President Donald Trump is demanding pharmaceutical companies release their data on COVID-19 vaccines, even as his own role in the initiative that sped their development has grown more complicated.
In a Truth Social post on Monday, President Donald Trump said it was “very important that the Drug Companies justify the success of their various COVID Drugs,” adding, “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, who once hailed Operation Warp Speed as a “Christmas miracle” in 2020, has rarely spoken about the vaccines other than to praise their development. His latest call for more transparency comes as his administration’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has restricted the use of the shots and cut federal funding for the mRNA research that made them possible.
The first Trump administration launched Warp Speed in May 2020 as “a massive scientific, industrial, and logistical endeavor unlike anything our country has seen since the Manhattan Project,” as Trump described it at the time. With billions from the CARES Act, the project aimed to compress years of vaccine research and distribution into months. By December 2020, Pfizer and Moderna received emergency authorization for their COVID shots.
Trump touted the achievement at a summit in December of that same year: “Before Operation Warp Speed, the typical timeframe for development and approval, as you know, could be infinity. And we were very, very happy that we were able to get things done at a level that nobody has ever seen before. The gold standard vaccine has been done in less than nine months.”
Yet even in 2020, the project was marked by tension with drugmakers. Pfizer publicly insisted it was not part of Warp Speed, with one executive telling the New York Times, “We have never taken any money from the U.S. government, or from anyone.” Trump pushed back, calling that “an unfortunate misrepresentation” and pointing to a $1.95 billion advance-purchase agreement for 100 million doses, per Fox Business.
However, under the agreement, Pfizer did not receive any money in advance for the development of the vaccine, like its pharmaceutical competitors did. Instead, it used the funding for the manufacturing and distribution of the vaccine after it was developed, as reported by Fox Business.
By the end of 2023, more than 711 million vaccine doses had been administered in the United States, according to the World Health Organization, and at least 70% of Americans had received both initial shots. But the vaccines have remained politically divisive. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll in May 2025 found that just 30% of Republicans considered the shots safe, compared to 87% of Democrats.
In an August Fox News opinion piece, former acting CDC Director Richard Besser warned that Kennedy’s decision to end mRNA funding was “deeply flawed,” writing that “COVID-19 vaccines saved at least 3.2 million lives in the United States and millions more around the world.”
His editorial did not address the well-documented cases of healthy young men who suffered pericarditis and myocarditis after taking the shot and who were at little risk of hospitalization or death from COVID-19.
Besser urged Trump to “direct Secretary Kennedy to immediately reverse this shortsighted decision.”
The turmoil has rippled through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Last week, Director Susan Monarez was fired after less than a month in the job, with her lawyers alleging she was dismissed for refusing to “rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives” and for supporting vaccines, per The Washington Post. Several other senior CDC officials resigned in protest.
Biden’s CDC Director Rochelle P. Walensky subsequently wrote an OpEd for The New York Times with several others under the headline, “We Ran the C.D.C.: Kennedy Is Endangering Every American’s Health.”
Yet, Walensky is partly known for her inaccurate medical assertions during the COVID-19 pandemic that at times went beyond what even the CDC was recommending. Walensky said that the “CDC recommends that pregnant people receive the Covid-19 vaccine,” despite CDC guidance stating that pregnant women “can” get the vaccine, while not specifically recommending it, CNN reported.
Trump has continued to insist that Pfizer possesses “extraordinary” vaccine data not yet shared with the public. “Why not???” he asked in his post. “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.”
What once stood as one of Trump’s signature achievements is now caught in a broader political and scientific clash, raising questions about whether the president will continue to claim Warp Speed as his own legacy or distance himself from the effort that produced the vaccines he now demands be reexamined.