16 ms·

Operation Warp Speed: A new model for industrial policy

151 points by gok 5y ago

tomohawk 5y ago
> In April 2020, Kadlec and Marks wrote a proposal for HHS secretary Alex Azar, who in turn took it to Jared Kushner and others in the White House, who were enthusiastic. President Trump supported it and signed off on it. Azar brought in the DoD as well. (The bureaucratic history of OWS, like everything to do with it, is complex and contested.) Azar, Kushner, and others then made two hiring decisions that were crucial to Warp Speed’s success, recruiting Moncief Slaoui, a pharma executive, and Gustave F. Perna, a general, as its leaders. Slaoui, OWS’s chief adviser, had been chairman of global vaccines at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and brought pharma knowledge. General Perna, OWS’s chief operating officer, had overseen the global supply chains for the U.S. Army and brought logistical expertise. It's really not possible to overstate what an accomplishment this was. To stand up an organization like this outside of the normal departments and to give it the political backing it needed. And the accomplishment of not only getting multiple vaccines ready in record time, but also solving the distribution logistics problems in parallel.
- NicoJuicy 5y ago
  Wait, getting multiple vaccines ready but none were from the US. The most used one is a partnership from Pfizer and was created by Biontech. The vaccine was practically ready on day 2 of COVID due to mRNA. Pfizer even declined Warp speed funding ( but pre-orders were accepted in December during phase 3 trials) So I'm not sure why Warp speed is considered a success?
  - manuelabeledo 5y ago
    > Wait, getting multiple vaccines ready but none were from the US. Wasn't the Moderna vaccine developed entirely in the US?
    - SR2Z 5y ago
      And while the Pfizer one was majority developed by BioNTech, they lacked the expertise to actually produce it at scale.
      - NicoJuicy 5y ago
        And that happened at the existing Pfizer facility in Puurs ( Belgium). As far as I'm aware, no existing facilities were upgraded/expanded? https://www.politico.eu/article/belgium-town-puurs-spotlight-coronavirus-vaccine/ https://www.politico.eu/article/belgium-town-puurs-spotlight... A big up for Belgian pharma facilities. But I'm unsure about the role of operation Warp speed on this all. As far as I'm aware, Pfizer/BionTech explicitly avoided any funding through operation Warp Speed. They received an order in phase 3 of the clinical trials. The core issue ( why they partnered with Pfizer) for BionTech was also not production at scale, but handling clinical trials at this scale. Which ( again/also) was not related to Warp Speed.
        yzmtf2008 5y ago
        > As far as I'm aware, no existing facilities were added? Nowhere in your linked article indicates that "no existing facilities were added". > As of January 2022, the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine is manufactured between 11 sites across five countries, including the U.S., Germany, Belgium, Ireland, and Croatia, and engages more than 20 suppliers. https://www.pfizer.com/science/coronavirus/vaccine/manufacturing-and-distribution#:~:text=Where%20is%20the%20Pfizer%2DBioNTech%20COVID%2D19%20vaccine%20made%3F https://www.pfizer.com/science/coronavirus/vaccine/manufactu...
        NicoJuicy 5y ago
        I'm from Belgium and i did follow up on Puurs and i hadn't encountered any news that they needed to upgrade facilities there. That's what you should have copied my whole sentence: "as far as I'm aware, no existing facilities were added". Which in retrospect should be upgraded actually. Didn't notice that mistake.
  - tomohawk 5y ago
    > ready on day 2 That's like some person in SV saying they had a great idea. Who cares? The level of execution in operation warp to get this past the FDA processes was enormous. The industrial mobilzation to create refrigeration units and transportation, and get all of the logistics alligned in a few months. That is the stuff of legend.
    - NicoJuicy 5y ago
      And that seems to me as patting themselves on the back. Every country in Europe did this exact thing without patting themselves on the back or calling it "Warp speed" ( eg. For Refrigerator units/logistics) The biggest accomplishment/improvement to speed up things was doing simultaneous clinical trials, which wasn't even remotely related with Warp speed but was a emergency action ( = it existed as advice before COVID to be used if a pandemic would happen)
      - e4e78a06 5y ago
        The EU had a substantially delayed rollout of vaccines compared to the US [1]. You can see that the purple line (US) is about 2 months ahead of the yellow (EU). Especially in the early days of the rollout the EU was very behind. [1]: https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2412 https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2412
        morelisp 5y ago
        > Especially in the early days of the rollout the EU was very behind. On one hand I agree, but on the other hand looking back now after 13-14 months, did it matter? Was any public health outcome significantly improved by that lead? (From the qualitative reports I've read I might believe there was in the UK - but not prima facie US vs. EU.)
        e4e78a06 5y ago
        That's a pretty hard analysis to make. You'd have to compare people that 1) wanted to get vaccinated and 2) _could_ have been vaccinated if they were in the US instead of Europe and 3) died from COVID during the 2 month delay and see how many lives were saved. My uninformed guess just eyeballing the historical death graphs and vaccine rollout is probably low 5 figures range.
  - yzmtf2008 5y ago
    > Wait, getting multiple vaccines ready but none were from the US. See sibling comment on Moderna. > The vaccine was practically ready on day 2 of COVID due to mRNA No. "ready" as in we can produce a vile in a lab? Sure. Ready as in tested in the general population, mass production facilities, distribution networks? Absolutely not. > So I'm not sure why Warp speed is considered a success? Producing a vaccine is about the easiest part of warp speed. Having the supply chain needed to vaccinate the whole population in such a brief time? That's the success. Also, it's literally the entire point of TFA.
    - dnautics 5y ago
      If I'm not mistaken the mRNA production is kind of bonkers, it's outsourced to a bestiary of third party small contract manufacturers. I could be wrong, but I don't think that any newly released drug has rolled out like that at such a scale in the past (usually it's one/a few plants all controlled by the big pharma that gets certified by the FDA). It's REALLY impressive that the bureaucracy figured out exactly where to bend the rules and shepherded all of the small contract manufacturers into compliance to get reasonable batch-to-batch consistency and safety for these vaccines.
      - EGreg 5y ago
        “The bureaucracy” is doing a lot of work there THIS is what I want to hear more about. How was all this coordination done? Solving collective action problems is what government is supposed to do… was this a command economy, central planning, or some sort of intiative like we have now with the new “security best practices imperatives” that will use the infrastructure bill and standardize what small vendors will deliver?
        dnautics 5y ago
        I don't necessarily think that government's job is to "solve collective action problems" (there are plenty of alternatives, actually free markets themselves are a solution to the collective action problem of "what should the price of X be") -- but if it's going to doit, it should be held to a high standard of effectiveness.
  - vlovich123 5y ago
    mRNA was an accomplishment to be sure. It’s a necessary but not sufficient condition. If you look at the stories for the rollout, the logistics challenge posed by mRNA vaccines were quite substantial, particularly refrigeration but also supply chain logistics in general were complicated. Warp Speed definitely was run competently by all accounts.
    - pyuser583 5y ago
      As the article pointed out, identifying MRNA as a viable option was one of Warp Speeds major accomplishments. There are tons of technologies that had to be explored. I’ve read this article in full several times (it’s dense). Warp Speed wasn’t like the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Project. It wasn’t hundreds of thousands of government employees working in one tech. It was hundreds of project managers with single tech portfolios, most of which were useless, trying to figure out which tech would solve the problem at hand. It was YComhinator investing applied to a major government project.
      - jounker 5y ago
        The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was pointedly not involved in Operation Warp Speed.
        vlovich123 5y ago
        Wikipedia disagrees with you but depends on your meaning of "not involved". I think you could be right about the impact Warp Speed had on the selection aspect of mRNA but it's hard to say. From one perspective, BioNtech mRNA effort started in January 2020 before Warp Speed was a thing. From another Pfizer and BioNTech announced a deal in April 2020 around the time that Warp Speed legislation (and since legislation is lagging self-organizing work that was ongoing, it's hard to say). From the capacity perspective, it doesn't seem right [1]. > But on July 22, Operation Warp Speed placed an advance-purchase order of $2 billion with Pfizer to manufacture 100 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine for use in the United States when the vaccine was shown to be safe, effective, licensed, and authorized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). On December 23, the Trump administration announced that they had ordered another 200 million doses from Pfizer. On November 9, the Pfizer–BioNTech partnership announced positive early results from its Phase III trial of the BNT162b2 vaccine candidate, and on December 11, the FDA provided emergency use authorization, initiating the distribution of the vaccine. > In September 2020, BioNTech received €375 million (US$445 million) from the government of Germany to accelerate the development and production capacity of the Pfizer–BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine So looks like they needed significant government help getting distribution and logistics. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed#Pfizer%E2%80%93BioNTech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed#Pfizer%E2...
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    Nooo. There was a ton of logistics. The military was a key part of the last mile distribution initially and for some time. Trump is a loathsome character, but OWS was a well executed initiative.
    - tandymodel100 5y ago
      The last mile distribution wasn’t well considered at all. Between tweets denying he lost the election he just said it would be up to the states to furnish last mile.
      - Spooky23 5y ago
        I think OWS had some autonomy outside of the crazy day to day bloviating. The initial Pfizer environmental requirements were difficult to meet, and the military through the national guard were a big part of delivery. Outside of those logistics everything was an evil shitshow.
  - EGreg 5y ago
