Explosive, if true. Corrupt? Certainly -- in a moral sense, anyway. But would it have been illegal -- even if it could be proven?

Donald Trump has long accused Pfizer of sitting on its clinical trials for the COVID-19 vaccine as a means to manipulate the 2020 presidential election. Now a British pharmaceutical manufacturer has given the Department of Justice some evidence that Trump had good reason to be suspicious. Federal prosecutors have opened a probe into Pfizer's actions in late 2020, the Wall Street Journal reports, although it's not clear what crime may have been committed:

Soon after President Trump won the presidential election in November, British drugmaker GSK brought an unusual claim to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, according to people familiar with the matter.

A senior GSK scientist, who formerly worked at rival Pfizer, had told GSK colleagues that Pfizer delayed announcing the success of its Covid vaccine in 2020 until after that year’s election.

The scientist disputes that account of what he told colleagues. But prosecutors are taking a closer look at what GSK shared with them, which is potentially politically explosive. Trump for years has claimed that Pfizer sat on the positive results of clinical trials, which could have reflected well on his management of the pandemic. There has never been evidence to support the accusation, and the development of the Covid vaccines is widely viewed as a medical miracle, coming faster than any other vaccine in history. 

The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan has interviewed at least two people in connection with the allegation, including a GSK executive who took notes of a conversation with the former Pfizer scientist, according to one of the people familiar with the matter. 

The irony of this, of course, is that this is over a vaccine that turned into a political hot potato anyway. Trump had been hailing the rapid advancement of multiple vaccines through Operation Warp Speed as one of his defenses of pandemic management during the 2020 election campaign. He clearly hoped to field the new vaccines in time for the election, but missed by a few weeks. Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson didn't apply for FDA emergency use authorization until after Biden had won the election. 

Biden turned the vaccines from a political benefit to an albatross, however. First, Biden tried to claim that the vaccines were developed under his leadership, when Biden himself got the vaccine before his inauguration in January 2021. Later, he and his administration refused to deal with reports of significant side effects, imposed vaccination mandates when it turned out that the vaccines didn't prevent uptake or transmission, and fired people from the federal government and military for refusing to take the vaccines. Trump didn't mention Operation Warp Speed much in the 2024 campaign because the vaccines themselves were politically toxic on the Right and in some corners of the Left, thanks to Biden's mismanagement. 

This probe raises even more questions, rather than provide answers. Did all three hold off on their applications, or just Pfizer? Did Pfizer actually delay the process at all, for that matter? The scientist in question is Phil Dormitzer, who insists now that Pfizer moved as rapidly as possible toward the EUA application. Nevertheless, the DoJ has already begun interviewing others involved in Pfizer's decision chain, although not Pfizer itself as an entity. GSK isn't exactly a disinterested entity either; they compete against Pfizer, and Dormitzer's departure from GSK was not a happy one, apparently. 

On top of all that, would a delayed application have broken the law -- or even the rules of Operation Warp Speed? "It isn't clear," the WSJ's reporting team notes, "what potential violations could be at issue." Perhaps this is just an effort at full accountability for the pharmaceuticals that got deluged in federal dollars by Trump to develop these vaccines. If so, though, that effort should fall under the purview of the Department of Health and Human Services rather than the DoJ, perhaps undertaken by inspectors general. Prosecutors get involved when crimes are committed, or at least when a reasonable basis exists to suspect that a crime took place. 

And that's tough to see here, even if there exists some moral culpability for alleged delays in getting the EUA applications filed for political purposes. If the company withheld the rollout of an effective vaccine for political purposes, they could have some civil liability from those who got infected in the interregnum and suffered some damages. But is it a crime to sit on an EUA application for a few extra days? Even if it were, how would one go about proving that it was done entirely with malice rather than based on being careful with the data and interpretations of success and side effects?

If GSK has real evidence that a crime might have been committed, then the DoJ would have to check it out, at least. The bigger issue is how these 'vaccines' were sold as such rather than as the moderately effective therapeutic interventions they turned out to be -- and whether Pfizer et al accurately represented the risks associated with them. Perhaps the DoJ is investigating that as well.