(LifeSiteNews) – President Donald Trump called for releasing the full data behind Operation Warp Speed to the public in the first indirect acknowledgment of any possibility that his controversial first-term initiative to rush the COVID-19 vaccines to the public may have been less than a success.
“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! With CDC being ripped apart over this question, I want the answer, and I want it NOW,” Trump posted Monday on Truth Social. “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??? They go off to the next ‘hunt’ and 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. They show me GREAT numbers and results, but they don’t seem to be showing them to many others. I want them to show them NOW, to CDC and the public, and clear up this MESS, one way or the other!!! I hope OPERATION WARP SPEED was as ‘BRILLIANT’ as many say it was. If not, we all want to know about it, and why???”
Launched in the final year of Trump’s first term in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Operation Warp Speed had the COVID shots ready for use in a fraction of the time any previous vaccine had ever been developed and tested. As LifeSiteNews has extensively covered, a body of evidence steadily accumulated over the following years that, while the COVID vaccines may have alleviated the severity of COVID cases, they failed to prevent transmission and most importantly carried severe risks of their own. COVID was a sticking point for many in Trump’s base, yet he doggedly refused to disavow OWS.
Since leaving office, Trump repeatedly promoted the shots as “one of the greatest achievements of mankind.” The negative reception to such comments got him to drop the subject for a while, but in July 2022, he complained that “we did so much in terms of therapeutics and a word that I’m not allowed to mention. But I’m still proud of that word, because we did that in nine months, and it was supposed to take five years to 12 years. Nobody else could have done it. But I’m not mentioning it in front of my people.”
As recently as August 26, 2025, just six days before his newest comment, Trump reiterated, “Operation Warp Speed, people say, is one of the greatest achievements ever in politics or in the military because it was almost a military procedure. But everybody, including (Russian dictator Vladimir) Putin, said that Operation Warp Speed, what you did with that, nobody can believe it and we did a great job.”
So far, Trump’s second administration has rolled back several recommendations for the shots but not yet pulled them from the market despite hiring several vocal critics of the COVID establishment and putting the Department of Health & Human Services under the leadership of America’s most prominent anti-vaccine activist, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. During his confirmation hearings for HHS Secretary, Kennedy raised eyebrows by praising Operation Warp Speed as an “extraordinary accomplishment.”
In April, the Trump administration replaced the Biden administration’s dedicated COVID-19 resource website with a White House landing page detailing several of the most prominent falsehoods previously promoted by the medical establishment, including about lockdowns and the true origins of the virus, yet omitting any discussion of the vaccines.
In May, U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner Marty Makary and vaccine chief Dr. Vinay Prasad announced that there would no longer be blanket recommendations for all Americans to receive the shot, but the “risk factors” it would still be recommended for include asthma, cancer, cerebrovascular disease, chronic kidney diseases, a handful of chronic liver and lung diseases, diabetes, disabilities such as Down’s syndrome, heart conditions, HIV, dementia, Parkinson’s, obesity, smoking, tuberculosis, and more. Kennedy subsequently announced COVID vaccines would not be recommended to healthy children or pregnant women.
However, in June, the Trump administration approved a new mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine from Moderna, for “individuals who have been previously vaccinated with any COVID-19 vaccine and are: 65 years and older, or 12 through 64 with at least one underlying condition that puts them at high risk for severe outcomes from COVID-19.” In a July interview, Makary asked for patience from those unsatisfied by the administration’s handling of the shots, insisting more time was needed for comprehensive trials to get more definitive data.
Last month, Trump’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Jay Bhattacharya published a Washington Post op-ed defending Operation Warp Speed as “very successful,” but arguing that the administration would be “pivoting away from mRNA vaccines” simply because the technology lacked “public trust,” for which he blamed the Biden administration. “I do not believe the mRNA vaccines caused either mass harm on the one hand or saved 14 million lives on the other,” Bhattacharya claimed.
More recently, however, HHS seems to have shifted. In early August, Kennedy announced the government would be “winding down” almost $500 million worth of mRNA vaccine projects and rejecting future exploration of the technology in favor of more conventional vaccines. Last week, HHS revoked emergency use authorizations (EUA) for the COVID vaccines, which were used to justify the long-since-rescinded mandates and sidestep other procedural hurdles, and in its place issued “marketing authorization” for those who meet a minimum risk threshold for the following mRNA vaccines: Moderna (6+ months), Pfizer (5+), and Novavax (12+).
“These vaccines are available for all patients who choose them after consulting with their doctors,” Kennedy said, making good on his pledge to “end covid vaccine mandates, keep vaccines available to people who want them, especially the vulnerable, demand placebo-controlled trials from companies,” and “end the emergency.”
