White House has reportedly told the head of the FDA to either approve Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine by the end of Friday or resign. 

The threat reported by The Washington Post on Friday, came on the same day Trump tweeted that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was a “big, old, slow turtle” and told its commissioner, Stephen Hahn, to “Get the dam(n) vaccines out NOW.”

The Post reported that the threat was delivered by White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

The report followed comments by the country’s health secretary earlier in the day that the United States could start injecting the first Americans with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine by Monday.

Alex Azar told news channels that final details were being ironed out and “we could be seeing people get vaccinated Monday, Tuesday of next week”, after an expert committee voted to green light the two-dose regimen for people aged 16 and over on an emergency basis.

“So, it’s very close. It’s really just the last dotting of I’s and crossing of T’s,” he said.

The reports came as the FDA was working out last minute details with Pfizer, including a fact sheet about the vaccine for doctors.

The FDA has also said it will include a warning label to advise people with a known history of severe allergies to avoid getting immunized for the time being.

Also read: ‘Very close’: US health secretary hopeful of people getting vaccinated by Monday

Once the FDA approves, the federal government’s ‘Operation Warp Speed’ program will oversee the vaccine’s distribution to thousands of sites across the country.

A committee from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is also reviewing the vaccine, then the agency itself has to accept that recommendation.

The first of these meetings takes place on Friday and the second on Sunday, but they are at this stage viewed as pro forma.

On Thursday, an independent expert committee convened by the FDA voted 17 in favor, four against, with one abstention, on approving Pfizer’s vaccine, which a clinical trial has shown to be 95% effective.

Next week, an FDA committee will meet to consider a second vaccine, developed by Moderna and the National Institutes of Health.

Both frontrunner vaccines are based on new messenger RNA technology, which have never been approved before but could potentially revolutionize the field.

The country hopes to immunize 20 million people this month, 100 million by either February or March, and the whole population by June.

Long-term care facility residents and health care workers are at the front of the line.