We’ll never know.
But even assuming it was 100% deliberate, so what? Isn’t that just basically lobbying? Companies routinely lobby for various agenda items using large amounts of money. They time releases to coincide with their plans for maximum profit/effectiveness. That’s not illegal.
Also not news is that a lot of companies were not particularly thrilled with Trump’s unpredictability. Many may have preferred a more docile puppet and they expected GOP to keep control of the Senate to bar excessively socialist regulations (aka status quo on current loose regulations but without Trump’s political volatility for the markets).
Being in the scientific community myself, there had been a lot of exasperation at Trump’s populist BS over the years at the expense of science as well so I wouldn’t put it past Pfizer and others to have conveniently dragged some processes out as long as it did not affect their short-term bottom line. Since they were going to be first to market anyway, a few days would be immaterial on their profits from vaccine but if that delay meant a few more votes for Biden, that’s seems like run of the mill lobbying to me.
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So What?? The most liberal POTUS of the century is running the house.
.
Reason is… he doesn’t speak for himself, the left, left is doing the talking. Or rather the liberal lefties write the words & Joe signs the documents.
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Were the Novavax and JJ also delayed past November for political purposes?
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They were a lot farther behind starting their trials. PFE/BNTC was first out of the gate with their tech to get the process started, and hence were expected to be first to complete them.
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But releasing results a few days earlier would mean approval a few days earlier, which would mean shots in arms starting a few days earlier. Using the words of those who have spent months chastizing Trump, they sacrificed American lives for the sake of manipulating an election. In a race for a vaccine, weeks of intentional delays makes it clear that there were more important priorities than getting a vaccine. If it could’ve been a week earlier if not for those other priorities, how do we know it couldnt have been a month earlier or even sooner? The fact that most of that camp was swearing it would be well into 2021 before there was any vaccine, is the only reason why a few days delay in November seems like no big deal - it’s still way earlier than expected. But it wouldnt change the fact that a life saving treatment was intentionally delayed for political reasons.
You can explain away just about every aspect of this with plausible scenarios, any one thing isnt particularly notable. What it basically boils down to is, how many coincidences do you accept before starting to wonder if any of it is really a coincidence…
Xerty - you mention how they told Biden’s camp the night before, allowing them the opportunity for possible profits. Biden/his family might not have been subject to government employee restrictions, but wouldnt that - both the results, and the pending announcement - still be considered insider information since it wasnt publically available? I’d think anyone trading while knowing the results were going to be announced that morning would highly scrutinized.
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It’s only inside information for the company it comes from, PFE in this case, so if you traded PFE having been told that, yes, you would be breaking the law. But you could buy SPY or futures or travel companies or just about anything and made money that morning. Just because you know something before someone else doesn’t make it inside info - it has to come from someone at the company and it only applies to that company (or maybe a company they’re buying in a merger or something very closely related).
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I’m having a really hard time not applying the Occam’s razor to this scenario.
If you look at their SEC filings, the 2020/Q2 10-K (August) says:
If the Phase 2/3 trial is successful, we and BioNTech expect to be ready to seek Emergency Use Authorization or some form of regulatory approval as early as October 2020.
This was always going to be near an election, and always going to be close. There’s no surprise here.
The 2020/Q3 10-K (November 3rd) says:
We may receive a conclusive readout on efficacy from the Phase 3 trial in the near future. Assuming positive data and availability of the necessary safety and manufacturing data, we expect to be ready to seek Emergency Use Authorization in the U.S. as early as late November 2020.
Given that we’re seeing issues manufacturing capacity for other vaccines causing a political row in Europe, and that they’re fighting competitively against the AstraZeneca vaccine (which was one of the first to get funding from any government), it seems more plausible that they are moving as fast as possible and wanted to make sure that the trials got their expected outcome.
Remember that clinical trials usually take years, not months, and an emergency use authorization isn’t a guarantee if they can’t convince the board approving it. Approval in other countries would be at risk because many countries are going to defer to the FDA EUA.
