"We had to really move at the speed of science," Janine Small, Pfizer's president of international markets, told the European Parliament this week. "We had to do everything at risk."
That quote came as part of a stunning admission by the pharmaceutical company's senior executive that the COVID-19 vaccines it developed were not tested for preventing transmission, upending the entire rationale behind vaccine mandates.
When former White House Deputy Press Secretary Brian Morgenstern heard it, he was stunned.
That's because Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla used the same five words when justifying the timing of when the company released data about its vaccine's efficacy—one day after the press declared Joe Biden winner of the 2020 election.
"For us, the Election Day was always an artificial day. We were not working with the election as a timeline," Bourla claimed at the time. "The only pressure we feel is the pressure of the billions of people hoping on our vaccine. And we are going to follow the speed of science, so science spoke."
As Morgenstern details in the book "Vignettes & Vino," which he co-authored with his wife, Teresa, a former senior White House communications advisor for Operation Warp Speed, that announcement was chalked up to coincidence, but chance it was not.
It was clear "when they said they were moving at the speed of science, they were moving at the speed of political science," he told Townhall.
As Morgenstern explained in an email, the data's release came "after [Pfizer] met with Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, an adviser to Joe Biden's campaign and the brother of Rahm Emanuel. And once Biden took over, Pfizer 'coincidentally' received massive contracts from the U.S. government at 25 percent markups for the same vaccine shots they were selling before the election."
But that's not the only troubling part of the story.
Morgenstern walks readers through a detailed timeline of the events leading up to the data's release – data that initially had been promised in October – to demonstrate how "Pfizer, the FDA, and the Biden campaign colluded to rig the election."
While efforts to undermine former President Trump's chances of winning reelection were coming from all angles, delaying the release of data that brought hope at a time in the pandemic when 1,000 people per day were dying from COVID-19 shows the sinister lengths leftists went to get the 45th president out of office.
"They were so obsessed with getting power that they were willing to do anything," Morgenstern said.
While Democrats have their man in the Oval Office and Pfizer is sitting on more than $60 billion in profits thanks to "governments purchasing and mandating their vaccine—even though the mandates were not justified by science," according to Morgenstern, trust in public health bureaucracies has been shattered.
"We have to be able to trust them," he said, "and right now, we can't, and we have to fix that."
Readers will find that although some of the insider accounts in "Vignettes & Vino," such as the vaccine saga, can be infuriating, there's much more to the book than that. In addition to the fun menu and drink pairings accompanying each chapter, the diverse stories included tell an important and interesting part of U.S. history from the perspective of two "normal people" who worked their way to some of the highest levels of government.
"Vignettes & Vino: Dinner Table Stories from the Trump White House with Recipes & Cocktail Pairings" hits shelves Oct. 25.