Pharmaceutical companies choose confrontation and postpone launching the vaccine .. Has Trump lost the Corona card in the election race?

Less than eight weeks before the US presidential elections, President Trump doubled his direct and indirect pressure on the major American pharmaceutical companies, seeking to announce a vaccine against Corona before Election Day, which may increase the chances of his re-election.

But these companies may have chosen confrontation with Trump instead of responding to his great pressure, and announced that they are going to issue a strict statement within days, confirming that no anti-corona virus vaccine will be announced before it is strictly subjected to safety and efficacy standards.

The companies behind their announcement aim to restore the confidence of Americans, and to assure that these companies will not announce the production of any vaccine in response to political pressure from President Donald Trump.

News reports stated that at least four companies will participate in issuing this pledge, namely, "Pfizer", "Johnson & Johnson", "Moderna" and "Sanofi". These companies are worth hundreds of billions of dollars and employ hundreds of thousands of scientists, technicians and doctors. .

These companies will pledge not to seek approval from the US Food and Drug Administration - which is the governmental technical authority entrusted with authorizing any new vaccines - before completing sufficient data collection to ensure the safety and effectiveness of the new vaccine.

Trump announced earlier that the plasma of those recovering from the Coronavirus would be used to treat those infected with it, in light of a polarized election season (Reuters)

The politicization of the Corona treatment issue

The US administration had called on US state governments to prepare to distribute a vaccine against the emerging corona virus in two months, by November 1, that is, two days before the presidential elections.

Prior to that, Trump announced, in a press conference at the White House on the eve of the start of the Republican General Conference, that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had authorized the use of recovered plasma to treat people with Covid-19 disease caused by the emerging corona virus, stressing that this treatment had achieved great successes. .

The previous steps have prompted some commentators to question the timing, and some health experts have warned of the danger of politicizing the issue of treating the Coronavirus in a fiery election season.

For her part, Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party's vice presidential candidate, said that Trump's words alone will not be sufficient to trust the effectiveness of any anti-Corona virus vaccine announced before the elections.

Harris confirmed in an interview with "CNN" broadcast the day before yesterday, that she does not trust President Trump, and that the talk about the effectiveness of the vaccine will have to come from a reliable source, and she pointed out that "Trump is trying to do everything he can during the period between the elections. To prove that he has managed this crisis. "

A vaccine cannot be fabricated, and

the US government is investing more than $ 10 billion to find vaccines and anti-coronavirus drugs and accelerate its access to the market, and three companies, Moderna, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, are already carrying out extensive tests in the third phase of the trials.

Dr. Moncef Al-Salawi, who leads the US government efforts to facilitate access to the vaccine, said, "The CDC's directive to states - which has caused confusion among health sector experts - was for planning purposes."

And he ruled out in an interview on the US National Radio that the vaccine will be ready for general distribution by next November.

Al-Jazeera Net spoke to Dr. Khaled Al-Shami, Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, about the role of government agencies in pressuring major drug companies to speed up access to the vaccine before the presidential elections.

Al-Shami stressed that "there is a deep and bureaucratic state in the American health sector, which is characterized by extreme slowness, and no party, even the White House, can pressure to accelerate the pace of its procedures and tests."

He added, "Yes, there is a global race that resembles the global race in the mid-twentieth century to obtain nuclear weapons, but that does not mean fabricating the process of reaching a vaccine. We are talking about large, stable companies that a government administration that changes with the elections cannot shake its established research system."

Regarding the possibility that President Trump will put pressure directly on the head of the US Food and Drug Authority, Dr. Stephan Hahn, Al-Shami said that licensing a vaccine or drug is a very complex process, and the president of the authority cannot accelerate it, because “there are complex and disciplined bureaucratic steps and a vaccine can only be produced after Confirmation that it is effective and safe. "

"Contrary to what happened in Russia regarding finding a vaccine, we are here with all the data related to trials and tests, and there is complete transparency between the medical community regarding clinical trial procedures and their results on patients and volunteers," Al-Shami said.

It should be noted that the number of people infected with the virus until the end of Monday, September 7, reached 6 million and 300 thousand people, while 190 thousand Americans died, according to data from John Hopkins University.