A Smoking Gun?

The World's Least Interesting Conspiracy Theory just got more interesting as new evidence emerged about Pfizer's mysterious shutdown of its vax clinical trial until the day after the 2020 election.

The House Judiciary Committee released today what might be smoking gun evidence that, as I’ve been arguing for most of this decade, Pfizer shut down work on its massively important clinical trial of its covid vax until the day after the 2020 election for political reasons.

If Trump had been able to crow about the success of his vaccine strategy for the last 24 hours of his 2020 campaign, that might well have flipped the fraction of one percent of the vote needed to get Trump to a 269-269 tied in the Electoral College, after which he likely would have been re-elected by the House voting as states.

As I may have mentioned once or twice over the last five years, Pfizer senior vice president William Gruber publicly admitted to reporter Matthew Herper of StatNews on November 9, 2020 that, stunningly, Pfizer had put all work on their crucial clinical trial of their vaccine on ice from late October 2020 until the day after the election:

In their announcement of the results, Pfizer and BioNTech revealed a surprise. The companies said they had decided not to conduct the 32-case analysis “after a discussion with the FDA.”

Pfizer had published a protocol committing itself to unblinding its clinical trial and publishing results after 32 volunteers in its trial came down with covid. If the data proved indeterminate at that point, it would repeat the process after 62 and then 92 cases.

Instead, they planned to conduct the analysis after 62 cases. But by the time the plan had been formalized, there had been 94 cases of Covid-19 in the study. It’s not known how many were in the vaccine arm, but it would have to be nine or fewer.

Gruber said that Pfizer and BioNTech had decided in late October that they wanted to drop the 32-case interim analysis. At that time, the companies decided to stop having their lab confirm cases of Covid-19 in the study, instead leaving samples in storage. The FDA was aware of this decision. Discussions between the agency and the companies concluded, and testing began this past Wednesday.

“This past Wednesday” was the day after the presidential election of 2020.

When the samples were tested, there were 94 cases of Covid in the trial. The DSMB met on Sunday.

This means that the statistical strength of the result is likely far stronger than was initially expected. It also means that if Pfizer had held to the original plan, the data would likely have been available in October, as its CEO, Albert Bourla, had initially predicted.

Here’s a press release today from the House Judiciary Committee:

New Information Suggests Senior Pfizer Executives Conspired to Delay COVID-19 Vaccine Clinical Testing to Influence 2020 Election

May 15, 2025

WASHINGTON, D.C. – House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent letters to the Chairman and CEO of Pfizer, Dr. Albert Bourla, and Pfizer's former Global Head of Vaccines Research and Development, Dr. Philip Dormitzer, after new information appears to suggest that senior Pfizer executives conspired to withhold data about Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine to influence the 2020 presidential election.

On March 26, 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported that authorities were in possession of information that originated from a former senior Pfizer executive related to whether Pfizer "sat on the positive results of clinical trials" of its COVID-19 vaccine so as to influence the 2020 presidential election. The Journal identified Dr. Philip Dormitzer as the former Pfizer executive, and reported that he disclosed this information to his then-current employer, GSK plc, in "late 2024" following President Trump's election.

On April 9, 2025, the Committee wrote to GSK requesting additional information about these allegations. GSK responded on April 16, 2025. In its letter to the Committee, GSK stated:

"In November 2024, shortly after the election, Dr. Dormitzer approached a representative from the GSK human resources team to speak about a potential relocation abroad. As the human resources representative recalls, in their meeting, Dr. Dormitzer was visibly upset; he requested that he be relocated to Canada due to concerns that he could be investigated by the incoming Trump Administration over his role in developing Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine. According to the human resources representative, when asked what prompted his request, Dr. Dormitzer made a comment to the effect of: 'Let's just say it wasn't a coincidence, the timing of the vaccine.'"

GSK further informed the Committee that Dr. Dormitzer had told GSK employees that "in late 2020, the three most senior people in Pfizer R&D were involved in a decision to deliberately slow down clinical testing so that it would not be complete prior to the results of the presidential election that year."

From a bio of Dormitzer:

Philip R. Dormitzer, MD, PhD, FIDSA joined GSK as Global Head of Vaccines Research and Development in December 2021. At GSK, he oversees a broad portfolio of Vaccine R&D programs, including the program that led to the recent licensure of a RSV vaccine. Previously, he was Chief Scientific Officer for Viral and RNA Vaccines at Pfizer, where he led programs that included Pfizer’s RSV vaccine program and the Pfizer-BioNTech RNA-based COVID-19 vaccine collaboration, which developed and distributed the world’s leading countermeasure against the COVID-19 pandemic.

Back to the House Judiciary press release:

Although it is unclear which Pfizer R&D employees were involved with Dr. Dormitzer in the decision to delay the clinical testing, Dr. Dormitzer represented to GSK that Pfizer's CEO was not aware of the delay.

Bourla had long been publicly adamant that Pfizer’s covid vaccine clinical trial should at least be able to announce efficacy (although perhaps not safety) results by late October 2020. But then he made his earnings call on, IIRC, October 27, 2020 and didn’t mention the trial. At least two Wall Street analysts took that as a sign that things didn’t look good for Pfizer’s potentially lucrative vaccine and issued negative reports on the stock.

The public was not informed that processing of clinical trial samples were put on ice until the day after the election, until the efficacy data was announced six days after the election on Monday, November 9. At that point, Gruber announced it to Herper, but nobody else besides me seemed to pay much attention.

I reviewed CEO Bourla’s memoir to get his version of the key events, but instead he just skips over the crucial decisions made in late October and goes from roughly early October to getting the call on November 8, the day after the media declared Biden the winner of the election, that the clinical trial was a big success in terms of efficacy. So, the dramatic core of his memoir was just missing.

It would seem strange to me for three of Bourla’s underlings to do something so radioactive without running it by their CEO first.

The usual excuse offered by my handful of critics on this subject was that Pfizer wasn’t making a political decision to delay, they were making a marketing decision. The trustworthiness of the upcoming vaccine had been attacked by Biden and Kamala in debates with Trump and Pence, and much other Democratic criticism had been directed at Bourla for insisting that he had invested so hugely in his trial’s sample size that it would reach its milestone in October.

In the steelman version of this argument, Pfizer didn’t delay from 32 to 94 cases to sabotage Trump but to quell Democratic criticism, to prevent Democrats from becoming anti-vax.

It’s a little hard to tell the significance of the difference between They put the trial on ice to sabotage Trump and They put the trial on ice to not anger Democrats.

But surely CEO Bourla would have been consulted on a marketing decision?

But, it also would seem strange to me that Gruber blithely mentioned the shutdown to reporter Herper on November 9 if Gruber was one of the two other underling conspirators.

Or perhaps Gruber had opposed the shutdown and was trying to get word out? If so, his plan worked great on me but on practically nobody else.

Well, the House Judiciary Committee is demanding more information, so we may finally get to the bottom of this story that has fascinated me for a half-decade.