Sarbanes Questions Pharmaceutical Companies About Plans to Quickly and Safely Produce COVID-19 Vaccine [Video]

WASHINGTON, D.C. – At a House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee hearing today, Congressman John Sarbanes (D-Md.) questioned representatives from several pharmaceutical companies about their efforts to ensure that safety isn’t compromised as they race to develop and manufacture a COVID-19 vaccine for the American people.

“I wanted to drill down a little bit more on this tension between safety and speed that you’ve spoken about a number of times,” said Congressman Sarbanes. “Of course, all of you have testified that you don’t have to sacrifice safety to achieve the speed that you’ve undertaken right now. But it sort of begs the question: What happens in normal times?”

Sarbanes asked: “Tell me exactly why it is that you’re able to move fast without sacrificing safety when we lay that against what the normal procedures would be? Is it that you are now putting staff on this literally 24 hours a day, whereas normally you’d be working a 12-hour shift? Is it that you got resources coming behind you from the government that you don't normally have that allows you to move faster? What are the actual logistical dimensions of what it means to go fast but stay safe?”

Sarbanes continued: “…. This pandemic may be completely changing up the way vaccines are produced and approved and tested and so forth for life after the pandemic. Obviously, this is an unprecedented situation, but it's forcing a changing in kind of the modeling and design for how we do this, which will be relevant on the other side of it. I think it’s interesting, in the moment even, to step back and consider what that means.”

See below for the Congressman’s full remarks.

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