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WASHINGTON – Sen. Ted Cruz is promoting vaccine skepticism, accusing Pfizer and U.S. officials of rolling out the COVID-19 vaccine without testing whether it would curb transmission of the coronavirus.
“They had zero scientific basis, zero data, backing it up,” Cruz said, referring to vaccine recommendations from federal officials and mandates on the military, federal workers and contractors. “It was politics. It wasn’t science. It wasn’t medicine.”
What Cruz didn’t mention is that regulators didn’t require evidence the vaccine slowed transmission of COVID-19. Vaccines generally aren’t evaluated on that basis.
Rather, the regulators wanted to know whether people who got the vaccine were less likely to get seriously ill, or have symptomatic infection. That evidence was overwhelming by the time the FDA approved Pfizer’s vaccine in December 2020
“It was never about reducing transmission,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.
“It’s called ‘weaponized health communication’. It’s dishonest,” he said of Cruz’s comments and other efforts that fuel vaccine hesitancy.
Cruz made his comments on a recent episode of his thrice-weekly podcast, which referred to Oct. 10 testimony by Janine Small, Pfizer’s president of international developed markets, at a European Parliament hearing in Germany.
Conservatives and anti-vaxxers on both sides of the Atlantic have used the testimony to boost doubts about the vaccines and to bash rivals who promoted mandates. The argument has been widely debunked.
A paper Hotez published this month argues that of 90,000 COVID deaths in Texas, up to 40,000 were preventable, because they occurred after vaccination became universally available in May 2021. Most of those who died were unvaccinated.
Many of them, Hotez contended, had succumbed to anti-vaccine misinformation of the sort Cruz is spreading.
“The Biden administration pushed mandates knowing that Pfizer had never tested for transmission, or they never bothered to check. That’s a fair point, and it’s the one Sen. Cruz is making,” said spokesman Darin Miller.
He cited an instance in May 2021 of Dr. Anthony Fauci advocating vaccination on the basis that “vaccinated people become dead ends for the coronavirus.” That was weeks after the CDC acknowledged “breakthrough” cases hitting some vaccinated people.
That June, the Delta variant emerged, blunting the vaccines’ effectiveness. Omicron, an even more contagious variant, was designated last November.
Weeks later, as Cruz’s office noted, President Joe Biden urged vaccination “so you do not spread the disease to anyone else.”
Republicans called that misinformation. Epidemiologists told fact-checkers at the time that the rationale for vaccination remained strong –the vaccines are proven to drastically reduce serious illness – it was not accurate to say that people can no longer spread COVID-19 once vaccinated.
Hearing in Germany
The European Parliament hearing focused on the purchase of 200 million vaccine doses before regulatory approval.
“Was the Pfizer COVID vaccine tested for stopping transmission of the virus before it entered the market?” asked a conservative Dutch member of the European Parliament, Rob Roos.
“No,” Small responded, adding that “we had to really move at the speed of science.”
Roos quickly amplified the Q&A on social media, asserting that Pfizer “now admits there was no evidence the vaccine would stop the spread of the virus. Yet the introduction of COVID mandates was based on this very lie. I demand accountability.”
Fox News host Tucker Carlson featured Roos two nights later.
Calling Fauci a “sinister buffoon” and asserting that Pfizer executives had committed unspecified crimes, Carlson characterized the reasoning behind U.S. public health authorities’ vaccine recommendations as: “you just sort of hope for the best.”
Cruz’s podcast comments echoed that line of argument.
“We had a senior executive at Pfizer testifying in Europe who said we never tested whether the vaccine prevents the transmission of COVID,” Cruz said, denouncing “abusive bureaucrats” and “despots” such as Fauci who promoted vaccination despite a lack of supporting evidence.
Pfizer, contacted Monday about Cruz’s comments, noted that its phase 3 clinical trial published in November 2020, shortly before FDA approval, “met two critical endpoints” – showing “prevention of confirmed symptomatic COVID-19 infection and …prevention of severe disease. The BNT162b2 (Comirnaty) trials were not designed to evaluate the vaccine’s effectiveness against transmission of SARS-CoV-2.”
“Since regulatory approval, the vaccine has helped protect billions of people from COVID-19,” the company said.
Cruz has railed against vaccine mandates throughout the pandemic.
“They’re illegal. They’re abusive. They’re wrong,” he said on his podcast. “They repeatedly told us, `Take the vaccine, it stops transmission.’ That’s an interesting theory. You can understand how it could be true. But it would seem kind of relevant that the maker of one of the most predominant vaccines said we never even …looked to assess whether the vaccine stopped the transmission of the virus.”
The FDA issued its emergency use authorization for the Pfizer vaccine on Dec. 11, 2020. On Aug. 23, 2021, the Pfizer vaccine became the first to receive full approval.
If emergency use authorization had been delayed pending a transmission study, Hotez said, “So many lives would have been lost. Remember, we were losing two to three thousand Americans a day during the Alpha wave.”
An initial trial of 40,000 people wouldn’t have been nearly enough to assess effects on transmission. That could take years to determine, and only after a vaccine was in wide use.
Still, indications quickly emerged.
By early 2021, Israeli researchers showed that vaccination stopped symptomatic illness and cut down on asymptomatic illness – a close proxy for transmission.
“The vaccines were approved on the basis of Operation Warp Speed criteria,” Hotez said, referring to the Trump administration’s crash program. “And remember, there was a lot of excitement about 95% protection against symptomatic illness.”