Pfizer’s Albert Bourla on Trump 2.0: ‘The status quo will collapse’

Few CEOs know the double-edged nature of dealing with US President Donald Trump as viscerally as Pfizer’s Albert Bourla. In his first term, Trump championed the $18 billion Operation Warp Speed program that helped the US drugmaker develop its COVID-19 vaccines. He also pushed conspiracy theories that made Bourla a target.

When positive data on Pfizer’s vaccine was released days after the 2020 election, Trump said the company had lacked the “courage” to issue it earlier and suggested there was a “medical deep state” aimed at aiding Joe Biden. Bourla was harassed on the Promenade in Davos a couple of years ago and at this year’s World Economic Forum gathering, he took his meetings in a nondescript apartment building — the sort of anonymous location that fits the definition of security through obscurity.

If Bourla feels aggrieved, he isn’t showing it. Instead, after Trump was reelected, he booked a Pfizer management meeting at Mar-a-Lago. Two days before Semafor met him in Davos, he was at Trump’s inauguration.

“People were thinking that because it is Trump, [who] is a little bit more controversial leader than the mainstream political leaders, we will change the way that we engage,” the Greek-American doctor of veterinary medicine says. “No. We engaged with him in the first administration, and we will engage with him now.” Even if he sees the other edge of Trump again, he says, “I’m very resilient, so I will never disengage.”

The RFK Jr. factor

Bourla sounds similarly sanguine about Trump’s pick of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be his health secretary, even though the choice of a vaccine skeptic has alarmed the pharma and biotech industry. “Don’t I see that Kennedy represents risks? Yes, he does,” he says. But he also sees opportunity.

“I don’t think that we will come that close when it comes to vaccines, because his positions are extreme, not scientific, and he will have to fight… with the entire medical community if he tries to do any of the things that he wants. But I don’t see why we wouldn’t be able to work with him on developing a new Operation Warp Speed for cancer.”

Bourla has not pitched the idea in those terms yet to Trump or Kennedy Jr., but he met both in Mar-a-Lago and thinks they are tempted by the chance to go after a target as big as cancer. “The new administration, they have a boldness. They go for it when they go, right? So the question is, how to influence the environment so that they would go for it in the right way?”

Biden backlash

Joe Biden called Bourla “a good friend” in 2021, but Pfizer’s CEO now says some of his former officials “hated business.”

“They were vicious to business. They were ideologically committed to hurt business,” he says, listing how Pfizer was “attacked” by the terms in the Inflation Reduction Act that capped the price of certain prescriptions, and constrained from dealmaking by an “unacceptably” hostile antitrust regime.

Bourla’s proposed cancer initiative echoes the “cancer moonshot” Biden championed as Barack Obama’s vice president. But with that, he says, the center of gravity was government agencies like the National Institutes of Health, and “it was not NIH that did the COVID vaccines.”

Trump understands that business “has a dynamism that can overcome mountains,” Bourla says. “He said, ‘I’ll put my money on you, Albert’ — and that means on the private sector, not on me particularly.”

Such enthusiasm for the new administration was widespread in Davos this week. Even so, Bourla does not understate the upheaval Trump represents: “It’s clear that with the radical change that is coming, there will be risks and there will be opportunities. The status quo will collapse.”

After the windfall

Five years from the first COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, a white-gloved aide was sanitizing the door handles in Pfizer’s Davos base before its CEO walked in. The vaccines Operation Warp Speed funded when a rampant coronavirus had made such practices commonplace “saved the whole world and the whole economy,” Bourla says.

For a moment, he and his employees were heroes. “We received a lot of love — myself, more than I deserved,” he recalls. That did not last. Nor did the market rally propelled by its windfall from vaccine sales. Pfizer’s stock more than doubled between the start of the pandemic and the end of 2021, but then it began a slide that cut Pfizer’s market value in half.

The sudden reversal of fortune angered investors and created “very big” morale issues among employees. In those circumstances, he says, “You can’t just tell people, ‘Well, don’t worry.’ You need to tell them, ‘Don’t worry, because we developed a plan.’”

Bourla cut $4 billion of costs, and made a series of management and board changes, all while integrating Seagen, a $43 billion acquisition. Despite that, the activist investor Starboard took a $1 billion stake last year and accused Pfizer of destroying $20 billion of value. Starboard’s salvo was clumsily launched, and Bourla quickly dismissed its vague call for him to do “something different.” He says their recent meetings have been productive, but adds, “I feel supported by my board, and I feel that my plan is working, so I will continue executing it.”

Speaking out

Bourla’s Davos agenda included an Anti-Defamation League event. The son of Holocaust survivors has been one of the few senior executives to speak out about the surge in antisemitism after the Hamas attack on Israel and the country’s response. The ensuing war is the most sensitive of topics for corporate America, but he says there has been no fallout for the business, noting that he is careful within Pfizer to condemn all forms of hate.

“I’m not only a CEO, I’m also a human being,” he explains. “The things that I saw on October 7 were things that my mom was describing that she saw… and so that’s who I am. This is who I always was, I speak my mind, and I think everybody should do it.”