‘I hope Operation Warp Speed was as “brilliant” as many say it was. If not, we all want to know about it, and why,’ the president said.

President Donald Trump greets Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. before speaking at an event on health technology in the East Room of the White House on July 30, 2025. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

 

Zachary Stieber

Senior Reporter

President Donald Trump on Sept. 1 said that pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, should make public information that they’ve shared with him about their COVID-19 products.

“It is very important that the Drug Companies justify the success of their various Covid Drugs,” the president said in a post on Truth Social.

Trump said Pfizer and other companies have shown him information “that is extraordinary, but they never seem to show those results to the public.”

The president then linked what he said was the lack of public information to the turmoil at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), whose director he recently fired. After the termination, several top officials resigned, in part because they opposed how the CDC, under orders from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., earlier this year stopped recommending COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children and pregnant women.

Kennedy has also terminated funding for projects involving messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology, which is utilized by the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. Kennedy has said the technology does not work for respiratory viruses.

Trump said that he wants companies to show the information “NOW to CDC and the public, and clear up this MESS, one way or the other!”

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Pfizer did not respond to a request for comment. Moderna, which also makes a COVID-19 vaccine, did not respond to a request for comment. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the CDC did not respond to requests for comment.

Clinical trials found that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines initially conferred strong protection, but data have since shown that the protection wanes over time. A modeling paper published in July concluded that the vaccines prevented about 2.5 million deaths around the world from 2020 through 2024. They have also been linked to serious health issues, including heart inflammation.

Under Trump in 2020, the government launched Operation Warp Speed, a project aimed at producing vaccines and other drugs targeting COVID-19 in record time. The government spent north of $12 billion on the project.

Trump has repeatedly praised Operation Warp Speed.

“Operation Warp Speed, people say, is one of the greatest achievements ever in politics or in the military,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting on Aug. 26.

Praise for the operation has also come from a number of health professionals, Republicans, and Democrats. The House of Representatives select panel on the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, said in its final report that the operation “was a tremendous success and a model to build upon in the future.” Others, including Kennedy, have been critical of the operation.

“I hope Operation Warp Speed was as ‘brilliant’ as many say it was,” the president said on Sept. 1. “If not, we all want to know about it, and why.”

David Mansdoerfer, a former federal health official who is now an adjunct professor at Pepperdine University School of Public Policy, told The Epoch Times in a message that Trump was “showing an openness to allow data to drive the answer.”

“We should expect the same scientific curiosity from CDC and our public health agencies,” he said. “Hopefully, this call to action will drive an open and honest dialogue.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), chairman of the Senate Health Committee, said he supported Trump’s call for transparency.

“We need to know what the data says and where it is coming from, so the CDC and HHS can make the best decisions,” Cassidy said on X.

Dr. Brett Giroir, who worked on Operation Warp Speed, said on X that it “resulted in vaccines that saved millions of lives” and “built on a historic public health agenda combating opioids, HIV, and youth obesity and depression.”

“We cannot let anyone cancel the importance of these initiatives, and take a giant step backward for American innovation and national security,” he said.

 

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