Operation Warp Speed Chief Can't Explain Trump's COVID Vaccine Order: 'I Literally Don't Know'

The chief adviser of Operation Warp Speed, the national program set by the government to accelerate the development and distribution of coronavirus vaccines, revealed he doesn't know what President Donald Trump's upcoming executive order on COVID-19 vaccines entails.

The president is expected to sign an executive order on Tuesday, which aims to give Americans priority access to vaccines before they are distributed abroad, White House officials confirmed Monday.

In an interview Tuesday with George Stephanopoulos on ABC's Good Morning America, when asked to explain the executive order, Operation Warp Speed chief Dr. Moncef Slaoui said: "Frankly, I don't know, and frankly I'm staying out of this. I can't comment. I literally don't know."

When Stephanopoulos said, "You don't know? But you're the chief science adviser for Operation Warp Speed," Slaoui replied, "Our work is, you know, rolling. We have plans we feel that we can deliver the vaccines as needed. So I don't know exactly what this order is about."

Earlier in the interview, Slaoui noted: "We are comfortable that we will be getting the vaccines to the people who need them as soon as possible. Because there are vaccine doses from Moderna, there are vaccine doses from Pfizer. We will work with Pfizer to try and increase capacity and have those vaccines available.

"We have two more vaccines from J&J [Johnson & Johnson] and AstraZeneca that will be completing their phase three trials in January and most likely, I hope, be approved for use in February.

"We have tens of millions of doses from those vaccines participating to the volume of vaccines we need to immunize the U.S. population as we promised all of it by the middle of the year 2021 and that's still on track," Slaoui told Stephanopoulos.

Newsweek has contacted the White House and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for comment.

Slaoui's comments come ahead of a "COVID-19 Vaccine Summit" to be held Tuesday at the White House, where the executive order will be discussed, according to White House officials.

The summit will be attended by the president, Vice President Mike Pence, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar as well as several governors and executives from the private sector, White House deputy press secretary Brian Morgenstern told ABC News last week.

Another White House official said: "The key purposes of this summit...is educating the American public about the vaccine development process and how extensive it is as well as the vaccine distribution process and how we will reach every zip code in America very quickly as soon as a vaccine is approved by the FDA [Food and Drug Administration]."

The summit takes place two days before an FDA panel of experts is due to convene on Thursday for a final review and possible authorization of the COVID-19 vaccine co-developed by Pfizer and Germany's BioNTech, which could see the delivery of 100 million doses in coming months.

According to a Pfizer board member and former FDA commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, the U.S. turned down multiple offers from Pfizer to buy more doses of its COVID vaccine contender.