The Trump administration pressured the Food and Drug Administration to authorize unproven treatments for Covid and the first Covid vaccine on an accelerated timeline. The reveal comes in a new report released by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis.
Senior Trump administration officials fought for the reauthorization of hydroxychloroquine, which is a drug that is typically used to treat malaria and lupus. Trump’s White House wanted the drug to be used after the FDA revoked its emergency clearance of it because data showed it was ineffective against Covid and furthermore could lead to potentially dangerous side effects.
The investigation also documented potential influence from former White House officials regarding the FDA’s decision to authorize convalescent plasma. It also showed the White House attempted to block the FDA from collecting additional safety data on Covid vaccines in order to get them to the public before the 2020 presidential election.
“The Select Subcommittee’s findings that Trump White House officials deliberately and repeatedly sought to bend FDA’s scientific work on coronavirus treatments and vaccines to the White House’s political will are yet another example of how the prior Administration prioritized politics over public health,” House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), who also chairs the subcommittee, said in a statement.
Clyburn said it was an assault on the nation’s public health institutions, and it undermined the country’s Covid response.
Trump, when he was president, publicly called out the FDA and its commissioner on multiple occasions. But the committee report now sheds even more light on just how persistent some of these White House efforts were.
A big part of the report focuses on Peter Navarro, a former adviser to Trump, who worked on the Trump administration’s Covid response.
According to emails collected over the course of the subcommittee’s investigation, Navarro and an adjunct virology professor at George Washington University, Steven Hatfill rallied other White House officials to pressure the FDA to reinstate the emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine after the agency revoked it in June 2020.
At one point, Hatfill characterized the disagreement between White House officials and the FDA as a forthcoming “knife fight” to an unnamed, outside ally over email.
The report also found that Navarro tasked Hatfill with coming up with a presentation that would convince the FDA to reauthorize the drug.
Hatfill and Navarro also sought to discredit other prominent health officials who spoke out against the use of hydroxychloroquine, including Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The two also discussed plans to get the Justice Department and the Department of Health and Human Service’s inspector general to conduct an investigation into Fauci and his use of emails. Hatfill wanted Fauci to be removed and pushed for his removal throughout the fall.
In multiple instances, the subcommittee said it found evidence of senior Trump officials planning to take actions that could benefit the administration politically.
Officials tried to pressure the FDA into authorizing convalescent plasma around the time of the Republican National Convention. The proposed investigation into Fauci would take place around the time of the 2020 presidential election in an attempt to sway voters in favor of Trump.
The Trump administration also tried to pressure the FDA to authorize the first Covid vaccines ahead of the presidential election in order to sway favor to him. When Hahn testified to the subcommittee in January 2022, he said that White House officials said they would not sign off on emergency use authorization language that required a 60-day safety follow-up for late-stage clinical trials.
Ultimately, the FDA went ahead with the 60-day follow-up plan without an explicit blessing from the White House, though the White House later cleared it.
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