Former CDC Director Hails WH Retreat on FDA’s More Rigorous Covid Vaccine Protocols: ‘This Means There Aren’t Going to Be Shortcuts on Safety’

Former CDC Director Tom Frieden hailed the news that the White House had backed off an earlier threat to block the FDA’s new, more rigorous safety protocols about any Covid vaccine. By extending the follow-up period of the Phase 3 trials by two months, the FDA’s rule would effectively rule out any chance of having a vaccine approved before Election Day.

Speaking with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Frieden was responding to a New York Times report on Tuesday afternoon that Trump’s inner circle, led by White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, had reversed an earlier decision to block the FDA’s new rule about emergency use authorization. President Donald Trump had previously criticized the FDA’s move — which was endorsed by all of the agency’s top public health officials — as “political.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci has expressed optimism that a Covid vaccine might be approved for deployment by the end of 2020 — but it would still take months for every American to be inoculated — even as Trump has repeatedly contradicted him and predicted one would be ready by Election Day. The timing of a possible vaccine has become a lightning rod of the 2020 election, with Democratic challenger Joe Biden declaring that he did not trust Trump on handling the vaccine.

Blitzer alluded to that ongoing controversy in his discussion with Frieden, noting that “these new guidelines from the FDA removing the political pressure on vaccine development, the entire process, now that authorization before Election Day is off the table.”

“That’s the way it looks,” Frieden said in response, praising the White House’s retreat as “encouraging, frankly.”

“What it means is there aren’t going to be shortcuts on safety. And the risk here is that one of the companies might have said, ‘Hey, it works, let’s give it to people, let’s make a big announcement.’ But that would have been done before the people who had gotten the vaccine had had time to have adverse reactions or even before we had known that the protection, if it protects, lasts a long time. So this is a step forward, this is a step that should help with confidence for a vaccine, if, as I say, it holds.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.