U.S. President Donald Trump in the Cabinet Room of the White House on Aug. 26, 2025 in Washington, D.C.
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President Donald Trump on Monday called on pharmaceutical companies to “justify the success” of their Covid drugs days after the Food and Drug Administration set new limits on who can receive vaccines for the virus.
“It is very important that the Drug Companies justify the success of their various Covid Drugs. Many people think they are a miracle that saved Millions of lives. Others disagree!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.
The FDA on Wednesday approved the latest round of Covid vaccines, but only for people at higher risk of severe illness.
The president’s comments also come days after he fired Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez after she refused to resign. Four other top health officials at the CDC also announced they were quitting the agency last week, including Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
“With CDC being ripped apart over this question, I want the answer, and I want it NOW,” Trump said in the post.
“I have been shown information from Pfizer, and others, that is extraordinary, but they never seem to show those results to the public. Why not???” the president wrote.
Pfizer did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
The leadership upheaval at the CDC follows a series of measures by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to overhaul federal health agencies and change U.S. immunization policies. He has instituted mass firings, gutted a key government vaccine panel and canceled studies on mRNA shot technology.
Trump urged drug companies to be more transparent about their results to “clear up this MESS,” writing that drugmakers “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.”
Trump in the post also continued to tout Operation Warp Speed, his first administration’s pandemic vaccine effort launched in May 2020 to accelerate the development, manufacturing and distribution of Covid vaccines and therapeutics.
Yet Kennedy — a prominent vaccine skeptic — has downplayed the efficacy of vaccinations.
In a guest essay published in the New York Times on Monday, a group of nine former directors and acting directors of the CDC said Kennedy is “endangering” Americans’ health.
“What [Kennedy] has done to the C.D.C. and to our nation’s public health system over the past several months — culminating in his decision to fire Dr. Susan Monarez as C.D.C. director days ago — is unlike anything we have ever seen at the agency, and unlike anything our country has ever experienced,” the group wrote.
“We are worried about the wide-ranging impact that all these decisions will have on America’s health security,” they said.