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Editor’s note: Here’s an excerpt from an article in The BMJ. To read the piece in its entirety, click here.

In autumn 2020 Pfizer’s chairman and chief executive, Albert Bourla, released an open letter to the billions of people around the world who were investing their hopes in a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine to end the pandemic.

“As I’ve said before, we are operating at the speed of science,” Bourla wrote, explaining to the public when they could expect a Pfizer vaccine to be authorized in the U.S.

But, for researchers who were testing Pfizer’s vaccine at several sites in Texas during that autumn, speed may have come at the cost of data integrity and patient safety.

A regional director who was employed at the research organization Ventavia Research Group has told The BMJ that the company falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer’s pivotal phase 3 trial.

Read the entire The BMJ article here.