    What I want to know is, what happened to all that “warp” speed since then? We had been waiting for delta vaccine and whatever else, for over a year. They can surely churn them out quick with mRNA (they even did it for HIV!) but they don’t. The profit motive happened. With government and media carrying water for these vaccine manufacturers, and forcing everyone to get an outdated vaccine, why would they cannibalize their own profits? It’s like if everyone were told you must install Windows 98 to get on the Internet or do any sort of work, why would Microsoft want to release Windows NT? Meanwhile, you can see how the US Army with no profit motive has outdone them and created a vaccine for ALL the variants: https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2021/12/us-army-creates-single-vaccine-effective-against-all-covid-sars-variants/360089/ https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2021/12/us-army-create... This just goes to show that government and industry often work together and market failures often result, while institutions with no profit motive can overtake them (Wikipedia, NGinX, Linux, Wordpress, WebKit and many others overtook their capitalist counterparts.)
    - jimmygrapes 5y ago
      What happened was, well, as you said, profit came in, but also we had an election and brought in a change of guard that for whatever reason didn't continue that particular mission. It seems to me that once the initial vaccines were out, the mission became "we have the solution, now make everyone accept it" rather than continuous improvement. It's like they refuse to do the last steps of a process (evaluate effectiveness and refine as needed) and got stuck on implementation, not recognizing that implementation itself needs to be evaluated and refined.
      - jonway 5y ago
        After reading TFA, I have learned that Operation Warp Speed essentially bought the risk and supplied scaling capital to bootstrap domestic biomedical manufacturing. OWS supplied capital for hardware, people, project management, brokered manufacturing agreements and organized large scale trials. Article mentions that moderna had a big weakness: Inexperienced at executing clinical trials and large scale manufacturing of its vaccine technology, it could produce a prototype vaccine in several days but had no existing pipeline to deliver industrial quantities. >It seems to me that once the initial vaccines were out, the mission became "we have the solution, now make everyone accept it" rather than continuous improvement. The vaccines were out in a couple of months. Amazingly, it turns out that the hard part is scaling to global quantities of a new product line. Re-engineering a global production is way hard, too. I agree that we should continue to fund the scaleout of domestic biomedical manufacturing.
  - rsynnott 5y ago
    Moderna was American and accepted US funding, so it wasn’t a total loss. Though the article certainly overstates it a bit. Pfizer/BioNTech and AZ were significant beneficiaries of state funding outside of the US, tho.
  - blibble 5y ago
    yes, the entire article is singing the praise of the necessity of darpa and OWS when biontech and pfizer succeeded without any of it
    - rsynnott 5y ago
      BioNTech did receive significant funding from the German government, however.
      - NicoJuicy 5y ago
        That's not related to Warp speed. Those are subsidies for eg. doing simultaneous clinical trials and to compensate it's additional costs.
    - anonymousiam 5y ago
      There's a separate element of Warp Speed that nobody is discussing. It's not about funding the development, but about allowing use on humans with reduced trials beforehand. That part was enormously successful.
      - NicoJuicy 5y ago
        That's not operation Warp speed. That's pandemic 101 from the WHO. And it's not reduced trials, it's doing them simultaneously. I mentioned it before in another comment 3 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30141967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30141967
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - refurb 5y ago
    3 of the 4 of the key vaccines were manufactured by US companies - Pfizer, Moderna and J&J. You realize a part of Warp Speed was the coordination of manufacturers and the FDA? So while Pfizer accepted no funding, it benefited from the streamlined regulatory process.
    - arcticbull 5y ago
      Pfizer was developed by BioNTech in Germany, funded by the German government. Pfizers involvement was limited to a co-branding arrangement where they ramped and scaled production. Pfizer also did not receive any money from Warp Speed, and one of their scientists at a point even stated they weren't participating at all. This was hastily walked back, but it's not really clear they were anything more than a vendor, IMO. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed
      - refurb 5y ago
        As someone who has been involved in development of new drugs, you are massively understating Pfizer’s role. BioNTech never could have got the drug to market without Pfizer. Pfizer had to: 1) conduct animal testing, 2) scale up synthesis to billions of units, 3) work with the FDA to align on clinical studies [where OWS helped], 4) conduct global clinical studies in dozens of countries, 5) collect, analyze the clinical study data, 6) assemble a new drug application for dozen of regulatory agencies across the globe [typically 1000's of pages long], 7) actually manufacture billions of sterile doses to the FDA’s requirements, 8) negotiate purchase agreements with 100+ countries, 9) actually distribute the vaccine globally despite the need for -78C temperature. BioNTech maybe could have done step 1. They had never gotten a drug approved before. Pfizer has brought over 100 drugs to market. BioNTech’s role is like creating an iPhone app and saying it’s the same as a building a multi billion dollar business like Uber.
        NicoJuicy 5y ago
        Wait what? Then why didn't Pfizer create the "iPhone app". You are seriously underestimating BionTech's advanced lead in mRNA. A fair comparison would be to create an iphone app without an SDK in existence yet, but an app store in place. Pfizer was there because it's existing infrastructure for trials and experience. While the timeline was seriously reduced, they didn't had to do much "new" that they hadn't done before yet. Additionally, requirements in the fridge was reduced to -20° which made it a lot easier than your -60°-80° and was assisted by many more than just Pfizer ( see UNICEF and their "cold chain unit" for this or how covax delivered > 1 billion doses) > Back in 1974, the World Health Organization (WHO) established the Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI). In order to assess the feasibility of a single, global immunisation schedule incorporating vaccines against polio, measles, tuberculosis, tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis, the EPI was initially piloted in Ghana. > One major challenge quickly became apparent: as vaccines were temperature-sensitive biological products, they needed to be continuously stored in a limited temperature range from the time they were manufactured until the moment of vaccination. Any exposure to temperatures outside this range would irreversibly affect vaccine potency, diminishing the ability of vaccines to protect vaccinated patients. > The solution was a workable “cold chain". A term adopted in 1976, it described a global network of cold rooms, cold boxes, vaccine carriers, refrigerators, and freezers that kept vaccines at the WHO-recommended temperature during the long journey from the manufacturing line to the syringe. Similarly, Ebola also needed cold chain infrastructure. Creds for doing it this fast, yes! But it's not something new and i won't pretend it is. Pfizer was the best choice for bringing it to market, definitely.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    Pfizer accepted preorders in June before phase 3 in the amount of $2 billion. They declined warp speed funding for the research, not the manufacture.
    - NicoJuicy 5y ago
      Pfizer accepted orders, but had a very special contract that meant the US needed to back off. They did manufacturer outside the US just fine. A simple Google search could have given that info.
      - HWR_14 5y ago
        Pfizer had multiple manufacturing processes in multiple parts of the world. The EU plants definitely did worse than the US plants. That's probably not due to any government program, but the US based manufacture didn't have to shutdown and restart or waste, I think it was a month. That said, the primary reason OWS worked at all is they parallelized anything they could. In this case, they paid Pfizer $2 billion to start producing a vaccine before they knew if it would work or be FDA approved, although there was good reason to believe it would. It wasn't brilliant. It was a good idea. Worst cast we waste $2 billion. Best case we end a pandemic 6 months early. Putting more money at risk for faster results is reasonable in emergencies. Outside emergencies we have a process for a reason - to reduce waste and fraud.
        NicoJuicy 5y ago
        I call bs. Show me. What's the source of a month shutdown? I've never heard of that. Pfizer, additionally, already had positive trials before the order from the US came! OWS had nothing to do with the quickest delivered vaccine, since Pfizer wanted NO political interference. The contract was not funding at all. They didn't receive the money upfront and it had to be approved by FDA before the contract was considered valid. Israel had the fastest vaccination rate/program in the world and it was supplied by the Belgian manufacturing part of Pfizer in Puurs. https://nsl.consilium.europa.eu/104100/GeneralNewsletter/4od5l4siyvf7z5zx5ai27sxp5i/Html https://nsl.consilium.europa.eu/104100/GeneralNewsletter/4od... > Most vaccination technologies have been initiated or developed in Europe. Most of the doses with which Israel embarked on its mass vaccination programme were sent from Belgium. There's a big difference in supplying the world with enough vaccines ( EU ) versus buying all available ones at a premium ( US). I don't even know where your fraud argument comes from... But worst case is definitely not 2 billion $ waste. But a 10 billion $ risk of funds taken from hospitals for COVID care that could need it, which paid for "operation Warp speed" - https://www.statnews.com/2021/03/02/trump-administration-quietly-spent-billions-in-hospital-funds-on-operation-warp-speed/ https://www.statnews.com/2021/03/02/trump-administration-qui...
- brian_cunnie 5y ago
  > It's really not possible to overstate what an accomplishment this was For some of us, it's a challenge to disentangle the achievements from the politics (e.g. "I hate Trump, so I refuse to believe his administration did anything of note"). But the world isn't a comforting black & white; instead, it's nuanced shades of gray. Let's applaud the achievements that saved lives, regardless of the administration that promulgated them.
  - tomohawk 5y ago
    Exactly. This could easily have become the next boondogle, akin to Solyndra. The fact that it didn't, and achieved such a good result is a rarity.
    - Aloha 5y ago
      I would rather government take reasonable risks, and end up with occasional Solyndra's if thats the price for increased innovation. To be honest, I don't consider the half a billion dollars from Solyndra to be much of a boondoggle, in the grand scheme of things. It's a loan guarantee that had intentional fraud by the borrower.
    - tootie 5y ago
      Solyndra was inconsequential. And it was part of a package of knowingly risky bets that was overall very successful. Warp Speed was the same. They invested in lots of vaccine trials with the expectation that some would fail and they would absorb the cost. There were a lot of manufacturing miscues and money that was misspent but that was all baked into the program expectations. Same with the clean energy funding of which Solyndra took part.
