Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb played down the significance of the Russian government’s announcement that it has developed the international community’s first vaccine for the coronavirus, warning on CNBC's "Squawk Box" Tuesday that Russia’s process for developing the vaccine is highly questionable.
“I wouldn’t take it, certainly not outside a clinical trial right now,” said Gottlieb, who was head of the FDA in the Trump administration from 2017 to 2019. “It appears that it’s only been tested in several hundred patients at most … it’s not a true-blue vaccine, in terms of the technical complexity that goes into manufacturing a vaccine.”
Gottlieb posted on Twitter following the interview that he is skeptical of the Russian government’s motives for announcing the vaccine due to its efforts to spread misinformation about the disease over the last several months.
“Russia was reported to be behind disinformation campaigns to sow doubts in U.S. about our COVID vaccines; and today’s news that they ‘approved’ a vaccine on the equivalent of phase-1 data may be another effort to stoke doubts or goad U.S. into forcing early action on our vaccines,” he wrote in the tweet.
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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