“It was the third week of August, the Republican National Convention was days away, and President Trump was impatient. White House officials were anxious to showcase a step forward in the battle against the coronavirus: an expansion of the use of blood plasma from recovered patients to treat new ones. For nearly two weeks, however, the National Institutes of Health had held up emergency authorization for the treatment, citing lingering concerns over its effectiveness. So on Wednesday, Aug. 19, Mr. Trump called Dr. Francis S. Collins, the director of the N.I.H., with a blunt message.”

“‘Get it done by Friday,’ he demanded. It wasn’t done by Friday, and on Sunday, regulators at the Food and Drug Administration still had not finished a last-minute data review intended to ease N.I.H. doubts. But on Sunday night, the eve of the convention, the president announced, with the F.D.A.’s approval, that plasma therapy would be available for wider use, and he declared that it could reduce deaths by 35 percent, vastly overstating what the data had shown about the benefits. Mr. Trump’s call to Dr. Collins was a flash point in a pressure campaign by the White House to bend the nation’s public health agencies to his desire to show progress in the fight against a pandemic that has killed more than 192,000 people in the United States. And it was just one in a series of moments that have left scientists and regulators across the public health bureaucracy increasingly worried that the White House could exert greater pressure to approve a vaccine before Election Day, even in the absence of agreement on its effectiveness and safety” – New York Times.