    - throwaway6734 5y ago
      The same program that invested in Solyndra also gave Tesla grants that prevented it's bankruptcy
  - KerrAvon 5y ago
    For some of us, the actual challenge is that all of Trump’s people lie at the drop of a hat. He hires for loyalty, not competence, and that means lying whenever necessary for his ego, and that means you’re talking to people who have no shame. How can we trust that any of this happened the way that they say it did? Isn’t this just amother puff piece to pump Jared and the other incompetent losers in Trumpworld up? Since they were also spectacularly incompetent at getting jabs into arms — Biden had to pick up the pieces on distribution — why do they deserve the benefit of the doubt?
- magicalist 5y ago
  > but also solving the distribution logistics problems in parallel. Quick to forget the huge distribution bottleneck that happened in December 2020 and the issues with depending on Walgreens and CVS as distribution points. I do enjoy that the article takes essentially no last mile plan and blames it the CDC and on a letter from state health groups saying "hey, wtf is the plan here" because it apparently had woke concerns. Meanwhile at the federal level "OWS was not faultless" and that's all we get. A lot of amazing things happened to get the vaccines out so quickly, but this hagiography reads like a characteristic of American propaganda.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    It is easy in hindsight to point out mistakes. However despite imperfections they still did an amazing job.
    - jounker 5y ago
      The mistakes were being pointed out very loudly at the time.
- tootie 5y ago
  Planet Money did a great breakdown of the whole thing. They put a lot more credit on Kadlec himself and implied the Slaoui and Perna were just sort of there to make sales pitches. I think it also can't be understated that none of the bureaucratic victories would be possible if the science wasn't so advanced. Moderna had their vaccine in hand and ready for trials in a matter of weeks. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1053003777 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1053003777 Also, notable that Russia and China delivered vaccines even faster by not bothering with so much testing. They took a much bigger risk in their approach, but the vaccines they produced turned out to be nearly as effective as those coming from US/UK/Germany
  - refurb 5y ago
    The Russian and China vaccines were NOT as effective. And the Russian vaccines had lot to lot variability that was pretty worrisome.
    - dirtyid 5y ago
      Seems like with omicron, working inactivated vaccines appear comparably effective at preventing severe cases considering mRNA does not substantively prevent breakthrough infections. I mean they are on paper, but in practice it means buying a few extra days before spread goes out of control. It's down to costs, manufacturability and logistics. Then arguably inactivated vaccines come out ahead as most countries can produce them and they have no cold chain requirements. A country that can afford and has the capability to go all mRNA will be better off for it. But it terms of global vax effort they're now relatively less effective than inactivated solutions.
- thrwaway11212 5y ago
  I'm a software engineer and I've done similar Operation Warp speeds in the past. Mandates from executives to ship something now. Disable the test suite because we don't have time to look at the tests. Skip QA, release directly to prod and see what happens. It always works very well in the IT industry, it's not wonder pharma wants to adopt the same proven approach.
  - funcDropShadow 5y ago
    They did not skip QA. The EMA (the European FDA equivalent) did not reduce the formal requirements for Covid vaccines compared to other vaccines. None of the Covid vaccines have an emergency use authorization in the EU. They all went through the regular process. That process was made more parallel and more incremental. And it was obviously executed with the highest priority possible. Those ideas are indeed used in the IT world, but they are successful ideas, and they are much older than the IT world. By incremental I mean, the rolling review used for the trials. I.e. the pharma companies would deliver regularly preliminary versions of the final report on the trial. Thereby, a lot of questions about the report can be asked and answered earlier than in a traditional review process after the trial has finished.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  It's really not possible to overstate what an accomplishment this was. To stand up an organization like this outside of the normal departments and to give it the political backing it needed. If that's true, it's also a testament to how ossified bureaucratic boundaries have become. It's like; America, 1969, "we put a man on the moon!". American, 2021, "we put a man into a position of authority outside of ordinary bureaucratic channels!". Maybe that's an achieve indeed but the context give one pause.
  - GuB-42 5y ago
    To be fair, I think it is an achievement on the scale of putting a man on the moon. Putting a man on the moon is a great technical achievement, but really, the reason people remember it so much is that it is a pissing contest that the US won. But being able to be productive against bureaucracy is maybe the greatest achievement for a big country. And I am sure that's also what made Apollo successful. Operation Warp Speed probably won't feature in the history books, it is not as symbolic as a moon landing, it just made vaccines available a bit sooner. I don't think it really changed the course of history, but the time savings have saved thousands of lives, maybe millions, shortened lockdowns, allowed schools to open, etc... It is just statistics, but there are some statistics I am happy not to be part of.
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      How do you know that it delivered vaccine earlier than alternatives, or than a properly run, non-corrupt project?
      - noitpmeder 5y ago
        Where are your sources saying this project was corrupt? Genuinely curious, as I have not read much to this effect.
        wolverine876 5y ago
        Just search a major news source from the time.
- tzs 5y ago
  > It's really not possible to overstate what an accomplishment this was. To stand up an organization like this outside of the normal departments and to give it the political backing it needed. And the accomplishment of not only getting multiple vaccines ready in record time, but also solving the distribution logistics problems in parallel. It was indeed quite an accomplishment. What was unexpected and ironic is what came afterwards, where opponents of the administration quickly got vaccinated in large numbers and supporters of the administration did not. There are some interesting graphs here [1]. Lately Trump was been pretty vocal about telling his supporters to get vaccinated, and even that doesn't seem to be changing many minds. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/05/1059828993/data-vaccine-misinformation-trump-counties-covid-death-rate https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/05/1059828...
  - chihuahua 5y ago
    To me, that is the strangest twist in this whole story: that Trump gets boo-ed by his supporters when he advises them to get vaccinated. They blindly accept everything he says, except for this one thing, which happens to be reasonable.
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      His endorsement of the vaccine was very thin cover to a mountain of attacks on everything they rely on (on Fauci, CDC, the 'deep state', all of government, science, it's just a flu, many, many others) and support for endless crazy conspiracy theories and their proponents. And how did he encourage the vaccines? We didn't have daily tweets saying things like 'TERRIBLE people opposing vaccines! SO SAD!!' He didn't really get behind them. You can't spend four years supporting everything that undermines them, and then quietly say 'get vaccinated'.
      - nervlord 5y ago
        [dead]
    - coolso 5y ago
      > that Trump gets boo-ed by his supporters Clarification: some of his supporters.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  Where does all this narrative come from? It is a complete revision of what I remember from the time. > outside of the normal departments Why is it superior to do it outside 'normal departments'? The CDC is the leading organization in the world for dealing with disease outbreaks and has handled them worldwide. The administration-appointed leadership didn't do well, and then was undermined by political appointees and the White House, who interfered with decisions and communication, in part to prevent any bad news or anything that contradicted Trump's misinformation. My understanding from the time was that Kushner was a disaster - in part due to being someone with no experience getting a tryout in a generational crisis - and that they created the outside organization to funnel funds to their friends, many of whom got contracts and were completely incompetent. As I understand it, what we got was despite Trump administration, not because of them. Edit: Also, part of Trump's solution was to pressure and outspend others to acquire vaccines from European companies, in a horrible zero-sum struggle. > To stand up an organization like this outside of the normal departments and to give it the political backing it needed. That's easy to do. What is hard is making it effective. > distribution logistics problems Distribution was a disaster. Remember in January 2021 the Trump administration was promising a large supply of vaccines that didn't actually exist, and in fact nobody knew how many vaccines we had. Despite nine months or more of time to prepare, no national vaccine tracking infrastructure was ready. Individual counties were trying to develop and deploy their own, of course with terrible results. Also, Trump was denying distribution to states whose governors didn't praise him - he actually blackmailed California's governor (and others), requiring them to publicly praise him in order to receive vaccines. These are just the things I remember off the top of my head.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    The "outside the process" was worse than you remember. Kushner got an bunch of MBA recent grads in a room to coordinate getting supplies. But they had no clue what they were doing. One CEO wrote about he spent about a month trying to get a federally guaranteed order so the bank would loan him the cash to run his mask factory on three shifts. Or maybe the details of that are fuzzy in my head and slightly off. But he eventually wrote into the Washington Post about trying to get the government to take his damn masks and, because there was an extra bureaucratic group running things, it was impossible to find the person who could say yes. And it was even worse than denying states gear unless their governor kissed Trumps ring. He actively encouraged a bidding war. Oh, and then he tried to confiscate PPE the states bought so he could redistribute it to political ally's states. It lead to ridiculously news stories about how state troopers in NY and MD were hiding trucks of PPE from the dead.
tpmx 5y ago
