The Washington Post reports:

President Trump’s accusatory tweet barreled in at 7:49 a.m. a week ago Saturday: The “deep state” at the Food and Drug Administration was trying to sandbag his election prospects by slowing progress on coronavirus treatments and vaccines until after Nov. 3.

Shocked and upset, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, who was tagged in the tweet, immediately began calling his contacts at the White House to find out why the president was angry. During his conversations, he mentioned the FDA was on the verge of granting emergency authorization to convalescent plasma as a treatment for covid-19. The agency planned to issue a news release.

The White House would upend those plans, turning a preliminary finding of modest efficacy into something much bigger — a presidential announcement of a “major therapeutic breakthrough on the China Virus,” as White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany previewed in a tweet late that Saturday night.

At a news conference on the eve of the Republican National Convention, Trump lauded an emergency authorization for convalescent plasma as a “very historic breakthrough.” Hahn, who had rushed back to Washington from a family home in Colorado, was initially restrained but then doubled down on Trump’s talking points. He said that 35 of 100 people with covid-19 “would have been saved because of the administration of plasma”— a gross overstatement denounced by scientists and public health experts.

The misrepresentations became a stunning debacle for the FDA, shaking its professional staff to the core and undermining its credibility as it approaches one of the most important and fraught decisions in its history amid a divisive presidential election — deciding when a covid-19 vaccine is safe and effective. Yet again, the president had harnessed the machinery of government to advance his political agenda — with potentially corrosive effects on public trust in government scientists’ handling of the pandemic. [Continue reading…]