Pfizer Board Member Dismissed Key Natural Immunity Studies In CIA Briefing, Docs Claim

When Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb briefed the CIA on COVID-19 in May 2020, he dismissed two influential studies indicating the virus killed far fewer people than expected, a new document claims.

Two California studies — one in Santa Clara in the San Francisco Bay Area and one in Los Angeles — showed a less lethal virus than other models. Two days before the CIA briefing, Pfizer had announced the initiation of a clinical trial on four vaccine candidates in the U.S.

Gottlieb, a former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner, advised the spy agency as a member of an outside advisory group, a CIA document revealed for the first time on Saturday claims.Then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo created the group in June 2017. Gottlieb served as FDA commissioner at that time. The impact of this advice on pandemic policies remains uncertain, as the CIA operates in secret.

The former FDA head stressed in an email to the Daily Caller News Foundation that CIA knew about his position with the vaccine manufacturer.

“I was asked by some political officials in the first term to attend a briefing,” said Gottlieb. “These were the early days of COVID when they were gathering a lot of different perspectives.”

Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul subpoenaed the document in the course of an investigation into the origins of COVID and Anthony Fauci, which has revealed new details about the intelligence community’s involvement in infectious diseases research.

CIA did not respond to a request for comment.

In the May 7, 2020, meeting with Langley, Gottlieb dismissed studies coauthored by now-National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya that could have hurt Pfizer’s bottom line, the executive summary shows.

The referenced studies, published in preprint form in mid-April 2020, found a higher than expected percentage of people had recovered from an asymptomatic or very mild COVID case and thus had some immunity.

“On ‘herd immunity’ Dr. Gottlieb discounts the 2 major studies from Los Angeles and Santa Clara counties showing high seroprevalence,” the summary reads. 

Because the document recounts the CIA’s recollection of his briefing on technical concepts, the memo may not precisely reflect Gottlieb’s comments.

But the memo shows that Gottlieb agreed with the authors that actual cases had been grossly undercounted but not to the extent the Santa Clara and Los Angeles studies indicated. Gottlieb argued in August 2020 that in outbreak areas as much as 25% of people had been exposed, but estimated nationally only 8% had.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield agreed, estimating 10% of Americans had been exposed to the virus in September 2020.

Meanwhile the Santa Clara and Los Angeles studies had estimated that cases in late March outstripped official counts by as much as 85 times, indicating that much larger proportions of the population would have been exposed to the virus by August. The study implied an infection fatality rate of 0.2% or less, on par with the flu.

Gottlieb made other points cautioning against over-interpreting those studies in appearances on cable news shows, which sometimes did not disclose his role at Pfizer.

He also said on CBS News in March 2020 that policymakers should not focus on the low infection fatality rate and instead focus on the much higher case fatality rate, the number of people who get sick who go on to die.

Gottlieb would go on to criticize the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for bungling testing, preventing a more targeted approach to the pandemic rather than a national stay-at-home order.

“To identify and contain spread, we needed a reliable and widely available test in February and certainly by March. We didn’t have one. The SARS-CoV-2 virus was now everywhere,” he wrote.

Scientists still have not reached a broad consensus on the virus’s lethality and how many people had prior immunity by the time vaccines rolled out in the winter. The National Institutes of Health under Director Francis Collins and its infectious diseases institute under Anthony Fauci did not prioritize these studies.

An October 2020 literature review found anywhere from 0.02% to 53.40% of people may have been exposed to the virus by September 2020, with a median COVID-19 infection fatality rate of 0.23%. Another study estimated that  in May 2021 only 20% of Americans had been exposed to COVID. A 2026 study by British argued that case data was an unreliable window into the true number of people who had been exposed to the virus, and that public health officials and the media vastly overstated the risks.

Despite the continued uncertainty about the true rate of viral exposure, Gottlieb’s role at Pfizer is bound to raise questions about whether he was conflicted when he briefed CIA.

Gottlieb has received $2.5 million in cash and stock from Pfizer since leaving FDA in 2019, according to company filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission .

At the May 2020 briefing with Langley, Gottlieb “primarily” weighed in on the relative strengths of various vaccine technologies despite his stake in Pfizer’s mRNA platform. Gottlieb also cautioned that, should officials in Beijing roll out a vaccine before officials in Washington, it could impact America’s reputation and global standing, the memo claims. Gottlieb has no formal training in geopolitics, his biography indicates.

“The biggest takeaway is that he believes the PRC will be first to market a vaccine against COVID-19 and is concerned that this will have positive geopolitical repercussions for the PRC even if the product proves to be marginally effective,” the CIA executive summary reads.

Former CIA Chief Operating Officer Andrew Makridis, then the agency’s third highest ranking official, organized the meeting. Makridis once ran the CIA division overseeing biodefense, the Weapons and Counterproliferation Mission Center (WCPMC).

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