Ron Johnson launders coronavirus conspiracy theories on Fox News — again

Some of these claims are rather inscrutable. But they boil down to the idea that the FDA has engaged in a bait-and-switch. While it fully approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine that will be marketed under the name Comirnaty, the FDA also extended the emergency-use authorization for the same vaccine under the existing name.

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Chris Beyrer, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School Public Health, noted that the existing Pfizer vaccines that have been produced and purchased can’t legally be overlabeled with the Comirnaty branding, even as they are the same thing.

“That’s why there may be, for some time, EUA Pfizer doses in use before [fully authorized] Comirnaty becomes more widely available,” Beyrer said. “This is standard, nothing unusual, and [it] does not void an EUA.”

This is something largely relegated to the extremes of the vaccine-skeptic community. But it’s catching on. And the FDA’s approval of the Pfizer vaccine — which is actually, literally that — means we’ll start seeing more entities mandating the vaccine. And that means those who have fought those mandates will need something to explain their opposition to mandating a fully authorized vaccine in a country where that is commonplace.

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