Thread by @PeterHotez

..and they were pretty brazen about it. In 2020, second to deconstructing the Trump White House antiscience disinformation campaign, I worked to downplay the spectacular claims of pharma company press releases, remindIng American audiences they were meant for shareholders, not us

https://twitter.com/wsj/status/1363473578583334914

This was a flaw of Op Warp Speed: never adopting a communication strategy. The gap was filled by company press releases making it appear like vaccines appeared like magic without reference to the more than a decade of NIH Wellcome investments in spike protein targeting R&D.

This in turn caused a segment of the public to distrust COVID19 vaccines, something for which I’m still doing damage control

This is not to say that the pharma companies did not deliver. For the most part they accomplished their directives and fulfilled contractual obligations, and made some great vaccines (well at least for North America and Europe). I think my Pfizer-BioNTech could have saved my life

But no question that their missteps in communication and stock trading promoted losses in vaccine confidence. For the most part the pharma CEOs were horrible public health communicators, only to be outdone by the horrible communications from the White House CoV Task Force

I could probably do an entire lecture on how not to conduct public health communications using examples from the pharma CEOs, WH CoV Task Force, HHS and their agencies