Donald Trump has appeared to cast doubt on the efficacy of his own administration’s program that rapidly developed COVID-19 vaccines as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took steps to limit who is eligible to receive them.
On Monday, Trump said drug manufacturers must “justify the success” of their vaccines and disclose “extraordinary” data and “GREAT numbers and results” — information that is already publicly available but repeatedly undermined by Kennedy and his allies.
Trump’s Truth Social post follows a wave of resignations at the nation’s top health agencies with stark warnings that the government is dangerously politicizing public health and gutting institutions that save lives.
The president launched Operation Warp Speed during his first administration in April 2020 to accelerate the development of life-saving COVID vaccines, an effort he has previously hailed as a “miracle” while navigating a base of support that is deeply skeptical.
The program is credited with preventing millions of deaths and hospitalizations.
“Many people think they are a miracle that saved Millions of lives. Others disagree! With CDC being ripped apart over this question, I want the answer, and I want it NOW,” Trump wrote Monday.
“I have been shown information from Pfizer, and others, that is extraordinary, but they never seem to show those results to the public. Why not??? They go off to the next ‘hunt’ and let everyone rip themselves apart, including Bobby Kennedy Jr. and CDC, trying to figure out the success or failure of the Drug Companies Covid work,” he added.
“They show me GREAT numbers and results, but they don’t seem to be showing them to many others. I want them to show them NOW, to CDC and the public, and clear up this MESS, one way or the other!!!” he wrote.
“I hope OPERATION WARP SPEED was as ‘BRILLIANT’ as many say it was,” he added. “If not, we all want to know about it, and why???”
His post comes just days after four top officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention abruptly left their positions when the agency’s director, Susan Monarez, was forced out of the job.
Monarez was sworn into office less than a month ago after she was appointed by Trump and confirmed by a Senate vote.
After Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services announced that Monarez was “no longer” the CDC director, four career officials at the agency announced they were leaving: chief medical officer Debra Houry; National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases director Daniel Jernigan; public health data chief Jennifer Layden; and respiratory diseases director Demetre Daskalakis.
In their public resignation letters, outgoing health officials delivered bleak warnings about the state of the agency, which they say is relying on “unscientific” policies while promoting “misinformation” that “will result in death and disability of vulnerable children and adults.”
“Enough is enough,” Daskalakis wrote in his resignation letter, which he posted to social media.
“I am not sure who the Secretary is listening to, but it is quite certainly not to us,” he wrote. “Unvetted and conflicted outside organizations seem to be the sources HHS use over the gold standard science of CDC and other reputable sources.”
Kennedy, a prolific vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist, should “not be considered a source of accurate information,” Daskalakis wrote.
Trump himself, in recent days, has praised Operation Warp Speed while claiming he "never got the credit for the job we did."
"Operation Warp Speed, people say, is one of the greatest achievements ever in politics — or in the military, because it was almost a military procedure," he said during a cabinet meeting last week.
Trump's former surgeon general Jerome Adams has said he is "outraged" by the administration's "baffling" refusal to defend Operation Warp Speed amid declining vaccination rates and the withdrawal of tens of millions of dollars in mRNA vaccine research.
"There is a clear pattern of insidious spread of fearmongering and misinformation emanating from the highest echelons of our nation's health research agencies," he wrote in The Washington Post. "This is not just a policy misstep; it's a national security crisis."
