“I don’t know how much even matters if the president’s comments drive the media narrative nearly every day.” Louis who follows pharmaceutical policy, told me. “The president who is in charge of all these various efforts being out there saying we will probably have a vaccine soon is hugely problematic,” Rachel Sachs, a health law professor at Washington University in St. If people won’t get the Covid-19 vaccine because they don’t trust it, all of the project’s accomplishments will be moot. The public hears what Trump says about a vaccine - and it seems to be creating more distrust, based on polls that show many Americans are skeptical of getting vaccinated. The problem is Trump has a much bigger microphone than his subordinates. Flanked by White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci, President Trump announces “Operation Warp Speed” on May 15. ![]() Those are merely the latest examples of the White House appearing to intrude on what is supposed to be a sacrosanct process driven by science. Trump has also reportedly been calling the CEOs of drug companies, pressing them for more progress on the vaccine front. The FDA released the guidance anyway, with support from the drug industry. This week, the president’s aides reportedly wanted to stop the FDA from releasing its criteria for evaluating a Covid-19 vaccine that would all but assure there is no approved option before November 3. Rather than let the vaccine science run its course, irrespective of electoral deadlines, Trump has meddled. ![]() That likely reflects the consensus among experts and insiders close to the project that it will succeed in spite of, not because of, the president himself. “It could set a model for these types of public-private partnerships that move science and regulation along to achieve great things.”Īnd yet, there has been little sign of Trump receiving a political boost from that progress. “What we’re seeing with Operation Warp Speed is unprecedented speed and public-private collaboration in a way that we’ve not seen before,” Kim Monk, founding partner at Capital Alpha, an investment advisory firm, told me. Trump had clung to the speedy development of a vaccine as the best hope for ending the coronavirus pandemic and for boosting his reelection chances - and his administration’s Operation Warp Speed can claim some credit for the rapid scientific advancements that we have seen over the last eight months. Instead, drug makers and public health experts think early 2021 is a more likely timeframe for the rollout of a vaccination campaign. While President Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and others dubbed the original project MP2, or Manhattan Project 2, after the crash effort to build an atomic bomb, Operation Warp Speed’s leadership borrowed a more practical model: the industrial mobilization during World War II that produced the so-called Arsenal of Democracy.A Covid-19 vaccine could be approved in record time, thanks to an unprecedented mobilization by the federal government and private sector - but it almost certainly isn’t coming before Election Day, as President Donald Trump has suggested throughout the year that it could. Nearly all these claims rest on a misunderstanding both of Operation Warp Speed’s mission and its nature as a government program. Jen Psaki, President Biden’s press secretary, has claimed to see an “urgent need to address failures of the Trump team approach to vaccine distribution.” Some in the new administration even want to rename the program. Most of that criticism focuses on the distribution bottlenecks that have developed in different states, as Americans are impatient with the slow pace of the rollout. ![]() Every day new questions and criticisms arise about Operation Warp Speed, the public-private vaccine development initiative launched by presidential order in May 2020.
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