Pfizer's response to Project Veritas left much to be desired

AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File

Last week, Project Veritas dropped another video, this time showing Jordan Walker, Pfizer’s Director of Research and Development, Strategic Operations for mRNA. Walker appeared to possibly make some admissions regarding his company’s actions or plans to engage in gain-of-function experiments on the COVID-19 virus, allowing them to get ahead of the game in terms of creating future vaccines. He actually called it “directed evolution.” We should emphasize that this is what Walker appeared to be saying, though he alternated between suggesting they were doing it and they planned to do it. It’s not entirely clear if he was being fully honest or was just trying to impress a journalist he thought might be interested in a date.

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Not long after, Walker was caught on video again, having a total meltdown and trying to call the police to a deli. It hasn’t been a great week for Jordan Walker. But through those first few days, we never heard a peep out of Pfizer. That finally changed on Friday when the company released a statement in response to the videos. They attempted to deliver some sort of unequivocal denial, stating in no uncertain terms that they weren’t doing any gain-of-function or directed evolution research. But as it was pointed out later at The Blaze, they then turned around and said something things that sounded an awful lot like they were.

In the days following the release of the video, Pfizer kept silent, but on Friday, the company finally issued a statement, expressing a desire “to set the record straight.” Some critics, however, have claimed that the statement all but confirms the accusations made against Pfizer.

On the one hand, the statement asserted unequivocally: “In the ongoing development of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, Pfizer has not conducted gain of function or directed evolution research.”

On the other hand, the statement later seemed to hedge that assertion a bit, adding that Pfizer “routinely assess[es] the activity of an antiviral” by conducting “computer simulations or mutations of the main protease.”

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If you follow the link, you can get a more complete description of the type of testing being discussed. (Though I personally still had a hard time parsing their statement.) Much like Walker’s statements in the original video, some of the things being said sounded quite contradictory.

The biggest example is where the Pfizer statement admits that they routinely conduct “computer simulations or mutations of the main protease.” Okay… so which is it? Are you running computer simulations? (Nothing wrong with that.) Or are you actually mutating the virus? The paragraph after that admission certainly makes it sound like they are mutating the virus in at least some cases. They mention experiments being done in their “secure Biosafety level 3 (BSL3) laboratory.”  Why would you need such a secure laboratory to run computer simulations?

This statement was obviously prepared in advance and reviewed at the highest levels. It wasn’t some sort of scientific, peer-reviewed research document. It was a statement intended for public consumption. As such, they could have dumbed it down a bit more for the laymen or at least not filled it with so much doublespeak.

Whether or not Project Veritas has caught Pfizer doing something that will get them in trouble, it likely won’t make any difference for Jordan Walker, who is probably toast in any case. Even if he didn’t actually admit that his company was doing gain-of-function research without approval, he referred to COVID as a “cash cow” for Pfizer. That’s no way to talk about the virus that started the pandemic. I’ll be shocked if the company keeps him around after that.

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