I agree with the other commenters that Operation Warp Speed was a pretty spectacular success. I just happened to focus on something specific - I really didn't mean for this comment to be some kind of anti-thesis to Operation Warp Speed. I very naively thought people were just upvoting something historically interesting. Seriously, does everything have to be political? :( ... The painting at the top of the article (https://americanaffairsjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Jenner-Vaccine.jpg https://americanaffairsjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/0...) shows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Jenner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Jenner jabbing a child with a vaccine. Edward Jenner, FRS FRCPE (17 May 1749 – 26 January 1823) was a British physician and scientist who pioneered the concept of vaccines including creating the smallpox vaccine, the world's first ever vaccine. The terms vaccine and vaccination are derived from Variolae vaccinae ('smallpox of the cow'), the term devised by Jenner to denote cowpox. [...] In the West, Jenner is often called "the father of immunology", and his work is said to have "saved more lives than the work of any other human". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Jenner#Invention_of_the_vaccine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Jenner#Invention_of_the... is a really interesting read.)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jonstewart 5y ago
American Affairs Journal is a relatively new magazine, and has leaned heavily to promoting America First protectionism and Trumpism — its editor eventually wrote that he regretted voting for Trump. I think the subject of the article is interesting and I’m looking forward to reading more about OWS in the years ahead. However, I think the true point of the article is to put this understanding of OWS on the political framework of the article’s many unsupported assertion. So, please read critically.
- FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
  You're absolutely right, so I was pleased to find a fairly low-political-content article, with little mention of Trump, adequate credit to Biden, and, mostly, a focus on the civil servants and government bureaucrats we rarely hear about -- who are arguably parts of the "Deep State" that Trump ran against, in fact -- and who the article lauds. And if > its editor eventually wrote that he regretted voting for Trump. then at least he's seen the light, right? The overall impression I get is that this particular author wants industrial policy, dammit, and he doesn't care if it's a Biden or a Trump who gives it to him -- or whether it's a "small government" Republican or a neoliberal Democrat who's getting in the way. Arguably Biden has taken some of these lessons (he may be the perfect Democrat for this), and has been attempting to enact them with Build Back Better (admittedly with some sops to the "progressives"). Which -- if "Trumpist" means "the principled stance of American Affairs" and not "the buffoon pandering to white grievance" -- would paradoxically make Biden more Trumpist than the Republicans and "moderates" who are now blocking his efforts. So how about I not call it "Trumpist" to begin with, given that Trump himself probably doesn't have many principles at all. It's simply: "Onshoring, Reindustrialization, and Industrial Policy". Or, "Make America Competitive with Germany and South Korea", you could say. The author's closing theme is also in direct contradiction of some talking points we've seen from Republicans recently. They've been talking about "government incompetence". Yet here, this article speaks of OWS as a display of competence. So if this guy is a Republican, I don't think he's a Republican who's "on message". The magazine does have its own ideological slant. But honestly, as it's begun to pivot away from Trump, it's not such a bad slant.
  - 5y ago
guy98238710 5y ago
[flagged]
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  The immune system has had longer to develop than we, as humans, have been aware of the existence of viruses or bacteria. I think you're taking the complexity of these systems for granted
arcticbull 5y ago
Warp Speed was good and whatnot but the first vaccine, the "Pfizer" one was developed by BioNTech, a Germany company, funded by the German government. Pfizer supported the development by handling clinical trials, logistics and manufacturing - and didn't take any Warp Speed money. IMO it felt more like a co-branding arrangement. > Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said that the company decided against taking direct Warp Speed funding for the development of the vaccine out of a desire "to liberate our scientists [from] any bureaucracy that comes with having to give reports and agree how we are going to spend the money in parallel or together". [1] Interesting anecoda. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Sure but this is about the USA government getting more involved in industry and they did that with Moderna and OWS. We already know that the German government (and Western European governments in general) are better at that than our government but at least we might have a chance to catch up.
  - xvilka 5y ago
    > German government (and Western European governments in general) are better at that than our government Debatable, Germany is notorious[1] for its bureaucracy still. [1] https://m.dw.com/en/germans-and-bureaucracy/a-16446787 https://m.dw.com/en/germans-and-bureaucracy/a-16446787
  - Barrin92 5y ago
    I'm German and thanks for the compliment but I think you can give the US government, or particular agencies some credit as well. The German government, public research sector and so forth work really well with industry and the Mittelstand, but our digital infrastructure is well.. not great. France is much stronger in the aeronautic/space sector which I always find a little bit embarrassing, and I'd be surprised if you see a German governmental institution produce something as relatively modest as Ghidra. While US/UK intelligence seems to attract quite a lot of talent over here it's generally considered a pretty bottom of the barrel career path.
marsven_422 5y ago
ISL 5y ago
I'd hesitate to presume that what worked for Warp Speed would work in a non-crisis situation. With our early-pandemic PPE-relief efforts, we had endless advantages that most projects don't have: almost-unlimited supply of high-skill and high-motivation labor, almost-unlimited support from any tech-partner we contacted with free service credits, almost-unlimited demand from "customers", and a sense of mission that was as strong as I've ever encountered. Warp Speed must have been similar -- "If we don't make this work on the first try, hundreds of thousands of people will die. If we don't make it work quickly, hundreds of thousands of people will die. The Federal Government will give us anything we need. Let's do this right." That's real different from bog-standard decadal industrial policy.
- echelon 5y ago
  > we had endless advantages that most projects don't have: almost-unlimited supply of high-skill and high-motivation labor, almost-unlimited support from any tech-partner we contacted with free service credits, almost-unlimited demand from "customers", and a sense of mission that was as strong as I've ever encountered. You know what would create an even greater sense of urgency? For the US government to offer fifty years of tax free profits to companies and entrepreneurs that industrialize in the US. Subsidize the factories, bring in immigrants to help. Let companies repatriate international profits for free to further assist. I've brought this up on HN before, but have been cautioned this might run afoul of the WTO. The more I think about it, though, would it really? And as net importers, do we care?
  - pjc50 5y ago
    Bezos doesn't need another hundred billion tax free dollars.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    Free money “solves” the exact one problem that American industry doesn’t have, and likely nothing else.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    It isn't so much that it runs afoul of the WTO (if the States are serious about they just ignore the UN) as that it is bad policy. Picking on China as the major competitor... the reasons China has gained an industrial advantage over the US is because: 1. Lots of industrial activity is illegal/extremely risky in the US. If you want to open a steelworks, for example, it seems reasonable to guess that the US will be much more hostile to the business on environmental grounds than China would. 2. US labour conditions are extremely generous compared to China. Median wage in the US is something like 5-6x times China and the gap was larger when the investment decisions were being made. Neither of those will be solved by tax breaks. General tax breaks may well spur good results, but the real killer of industry is those two factors. The US already has a much better general business climate than China legally (eg, people can be confident that they own their business without risks like corruption or nationalisation taking it off them).
WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
mola 5y ago
This reads like private industry propoganda for free money from the government without any strings attached. Amazing deal....
- kick_in_the_dor 5y ago
  Serious question: did you actually read the article, or are you basing this comment of the headline alone?
NicoJuicy 5y ago
Had some discussions here and i might conclude with the following: It's important to note, that the first authorized vaccine ( BionTech/Pfizer) was not funded by operation warp speed and they explicitely denied it to avoid political interference. Pfizer did a flawless execution ( they were chosen by BionTech because of their experience), simultaneous clinical trials ( funded by governements) and faster approval by governements made the BIGGEST difference from multiple years for a vaccine to just one year. Doing that process almost flawlessly by Pfizer is not an easy task! The Cold Storage pipeline was already mentioned since 1976 and many countries outside of the US had a very good execution. The logistical issues were also ( not coinsidence) not "rich countries" unfortunately. Ebola paved the way for a lot of regulatory changes too as a lot of bottlenecks were discovered before Covid. Also the reduced requirement from -60° to -20° made it easier to hook into the existing cold chain pipeline ( but not without hurdles ofc, but the tech was already available - https://www.unicef.org/supply/stories/historic-push-provide-ultra-cold-chain-freezers-around-world https://www.unicef.org/supply/stories/historic-push-provide-... ) The US started to deliver vaccines 2 months faster ( Europe didn't do premium pricing, did more in cooperation which made it slower ( > 25 countries!) and didn't waver pharma responsibilities. They also bought more Astra Zenica which wasn't the right bet). My POV of Operation WarpSpeed: buy all possible vaccines at premium pricing and then distribute it like the others, while leaving last-mile delivery to the states themselves is really just picking the easy work and letting others do the hard work. Long-term: As it's the governments "initiative", they should have promoted the vaccines more and made more information available. Other countries greatly overtook the US by vaccination rates by now and the "total package" should be compared. It's not the start that counts, it's the finish that matters. TLDR: I don't know where Operation WarpSpeed made any proven difference that couldn't be done by buying all possible vaccines.
- NicoJuicy 5y ago
  Additional data to support my perception. Israel was quicker in rollout/receiving vaccines, because they also paid more than the US: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-03-04/pfizer-pfe-has-a-moral-dilemma-deciding-where-the-vaccines-will-go https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-03-04/pfizer-pf... ( And were willing to share countrywide data)