They say this as much elsewhere in their 10-K filings under risk factors:
Uncertainties related to our efforts to develop a potential treatment or vaccine for COVID-19, including uncertainties related to the risk that our development programs may not be successful, commercially viable or receive approval or Emergency Use Authorization from regulatory authorities, risks associated with preliminary data, including the possibility of unfavorable new preclinical or clinical trial data and further analyses of existing preclinical or clinical trial data that may be inconsistent with the data used for selection of the BNT162b2 vaccine candidate and dose level for the Phase 2/3 study, the risk that clinical trial data are subject to differing interpretations and assessments, including during the peer review/publication process, in the scientific community generally, and by regulatory authorities, whether and when data from the BNT162 mRNA vaccine program will be published in scientific journal publications and, if so, when and with what modifications, disruptions in the relationships between us and our collaboration partners or third-party suppliers, the risk that other companies may produce superior or competitive products, the risk that demand for any products may no longer exist, risks related to the availability of raw materials to manufacture any such products, the risk that we may not be able to recoup costs associated with our R&D and manufacturing efforts and risks associated with any changes in the way we approach or provide additional research funding for potential drug development related to COVID-19, the risk that we may not be able to create or scale up manufacturing capacity on a timely basis or have access to logistics or supply channels commensurate with global demand for any potential approved vaccine or product candidate, which would negatively impact our ability to supply the estimated numbers of doses of our vaccine candidate within the projected time periods indicated, and pricing and access challenges for such products, including in the U.S.
If anything were to get botched, Pfizer would stand to lose billions of dollars worldwide in some of the biggest markets for the vaccine, such as Japan, Europe and China. I think that the executives care a lot more about their bonuses than who is currently president in the US.
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Could we get more details about the “independent review board” that approved the Pfizer results on that Sunday before the official Monday morning announcement? Who are they (are we even allowed to know?), how are they selected, are they bound by NDAs, etc? Is their approval required for but separate from the FDA emergency authorization? I didn’t see anything about them in the articles linked here and googling isn’t helpful as there’s way too much general info on the subject. I figured anyone invested in this topic may know more.
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I don’t know the details in this specific case, nor have I seen it discussed. Here’s the FDA on why and how DMC’s are used in blinded clinical trials generally -
https://www.fda.gov/media/75398/download
Their specific responsibilities in the PFE trial are in section 9.6 of their trial docs -
https://pfe-pfizercom-d8-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/2020-09/C4591001_Clinical_Protocol.pdf#page105
Is their approval required for but separate from the FDA emergency authorization?
It’s separate. The DMC are experts in the field that help overseeing the company’s trial, but are not a government body. The FDA will decide themselves and judge the preliminary trial results to decide if it merits an EUA. I suspect the DMC “approval” isn’t really required, but given how these fast trials with interim results were run, in practice they would have to approve it or the results wouldn’t be good enough to justify trying for an emergency approval.
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No the fact that it was set for 2021 was based on previous vaccine development times. Look into it. When was a previous vaccine developed in anything shorter than 18 months. mRNA vaccine have only been known for about 25-30 years and never been done on humans before now. These are the most untested vaccine in history as it is. That explains the projected time frame and they can easily explain any delays by invoking caution.
That’s basically the basis for conspiracy theory. If you want to see it as a massive political conspiracy, nothing will prove you wrong because you cannot prove a negative. Or you can look at the medical risks (effects of getting a bad product to market) and throw in the risk of losing credibility (brand damage) and money if anything went wrong. Considering the competition from Moderna, they could not get this wrong or they’d just been out of the picture. Look at the AstraZeneca phase 3 fail. They botched that trial and had to redo it costing them billions because that delayed them 2 months and still has a shadow of doubt over their results (linger question about competency). Self-interest is a very powerful explanation for Pfizer. And they were already going to be first to market so why rush and be first by a few more days at the risk of overlooking something that would cost them immensely more.
Finally, you have to accept that corps like Pfizer have little actual interest in the public health. Patients are consumers, that’s about the extent of how much they care. Why else the shift of emphasis in research on long-term use drugs? Those are way more profitable. They regularly put profits ahead of public interest so no reason that would not be the case in this pandemic too. If they had determined that Biden was better for their bottom line than Trump, I’d not be surprised if that did not factor into their timing of information release. Would not have been the sole factor but would they take it into account? I bet they would.
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Or the defence of a conspiracy. 
A couple years later and boy the government contracting has sure gone Pfizer’s way under the Biden administration.
https://www.yahoo.com/now/pfizer-won-pandemic-profit-influence-032727876.html
Now its mRNA vaccine holds 70 percent of the U.S. and European markets. And its antiviral Paxlovid is the pill of choice to treat early symptoms of covid. This year, the company expects to rake in more than $50 billion in global revenue from the two medications alone.
Paxlovid’s value to vaccinated patients isn’t yet clear, and Pfizer’s covid vaccine doesn’t entirely prevent infections, although each booster temporarily restores some protection. Yet, while patients may recoil at the need for repeated injections—two boosters are now recommended for people 50 and older—the requirement is gold for investors.
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