(Reuters) -Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are probing a claim by GSK that Pfizer delayed announcing its COVID shot’s success in 2020 until after that year’s election, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
The report said on Wednesday GSK’s former head of vaccine development, Philip Dormitzer, who joined the company after working at rival Pfizer, had told his GSK colleagues about the delay.
However, Dormitzer has disputed that account.
“My Pfizer colleagues and I did everything we could to get the FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization at the very first possible moment. Any other interpretation of my comments about the pace of the vaccine’s development would be incorrect,” he told Reuters in a statement.
The WSJ report said the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which includes Manhattan, is taking a closer look at what GSK has shared.
President Donald Trump has claimed in the past that Pfizer sat on positive data from the vaccine’s clinical trials, but there has never been evidence to support the accusation.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan has interviewed at least two people, including a GSK executive who took notes of a conversation with Dormitzer, the report said, citing one of the people familiar with the matter.
The prosecutors are planning to interview a third person in the coming days, WSJ reported, citing some of the people familiar with the probe.
The report said officials from Pfizer have not been interviewed.
GSK has declined to comment, while Pfizer and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comments.
(Reporting by Puyaan Singh in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Michael Erman; Editing by Shreya Biswas)
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