151 points by gok 5y ago

> In April 2020, Kadlec and Marks wrote a proposal for HHS secretary Alex Azar, who in turn took it to Jared Kushner and others in the White House, who were enthusiastic. President Trump supported it and signed off on it. Azar brought in the DoD as well. (The bureaucratic history of OWS, like everything to do with it, is complex and contested.) Azar, Kushner, and others then made two hiring decisions that were crucial to Warp Speed’s success, recruiting Moncief Slaoui, a pharma executive, and Gustave F. Perna, a general, as its leaders. Slaoui, OWS’s chief adviser, had been chairman of global vaccines at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and brought pharma knowledge. General Perna, OWS’s chief operating officer, had overseen the global supply chains for the U.S. Army and brought logistical expertise. It's really not possible to overstate what an accomplishment this was. To stand up an organization like this outside of the normal departments and to give it the political backing it needed. And the accomplishment of not only getting multiple vaccines ready in record time, but also solving the distribution logistics problems in parallel.

NicoJuicy 5y ago
Wait, getting multiple vaccines ready but none were from the US. The most used one is a partnership from Pfizer and was created by Biontech. The vaccine was practically ready on day 2 of COVID due to mRNA. Pfizer even declined Warp speed funding ( but pre-orders were accepted in December during phase 3 trials) So I'm not sure why Warp speed is considered a success?
- manuelabeledo 5y ago
  > Wait, getting multiple vaccines ready but none were from the US. Wasn't the Moderna vaccine developed entirely in the US?
  - SR2Z 5y ago
    And while the Pfizer one was majority developed by BioNTech, they lacked the expertise to actually produce it at scale.
    - NicoJuicy 5y ago
      And that happened at the existing Pfizer facility in Puurs ( Belgium). As far as I'm aware, no existing facilities were upgraded/expanded? https://www.politico.eu/article/belgium-town-puurs-spotlight-coronavirus-vaccine/ https://www.politico.eu/article/belgium-town-puurs-spotlight... A big up for Belgian pharma facilities. But I'm unsure about the role of operation Warp speed on this all. As far as I'm aware, Pfizer/BionTech explicitly avoided any funding through operation Warp Speed. They received an order in phase 3 of the clinical trials. The core issue ( why they partnered with Pfizer) for BionTech was also not production at scale, but handling clinical trials at this scale. Which ( again/also) was not related to Warp Speed.
      - yzmtf2008 5y ago
        > As far as I'm aware, no existing facilities were added? Nowhere in your linked article indicates that "no existing facilities were added". > As of January 2022, the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine is manufactured between 11 sites across five countries, including the U.S., Germany, Belgium, Ireland, and Croatia, and engages more than 20 suppliers. https://www.pfizer.com/science/coronavirus/vaccine/manufacturing-and-distribution#:~:text=Where%20is%20the%20Pfizer%2DBioNTech%20COVID%2D19%20vaccine%20made%3F https://www.pfizer.com/science/coronavirus/vaccine/manufactu...
        NicoJuicy 5y ago
        I'm from Belgium and i did follow up on Puurs and i hadn't encountered any news that they needed to upgrade facilities there. That's what you should have copied my whole sentence: "as far as I'm aware, no existing facilities were added". Which in retrospect should be upgraded actually. Didn't notice that mistake.
- tomohawk 5y ago
  > ready on day 2 That's like some person in SV saying they had a great idea. Who cares? The level of execution in operation warp to get this past the FDA processes was enormous. The industrial mobilzation to create refrigeration units and transportation, and get all of the logistics alligned in a few months. That is the stuff of legend.
  - NicoJuicy 5y ago
    And that seems to me as patting themselves on the back. Every country in Europe did this exact thing without patting themselves on the back or calling it "Warp speed" ( eg. For Refrigerator units/logistics) The biggest accomplishment/improvement to speed up things was doing simultaneous clinical trials, which wasn't even remotely related with Warp speed but was a emergency action ( = it existed as advice before COVID to be used if a pandemic would happen)
    - e4e78a06 5y ago
      The EU had a substantially delayed rollout of vaccines compared to the US [1]. You can see that the purple line (US) is about 2 months ahead of the yellow (EU). Especially in the early days of the rollout the EU was very behind. [1]: https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2412 https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2412
      - morelisp 5y ago
        > Especially in the early days of the rollout the EU was very behind. On one hand I agree, but on the other hand looking back now after 13-14 months, did it matter? Was any public health outcome significantly improved by that lead? (From the qualitative reports I've read I might believe there was in the UK - but not prima facie US vs. EU.)
        e4e78a06 5y ago
        That's a pretty hard analysis to make. You'd have to compare people that 1) wanted to get vaccinated and 2) _could_ have been vaccinated if they were in the US instead of Europe and 3) died from COVID during the 2 month delay and see how many lives were saved. My uninformed guess just eyeballing the historical death graphs and vaccine rollout is probably low 5 figures range.
- yzmtf2008 5y ago
  > Wait, getting multiple vaccines ready but none were from the US. See sibling comment on Moderna. > The vaccine was practically ready on day 2 of COVID due to mRNA No. "ready" as in we can produce a vile in a lab? Sure. Ready as in tested in the general population, mass production facilities, distribution networks? Absolutely not. > So I'm not sure why Warp speed is considered a success? Producing a vaccine is about the easiest part of warp speed. Having the supply chain needed to vaccinate the whole population in such a brief time? That's the success. Also, it's literally the entire point of TFA.
  - dnautics 5y ago
    If I'm not mistaken the mRNA production is kind of bonkers, it's outsourced to a bestiary of third party small contract manufacturers. I could be wrong, but I don't think that any newly released drug has rolled out like that at such a scale in the past (usually it's one/a few plants all controlled by the big pharma that gets certified by the FDA). It's REALLY impressive that the bureaucracy figured out exactly where to bend the rules and shepherded all of the small contract manufacturers into compliance to get reasonable batch-to-batch consistency and safety for these vaccines.
    - EGreg 5y ago
      “The bureaucracy” is doing a lot of work there THIS is what I want to hear more about. How was all this coordination done? Solving collective action problems is what government is supposed to do… was this a command economy, central planning, or some sort of intiative like we have now with the new “security best practices imperatives” that will use the infrastructure bill and standardize what small vendors will deliver?
      - dnautics 5y ago
        I don't necessarily think that government's job is to "solve collective action problems" (there are plenty of alternatives, actually free markets themselves are a solution to the collective action problem of "what should the price of X be") -- but if it's going to doit, it should be held to a high standard of effectiveness.
- vlovich123 5y ago
  mRNA was an accomplishment to be sure. It’s a necessary but not sufficient condition. If you look at the stories for the rollout, the logistics challenge posed by mRNA vaccines were quite substantial, particularly refrigeration but also supply chain logistics in general were complicated. Warp Speed definitely was run competently by all accounts.
  - pyuser583 5y ago
    As the article pointed out, identifying MRNA as a viable option was one of Warp Speeds major accomplishments. There are tons of technologies that had to be explored. I’ve read this article in full several times (it’s dense). Warp Speed wasn’t like the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Project. It wasn’t hundreds of thousands of government employees working in one tech. It was hundreds of project managers with single tech portfolios, most of which were useless, trying to figure out which tech would solve the problem at hand. It was YComhinator investing applied to a major government project.
    - jounker 5y ago
      The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was pointedly not involved in Operation Warp Speed.
      - vlovich123 5y ago
        Wikipedia disagrees with you but depends on your meaning of "not involved". I think you could be right about the impact Warp Speed had on the selection aspect of mRNA but it's hard to say. From one perspective, BioNtech mRNA effort started in January 2020 before Warp Speed was a thing. From another Pfizer and BioNTech announced a deal in April 2020 around the time that Warp Speed legislation (and since legislation is lagging self-organizing work that was ongoing, it's hard to say). From the capacity perspective, it doesn't seem right [1]. > But on July 22, Operation Warp Speed placed an advance-purchase order of $2 billion with Pfizer to manufacture 100 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine for use in the United States when the vaccine was shown to be safe, effective, licensed, and authorized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). On December 23, the Trump administration announced that they had ordered another 200 million doses from Pfizer. On November 9, the Pfizer–BioNTech partnership announced positive early results from its Phase III trial of the BNT162b2 vaccine candidate, and on December 11, the FDA provided emergency use authorization, initiating the distribution of the vaccine. > In September 2020, BioNTech received €375 million (US$445 million) from the government of Germany to accelerate the development and production capacity of the Pfizer–BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine So looks like they needed significant government help getting distribution and logistics. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed#Pfizer%E2%80%93BioNTech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed#Pfizer%E2...
- Spooky23 5y ago
  Nooo. There was a ton of logistics. The military was a key part of the last mile distribution initially and for some time. Trump is a loathsome character, but OWS was a well executed initiative.
  - tandymodel100 5y ago
    The last mile distribution wasn’t well considered at all. Between tweets denying he lost the election he just said it would be up to the states to furnish last mile.
    - Spooky23 5y ago
      I think OWS had some autonomy outside of the crazy day to day bloviating. The initial Pfizer environmental requirements were difficult to meet, and the military through the national guard were a big part of delivery. Outside of those logistics everything was an evil shitshow.
- EGreg 5y ago
  What I want to know is, what happened to all that “warp” speed since then? We had been waiting for delta vaccine and whatever else, for over a year. They can surely churn them out quick with mRNA (they even did it for HIV!) but they don’t. The profit motive happened. With government and media carrying water for these vaccine manufacturers, and forcing everyone to get an outdated vaccine, why would they cannibalize their own profits? It’s like if everyone were told you must install Windows 98 to get on the Internet or do any sort of work, why would Microsoft want to release Windows NT? Meanwhile, you can see how the US Army with no profit motive has outdone them and created a vaccine for ALL the variants: https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2021/12/us-army-creates-single-vaccine-effective-against-all-covid-sars-variants/360089/ https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2021/12/us-army-create... This just goes to show that government and industry often work together and market failures often result, while institutions with no profit motive can overtake them (Wikipedia, NGinX, Linux, Wordpress, WebKit and many others overtook their capitalist counterparts.)
  - jimmygrapes 5y ago
    What happened was, well, as you said, profit came in, but also we had an election and brought in a change of guard that for whatever reason didn't continue that particular mission. It seems to me that once the initial vaccines were out, the mission became "we have the solution, now make everyone accept it" rather than continuous improvement. It's like they refuse to do the last steps of a process (evaluate effectiveness and refine as needed) and got stuck on implementation, not recognizing that implementation itself needs to be evaluated and refined.
    - jonway 5y ago
      After reading TFA, I have learned that Operation Warp Speed essentially bought the risk and supplied scaling capital to bootstrap domestic biomedical manufacturing. OWS supplied capital for hardware, people, project management, brokered manufacturing agreements and organized large scale trials. Article mentions that moderna had a big weakness: Inexperienced at executing clinical trials and large scale manufacturing of its vaccine technology, it could produce a prototype vaccine in several days but had no existing pipeline to deliver industrial quantities. >It seems to me that once the initial vaccines were out, the mission became "we have the solution, now make everyone accept it" rather than continuous improvement. The vaccines were out in a couple of months. Amazingly, it turns out that the hard part is scaling to global quantities of a new product line. Re-engineering a global production is way hard, too. I agree that we should continue to fund the scaleout of domestic biomedical manufacturing.
- rsynnott 5y ago
  Moderna was American and accepted US funding, so it wasn’t a total loss. Though the article certainly overstates it a bit. Pfizer/BioNTech and AZ were significant beneficiaries of state funding outside of the US, tho.
- blibble 5y ago
  yes, the entire article is singing the praise of the necessity of darpa and OWS when biontech and pfizer succeeded without any of it
  - rsynnott 5y ago
    BioNTech did receive significant funding from the German government, however.
    - NicoJuicy 5y ago
      That's not related to Warp speed. Those are subsidies for eg. doing simultaneous clinical trials and to compensate it's additional costs.
  - anonymousiam 5y ago
    There's a separate element of Warp Speed that nobody is discussing. It's not about funding the development, but about allowing use on humans with reduced trials beforehand. That part was enormously successful.
    - NicoJuicy 5y ago
      That's not operation Warp speed. That's pandemic 101 from the WHO. And it's not reduced trials, it's doing them simultaneously. I mentioned it before in another comment 3 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30141967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30141967
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- refurb 5y ago
  3 of the 4 of the key vaccines were manufactured by US companies - Pfizer, Moderna and J&J. You realize a part of Warp Speed was the coordination of manufacturers and the FDA? So while Pfizer accepted no funding, it benefited from the streamlined regulatory process.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    Pfizer was developed by BioNTech in Germany, funded by the German government. Pfizers involvement was limited to a co-branding arrangement where they ramped and scaled production. Pfizer also did not receive any money from Warp Speed, and one of their scientists at a point even stated they weren't participating at all. This was hastily walked back, but it's not really clear they were anything more than a vendor, IMO. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed
    - refurb 5y ago
      As someone who has been involved in development of new drugs, you are massively understating Pfizer’s role. BioNTech never could have got the drug to market without Pfizer. Pfizer had to: 1) conduct animal testing, 2) scale up synthesis to billions of units, 3) work with the FDA to align on clinical studies [where OWS helped], 4) conduct global clinical studies in dozens of countries, 5) collect, analyze the clinical study data, 6) assemble a new drug application for dozen of regulatory agencies across the globe [typically 1000's of pages long], 7) actually manufacture billions of sterile doses to the FDA’s requirements, 8) negotiate purchase agreements with 100+ countries, 9) actually distribute the vaccine globally despite the need for -78C temperature. BioNTech maybe could have done step 1. They had never gotten a drug approved before. Pfizer has brought over 100 drugs to market. BioNTech’s role is like creating an iPhone app and saying it’s the same as a building a multi billion dollar business like Uber.
      - NicoJuicy 5y ago
