ANALYSIS: Inside Trump’s pressure campaign on federal scientists over a covid-19 treatment

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 coronavirus 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.

Hahn apologized the following day for misspeaking, saying on Twitter, “The criticism is entirely justified.” But demoralized employees felt he had allowed the agency to become a prop in the president’s reelection campaign — a bit player in a reality TV show scripted by political operatives, not scientists, according to several people familiar with their thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect the employees from retaliation....