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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 10, 2025

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No, that part is very real. (Unlike the vague nonsense that makes up most of the rest of his post.) If Pfizer had followed their planned trial endpoints they would have announced results days before the 2020 election. Instead they chose to leave samples frozen without testing them until afterwards. I wrote about this years ago, it was clear what had happened just from public information, but earlier this year there was also some new evidence via the House Judiciary Committee:

GSK further informed the Committee that Dr. Dormitzer had told GSK employees that "in late 2020, the three most senior people in Pfizer R&D were involved in a decision to deliberately slow down clinical testing so that it would not be complete prior to the results of the presidential election that year."

As I mention in my old linked post, I wonder how much their actions ended up affecting trust in the vaccine, and by extension how many lives it cost.

I don't think it would have reversed the political association, despite people like Kamala Harris and Andrew Cuomo expressing doubts about a vaccine approved during the Trump administrations. Ultimately I think left-wing/mainstream media outlets would probably have still been pro-vaccine, and left-wingers would have still generally listened to them. But I think it might have made a significant impact on right-wingers if Trump had actively campaigned on his administration making it possible for the vaccine to be developed and approved so quickly. Which implies that a world where the trials concluded pre-election would have significantly higher acceptance of the vaccine overall.