        Wait what? Then why didn't Pfizer create the "iPhone app". You are seriously underestimating BionTech's advanced lead in mRNA. A fair comparison would be to create an iphone app without an SDK in existence yet, but an app store in place. Pfizer was there because it's existing infrastructure for trials and experience. While the timeline was seriously reduced, they didn't had to do much "new" that they hadn't done before yet. Additionally, requirements in the fridge was reduced to -20° which made it a lot easier than your -60°-80° and was assisted by many more than just Pfizer ( see UNICEF and their "cold chain unit" for this or how covax delivered > 1 billion doses) > Back in 1974, the World Health Organization (WHO) established the Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI). In order to assess the feasibility of a single, global immunisation schedule incorporating vaccines against polio, measles, tuberculosis, tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis, the EPI was initially piloted in Ghana. > One major challenge quickly became apparent: as vaccines were temperature-sensitive biological products, they needed to be continuously stored in a limited temperature range from the time they were manufactured until the moment of vaccination. Any exposure to temperatures outside this range would irreversibly affect vaccine potency, diminishing the ability of vaccines to protect vaccinated patients. > The solution was a workable “cold chain". A term adopted in 1976, it described a global network of cold rooms, cold boxes, vaccine carriers, refrigerators, and freezers that kept vaccines at the WHO-recommended temperature during the long journey from the manufacturing line to the syringe. Similarly, Ebola also needed cold chain infrastructure. Creds for doing it this fast, yes! But it's not something new and i won't pretend it is. Pfizer was the best choice for bringing it to market, definitely.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  Pfizer accepted preorders in June before phase 3 in the amount of $2 billion. They declined warp speed funding for the research, not the manufacture.
  - NicoJuicy 5y ago
    Pfizer accepted orders, but had a very special contract that meant the US needed to back off. They did manufacturer outside the US just fine. A simple Google search could have given that info.
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      Pfizer had multiple manufacturing processes in multiple parts of the world. The EU plants definitely did worse than the US plants. That's probably not due to any government program, but the US based manufacture didn't have to shutdown and restart or waste, I think it was a month. That said, the primary reason OWS worked at all is they parallelized anything they could. In this case, they paid Pfizer $2 billion to start producing a vaccine before they knew if it would work or be FDA approved, although there was good reason to believe it would. It wasn't brilliant. It was a good idea. Worst cast we waste $2 billion. Best case we end a pandemic 6 months early. Putting more money at risk for faster results is reasonable in emergencies. Outside emergencies we have a process for a reason - to reduce waste and fraud.
      - NicoJuicy 5y ago
        I call bs. Show me. What's the source of a month shutdown? I've never heard of that. Pfizer, additionally, already had positive trials before the order from the US came! OWS had nothing to do with the quickest delivered vaccine, since Pfizer wanted NO political interference. The contract was not funding at all. They didn't receive the money upfront and it had to be approved by FDA before the contract was considered valid. Israel had the fastest vaccination rate/program in the world and it was supplied by the Belgian manufacturing part of Pfizer in Puurs. https://nsl.consilium.europa.eu/104100/GeneralNewsletter/4od5l4siyvf7z5zx5ai27sxp5i/Html https://nsl.consilium.europa.eu/104100/GeneralNewsletter/4od... > Most vaccination technologies have been initiated or developed in Europe. Most of the doses with which Israel embarked on its mass vaccination programme were sent from Belgium. There's a big difference in supplying the world with enough vaccines ( EU ) versus buying all available ones at a premium ( US). I don't even know where your fraud argument comes from... But worst case is definitely not 2 billion $ waste. But a 10 billion $ risk of funds taken from hospitals for COVID care that could need it, which paid for "operation Warp speed" - https://www.statnews.com/2021/03/02/trump-administration-quietly-spent-billions-in-hospital-funds-on-operation-warp-speed/ https://www.statnews.com/2021/03/02/trump-administration-qui...
brian_cunnie 5y ago
> It's really not possible to overstate what an accomplishment this was For some of us, it's a challenge to disentangle the achievements from the politics (e.g. "I hate Trump, so I refuse to believe his administration did anything of note"). But the world isn't a comforting black & white; instead, it's nuanced shades of gray. Let's applaud the achievements that saved lives, regardless of the administration that promulgated them.
- tomohawk 5y ago
  Exactly. This could easily have become the next boondogle, akin to Solyndra. The fact that it didn't, and achieved such a good result is a rarity.
  - Aloha 5y ago
    I would rather government take reasonable risks, and end up with occasional Solyndra's if thats the price for increased innovation. To be honest, I don't consider the half a billion dollars from Solyndra to be much of a boondoggle, in the grand scheme of things. It's a loan guarantee that had intentional fraud by the borrower.
  - tootie 5y ago
    Solyndra was inconsequential. And it was part of a package of knowingly risky bets that was overall very successful. Warp Speed was the same. They invested in lots of vaccine trials with the expectation that some would fail and they would absorb the cost. There were a lot of manufacturing miscues and money that was misspent but that was all baked into the program expectations. Same with the clean energy funding of which Solyndra took part.
  - throwaway6734 5y ago
    The same program that invested in Solyndra also gave Tesla grants that prevented it's bankruptcy
- KerrAvon 5y ago
  For some of us, the actual challenge is that all of Trump’s people lie at the drop of a hat. He hires for loyalty, not competence, and that means lying whenever necessary for his ego, and that means you’re talking to people who have no shame. How can we trust that any of this happened the way that they say it did? Isn’t this just amother puff piece to pump Jared and the other incompetent losers in Trumpworld up? Since they were also spectacularly incompetent at getting jabs into arms — Biden had to pick up the pieces on distribution — why do they deserve the benefit of the doubt?
magicalist 5y ago
> but also solving the distribution logistics problems in parallel. Quick to forget the huge distribution bottleneck that happened in December 2020 and the issues with depending on Walgreens and CVS as distribution points. I do enjoy that the article takes essentially no last mile plan and blames it the CDC and on a letter from state health groups saying "hey, wtf is the plan here" because it apparently had woke concerns. Meanwhile at the federal level "OWS was not faultless" and that's all we get. A lot of amazing things happened to get the vaccines out so quickly, but this hagiography reads like a characteristic of American propaganda.
- bluGill 5y ago
  It is easy in hindsight to point out mistakes. However despite imperfections they still did an amazing job.
  - jounker 5y ago
    The mistakes were being pointed out very loudly at the time.
tootie 5y ago
Planet Money did a great breakdown of the whole thing. They put a lot more credit on Kadlec himself and implied the Slaoui and Perna were just sort of there to make sales pitches. I think it also can't be understated that none of the bureaucratic victories would be possible if the science wasn't so advanced. Moderna had their vaccine in hand and ready for trials in a matter of weeks. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1053003777 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1053003777 Also, notable that Russia and China delivered vaccines even faster by not bothering with so much testing. They took a much bigger risk in their approach, but the vaccines they produced turned out to be nearly as effective as those coming from US/UK/Germany
- refurb 5y ago
  The Russian and China vaccines were NOT as effective. And the Russian vaccines had lot to lot variability that was pretty worrisome.
  - dirtyid 5y ago
    Seems like with omicron, working inactivated vaccines appear comparably effective at preventing severe cases considering mRNA does not substantively prevent breakthrough infections. I mean they are on paper, but in practice it means buying a few extra days before spread goes out of control. It's down to costs, manufacturability and logistics. Then arguably inactivated vaccines come out ahead as most countries can produce them and they have no cold chain requirements. A country that can afford and has the capability to go all mRNA will be better off for it. But it terms of global vax effort they're now relatively less effective than inactivated solutions.
thrwaway11212 5y ago
I'm a software engineer and I've done similar Operation Warp speeds in the past. Mandates from executives to ship something now. Disable the test suite because we don't have time to look at the tests. Skip QA, release directly to prod and see what happens. It always works very well in the IT industry, it's not wonder pharma wants to adopt the same proven approach.
- funcDropShadow 5y ago
  They did not skip QA. The EMA (the European FDA equivalent) did not reduce the formal requirements for Covid vaccines compared to other vaccines. None of the Covid vaccines have an emergency use authorization in the EU. They all went through the regular process. That process was made more parallel and more incremental. And it was obviously executed with the highest priority possible. Those ideas are indeed used in the IT world, but they are successful ideas, and they are much older than the IT world. By incremental I mean, the rolling review used for the trials. I.e. the pharma companies would deliver regularly preliminary versions of the final report on the trial. Thereby, a lot of questions about the report can be asked and answered earlier than in a traditional review process after the trial has finished.
joe_the_user 5y ago
It's really not possible to overstate what an accomplishment this was. To stand up an organization like this outside of the normal departments and to give it the political backing it needed. If that's true, it's also a testament to how ossified bureaucratic boundaries have become. It's like; America, 1969, "we put a man on the moon!". American, 2021, "we put a man into a position of authority outside of ordinary bureaucratic channels!". Maybe that's an achieve indeed but the context give one pause.
- GuB-42 5y ago
  To be fair, I think it is an achievement on the scale of putting a man on the moon. Putting a man on the moon is a great technical achievement, but really, the reason people remember it so much is that it is a pissing contest that the US won. But being able to be productive against bureaucracy is maybe the greatest achievement for a big country. And I am sure that's also what made Apollo successful. Operation Warp Speed probably won't feature in the history books, it is not as symbolic as a moon landing, it just made vaccines available a bit sooner. I don't think it really changed the course of history, but the time savings have saved thousands of lives, maybe millions, shortened lockdowns, allowed schools to open, etc... It is just statistics, but there are some statistics I am happy not to be part of.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    How do you know that it delivered vaccine earlier than alternatives, or than a properly run, non-corrupt project?
    - noitpmeder 5y ago
      Where are your sources saying this project was corrupt? Genuinely curious, as I have not read much to this effect.
      - wolverine876 5y ago
        Just search a major news source from the time.
tzs 5y ago
> It's really not possible to overstate what an accomplishment this was. To stand up an organization like this outside of the normal departments and to give it the political backing it needed. And the accomplishment of not only getting multiple vaccines ready in record time, but also solving the distribution logistics problems in parallel. It was indeed quite an accomplishment. What was unexpected and ironic is what came afterwards, where opponents of the administration quickly got vaccinated in large numbers and supporters of the administration did not. There are some interesting graphs here [1]. Lately Trump was been pretty vocal about telling his supporters to get vaccinated, and even that doesn't seem to be changing many minds. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/05/1059828993/data-vaccine-misinformation-trump-counties-covid-death-rate https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/05/1059828...
- chihuahua 5y ago
  To me, that is the strangest twist in this whole story: that Trump gets boo-ed by his supporters when he advises them to get vaccinated. They blindly accept everything he says, except for this one thing, which happens to be reasonable.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    His endorsement of the vaccine was very thin cover to a mountain of attacks on everything they rely on (on Fauci, CDC, the 'deep state', all of government, science, it's just a flu, many, many others) and support for endless crazy conspiracy theories and their proponents. And how did he encourage the vaccines? We didn't have daily tweets saying things like 'TERRIBLE people opposing vaccines! SO SAD!!' He didn't really get behind them. You can't spend four years supporting everything that undermines them, and then quietly say 'get vaccinated'.
    - nervlord 5y ago
      [dead]
  - coolso 5y ago
    > that Trump gets boo-ed by his supporters Clarification: some of his supporters.
wolverine876 5y ago
Where does all this narrative come from? It is a complete revision of what I remember from the time. > outside of the normal departments Why is it superior to do it outside 'normal departments'? The CDC is the leading organization in the world for dealing with disease outbreaks and has handled them worldwide. The administration-appointed leadership didn't do well, and then was undermined by political appointees and the White House, who interfered with decisions and communication, in part to prevent any bad news or anything that contradicted Trump's misinformation. My understanding from the time was that Kushner was a disaster - in part due to being someone with no experience getting a tryout in a generational crisis - and that they created the outside organization to funnel funds to their friends, many of whom got contracts and were completely incompetent. As I understand it, what we got was despite Trump administration, not because of them. Edit: Also, part of Trump's solution was to pressure and outspend others to acquire vaccines from European companies, in a horrible zero-sum struggle. > To stand up an organization like this outside of the normal departments and to give it the political backing it needed. That's easy to do. What is hard is making it effective. > distribution logistics problems Distribution was a disaster. Remember in January 2021 the Trump administration was promising a large supply of vaccines that didn't actually exist, and in fact nobody knew how many vaccines we had. Despite nine months or more of time to prepare, no national vaccine tracking infrastructure was ready. Individual counties were trying to develop and deploy their own, of course with terrible results. Also, Trump was denying distribution to states whose governors didn't praise him - he actually blackmailed California's governor (and others), requiring them to publicly praise him in order to receive vaccines. These are just the things I remember off the top of my head.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  The "outside the process" was worse than you remember. Kushner got an bunch of MBA recent grads in a room to coordinate getting supplies. But they had no clue what they were doing. One CEO wrote about he spent about a month trying to get a federally guaranteed order so the bank would loan him the cash to run his mask factory on three shifts. Or maybe the details of that are fuzzy in my head and slightly off. But he eventually wrote into the Washington Post about trying to get the government to take his damn masks and, because there was an extra bureaucratic group running things, it was impossible to find the person who could say yes. And it was even worse than denying states gear unless their governor kissed Trumps ring. He actively encouraged a bidding war. Oh, and then he tried to confiscate PPE the states bought so he could redistribute it to political ally's states. It lead to ridiculously news stories about how state troopers in NY and MD were hiding trucks of PPE from the dead.

