Former FDA Director Scott Gottlieb: Trump Administration Declined More Pfizer Vaccines as Recently as November

Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb, now on the board of Pfizer, said that the United States was offered more of the company’s successful coronavirus vaccine as recently as November — but didn’t take the deal.

“There were multiple conversations with the U.S. government about taking more supply in the second quarter” of 2021, Gottlieb said. “The company wasn’t taken up on the offer as recently as November.”

The New York Times reported last week that Pfizer offered the Trump administration the chance to buy more than the 100 million doses agreed upon over the summer. In a baffling move, the Trump administration never made the deal.

Gottlieb, who was Trump’s FDA chief until April 2019, noted that the U.S. government said that the conversations with Pfizer happened in July, but that there was an offer for more vaccines on the table as recently as last month.

Gottlieb said other countries ended up taking those vaccines after the U.S. passed:

The federal government said those discussions happened in July. Now they’re saying they happened in October. So we’re getting closer to when I think the last discussions were, which was November. In the interim, other countries have put in orders for those supplies. I think they’re going to work this out. I think hopefully we’ll find a way to increase supply and be able to get the government what the government needs. This is an American company, we want to work with the U.S. government. But this has been a challenging process because there have been multiple conversations happening as recently as November, and now they’re coming back and wanting to restart those conversations when other commitments have been made in the interim.

“I think this will get worked out,” Gottlieb added. He noted that the United States has locked in Pfizer vaccines for the first quarter of 2021, but there could be a lack of supply starting in April.

The effort to immunize the population against Covid-19 is the largest vaccination task in U.S. history. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is the first of several to be authorized for emergency use by the FDA. On Sunday, the first shipments of the vaccine were sent out from the company’s Michigan facility.

Watch above, via CNBC.