tpmx 5y ago

I agree with the other commenters that Operation Warp Speed was a pretty spectacular success. I just happened to focus on something specific - I really didn't mean for this comment to be some kind of anti-thesis to Operation Warp Speed. I very naively thought people were just upvoting something historically interesting. Seriously, does everything have to be political? :( ... The painting at the top of the article (https://americanaffairsjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Jenner-Vaccine.jpg https://americanaffairsjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/0...) shows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Jenner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Jenner jabbing a child with a vaccine. Edward Jenner, FRS FRCPE (17 May 1749 – 26 January 1823) was a British physician and scientist who pioneered the concept of vaccines including creating the smallpox vaccine, the world's first ever vaccine. The terms vaccine and vaccination are derived from Variolae vaccinae ('smallpox of the cow'), the term devised by Jenner to denote cowpox. [...] In the West, Jenner is often called "the father of immunology", and his work is said to have "saved more lives than the work of any other human". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Jenner#Invention_of_the_vaccine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Jenner#Invention_of_the... is a really interesting read.)

deleted 5y ago
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jonstewart 5y ago

American Affairs Journal is a relatively new magazine, and has leaned heavily to promoting America First protectionism and Trumpism — its editor eventually wrote that he regretted voting for Trump. I think the subject of the article is interesting and I’m looking forward to reading more about OWS in the years ahead. However, I think the true point of the article is to put this understanding of OWS on the political framework of the article’s many unsupported assertion. So, please read critically.

FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
You're absolutely right, so I was pleased to find a fairly low-political-content article, with little mention of Trump, adequate credit to Biden, and, mostly, a focus on the civil servants and government bureaucrats we rarely hear about -- who are arguably parts of the "Deep State" that Trump ran against, in fact -- and who the article lauds. And if > its editor eventually wrote that he regretted voting for Trump. then at least he's seen the light, right? The overall impression I get is that this particular author wants industrial policy, dammit, and he doesn't care if it's a Biden or a Trump who gives it to him -- or whether it's a "small government" Republican or a neoliberal Democrat who's getting in the way. Arguably Biden has taken some of these lessons (he may be the perfect Democrat for this), and has been attempting to enact them with Build Back Better (admittedly with some sops to the "progressives"). Which -- if "Trumpist" means "the principled stance of American Affairs" and not "the buffoon pandering to white grievance" -- would paradoxically make Biden more Trumpist than the Republicans and "moderates" who are now blocking his efforts. So how about I not call it "Trumpist" to begin with, given that Trump himself probably doesn't have many principles at all. It's simply: "Onshoring, Reindustrialization, and Industrial Policy". Or, "Make America Competitive with Germany and South Korea", you could say. The author's closing theme is also in direct contradiction of some talking points we've seen from Republicans recently. They've been talking about "government incompetence". Yet here, this article speaks of OWS as a display of competence. So if this guy is a Republican, I don't think he's a Republican who's "on message". The magazine does have its own ideological slant. But honestly, as it's begun to pivot away from Trump, it's not such a bad slant.
- 5y ago

guy98238710 5y ago

[flagged]

netizen-936824 5y ago
The immune system has had longer to develop than we, as humans, have been aware of the existence of viruses or bacteria. I think you're taking the complexity of these systems for granted

arcticbull 5y ago

Warp Speed was good and whatnot but the first vaccine, the "Pfizer" one was developed by BioNTech, a Germany company, funded by the German government. Pfizer supported the development by handling clinical trials, logistics and manufacturing - and didn't take any Warp Speed money. IMO it felt more like a co-branding arrangement. > Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said that the company decided against taking direct Warp Speed funding for the development of the vaccine out of a desire "to liberate our scientists [from] any bureaucracy that comes with having to give reports and agree how we are going to spend the money in parallel or together". [1] Interesting anecoda. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed

stjohnswarts 5y ago
Sure but this is about the USA government getting more involved in industry and they did that with Moderna and OWS. We already know that the German government (and Western European governments in general) are better at that than our government but at least we might have a chance to catch up.
- xvilka 5y ago
  > German government (and Western European governments in general) are better at that than our government Debatable, Germany is notorious[1] for its bureaucracy still. [1] https://m.dw.com/en/germans-and-bureaucracy/a-16446787 https://m.dw.com/en/germans-and-bureaucracy/a-16446787
- Barrin92 5y ago
  I'm German and thanks for the compliment but I think you can give the US government, or particular agencies some credit as well. The German government, public research sector and so forth work really well with industry and the Mittelstand, but our digital infrastructure is well.. not great. France is much stronger in the aeronautic/space sector which I always find a little bit embarrassing, and I'd be surprised if you see a German governmental institution produce something as relatively modest as Ghidra. While US/UK intelligence seems to attract quite a lot of talent over here it's generally considered a pretty bottom of the barrel career path.

marsven_422 5y ago

ISL 5y ago

I'd hesitate to presume that what worked for Warp Speed would work in a non-crisis situation. With our early-pandemic PPE-relief efforts, we had endless advantages that most projects don't have: almost-unlimited supply of high-skill and high-motivation labor, almost-unlimited support from any tech-partner we contacted with free service credits, almost-unlimited demand from "customers", and a sense of mission that was as strong as I've ever encountered. Warp Speed must have been similar -- "If we don't make this work on the first try, hundreds of thousands of people will die. If we don't make it work quickly, hundreds of thousands of people will die. The Federal Government will give us anything we need. Let's do this right." That's real different from bog-standard decadal industrial policy.

echelon 5y ago
> we had endless advantages that most projects don't have: almost-unlimited supply of high-skill and high-motivation labor, almost-unlimited support from any tech-partner we contacted with free service credits, almost-unlimited demand from "customers", and a sense of mission that was as strong as I've ever encountered. You know what would create an even greater sense of urgency? For the US government to offer fifty years of tax free profits to companies and entrepreneurs that industrialize in the US. Subsidize the factories, bring in immigrants to help. Let companies repatriate international profits for free to further assist. I've brought this up on HN before, but have been cautioned this might run afoul of the WTO. The more I think about it, though, would it really? And as net importers, do we care?
- pjc50 5y ago
  Bezos doesn't need another hundred billion tax free dollars.
- ben_w 5y ago
  Free money “solves” the exact one problem that American industry doesn’t have, and likely nothing else.
- roenxi 5y ago
  It isn't so much that it runs afoul of the WTO (if the States are serious about they just ignore the UN) as that it is bad policy. Picking on China as the major competitor... the reasons China has gained an industrial advantage over the US is because: 1. Lots of industrial activity is illegal/extremely risky in the US. If you want to open a steelworks, for example, it seems reasonable to guess that the US will be much more hostile to the business on environmental grounds than China would. 2. US labour conditions are extremely generous compared to China. Median wage in the US is something like 5-6x times China and the gap was larger when the investment decisions were being made. Neither of those will be solved by tax breaks. General tax breaks may well spur good results, but the real killer of industry is those two factors. The US already has a much better general business climate than China legally (eg, people can be confident that they own their business without risks like corruption or nationalisation taking it off them).

WaxedChewbacca 5y ago

mola 5y ago

This reads like private industry propoganda for free money from the government without any strings attached. Amazing deal....

kick_in_the_dor 5y ago
Serious question: did you actually read the article, or are you basing this comment of the headline alone?

NicoJuicy 5y ago

Had some discussions here and i might conclude with the following: It's important to note, that the first authorized vaccine ( BionTech/Pfizer) was not funded by operation warp speed and they explicitely denied it to avoid political interference. Pfizer did a flawless execution ( they were chosen by BionTech because of their experience), simultaneous clinical trials ( funded by governements) and faster approval by governements made the BIGGEST difference from multiple years for a vaccine to just one year. Doing that process almost flawlessly by Pfizer is not an easy task! The Cold Storage pipeline was already mentioned since 1976 and many countries outside of the US had a very good execution. The logistical issues were also ( not coinsidence) not "rich countries" unfortunately. Ebola paved the way for a lot of regulatory changes too as a lot of bottlenecks were discovered before Covid. Also the reduced requirement from -60° to -20° made it easier to hook into the existing cold chain pipeline ( but not without hurdles ofc, but the tech was already available - https://www.unicef.org/supply/stories/historic-push-provide-ultra-cold-chain-freezers-around-world https://www.unicef.org/supply/stories/historic-push-provide-... ) The US started to deliver vaccines 2 months faster ( Europe didn't do premium pricing, did more in cooperation which made it slower ( > 25 countries!) and didn't waver pharma responsibilities. They also bought more Astra Zenica which wasn't the right bet). My POV of Operation WarpSpeed: buy all possible vaccines at premium pricing and then distribute it like the others, while leaving last-mile delivery to the states themselves is really just picking the easy work and letting others do the hard work. Long-term: As it's the governments "initiative", they should have promoted the vaccines more and made more information available. Other countries greatly overtook the US by vaccination rates by now and the "total package" should be compared. It's not the start that counts, it's the finish that matters. TLDR: I don't know where Operation WarpSpeed made any proven difference that couldn't be done by buying all possible vaccines.

NicoJuicy 5y ago
Additional data to support my perception. Israel was quicker in rollout/receiving vaccines, because they also paid more than the US: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-03-04/pfizer-pfe-has-a-moral-dilemma-deciding-where-the-vaccines-will-go https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-03-04/pfizer-pf... ( And were willing to share countrywide data)