Operation Warp Speed: A new model for industrial policy
americanaffairsjournal.org
americanaffairsjournal.org
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.
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?
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).
> Lots of industrial activity is illegal/extremely risky in the US. If you want to open a steelworks, for example,
I see your point. OSHA and regulations probably make this more expensive domestically, but I wonder if it'd only be marginally more expensive? We still have plenty of dangerous industries at scale: forestry, oil, mining, machining, rail, our remaining steel industry, etc.
I agree with you that this probably plays a big role in the dangerous manufacturing jobs. I'm not sure it would have any bearing on "safe" jobs such as electronics manufacture, though.
> the US will be much more hostile to the business on environmental grounds than China would.
A sibling comment questioned this, and I share that sentiment. We have shale fracking, offshore drilling, mining, coal, and plenty of other environmentally dirty industries. Negative press hasn't put a stop to it.
> Median wage in the US is something like 5-6x times China and the gap was larger when the investment decisions were being made.
This is historical and it's starting to level out. Following this rationale, I assume we'd push manufacturing to countries where labor is even cheaper than China.
But another issue is fragility. Though infrequent, the supply chain situation we're in now is something we should avoid. We're making the decision to onshore for semiconductors, which are high value, critical, strategic components. It seems like we'd want to do the same for steel, pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, and other key domestic functions and high value industries.
Even if we don't face another pandemic for a long time, Covid has surfaced problems in our existing strategy. It would be good to be in a place of security and negotiating power.
Not even Communist states attempt to plan spending fifty years ahead of time.
We currently have multiple crises that would benefit tremendously from the OWS strategy.
Rebuilding our electrical grid for one. It has to be done. Every rational person knows this and agrees. And yet we. just. can't. budge.
More than capital (investment), we need some bulldozers to push thru all the jurisdictional bullshit. Make us some omelets.
The challenges of building transmission in the US, and how to overcome them, with Liza Reed
https://www.volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-the-challenges-of-buil...
How Are We Going to Build All That Clean Energy Infrastructure?
https://www.niskanencenter.org/report-how-are-we-going-to-bu...
There are perhaps dozens, maybe 100s, of such sticky wicket policy traps which would benefit from some Operation Warp Speed style mojo.
> 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.
Debatable, Germany is notorious[1] for its bureaucracy still.
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.
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vaccine/comp...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed#Companies...
Adenovirus vector vaccines are also very new technology: First one was approved only in 2019, an ebola vaccine.
Run everything in parallel, or at least start as early as possible, and be willing to discard the results of potentially dozens of paths that did not lead to an acceptable solution.
Pfizer-BioNTech: 30µg doses, 21 days apart.
Moderna: 100µg doses, 28 days apart.
It seems probable that Moderna has higher efficacy because the dose is larger, or because the doses are given with a longer time interval, or both. And not that the Moderna vaccine is any kind of biochemically superior.
If you were to give Pfizer-BioNTech in 100µg doses, 28 days apart, maybe it would be just as effective as Moderna?
The $2 billion was part of the manufacturing half of Warp Speed.
A $2 billion contract for 600 million doses of a vaccine if they got it through FDA are orders, not funding.
They didn't receive the money in advance either.
The orders were through OWS. The best part was OWS that they would spend billions on hundreds of millions of doses even if the vaccines didn't work or had side effects. They could start production knowing they sell even if they made people grow gills. The US government also agreed not to ship the doses to other countries that might not fully indemnify Pfizer from any side effects that might occur like the US did. This is the part that's different, where normally the US government doesn't buy snake oil, insisting on seeing it works first.
Fortunately, the vaccines worked and are safe, so that's good. For some reason, I need to explicitly state this every fucking time vaccines come up because idiots keep insisting the opposite.
And "not receiving the money in advance" is pretty meaningless. If I have a guarantee the US government will give me $2 billion in 6 months, it should be trivial to debt-finance anything I need. Even if Pfizer didn't have the capital to do so internally.
Look, there were a lot of dumb things done by the US, especially by the executive branch, 2017-2021. This was not one of them. There were other parts of OWS that were stupid. But one of the best (if easiest) decisions was writing giant checks to pharma companies.
FDA requirement was valid for all the contract.
> The U.S. government will pay the companies $1.95 billion upon the receipt of the first 100 million doses, following FDA authorization or approval.
The big giant checks also was not the best decision for other countries. But it was for the US.
By comparison, Israel paid 30$ and could vaccinate the population even faster.
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.
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?
Wasn't the Moderna vaccine developed entirely in the US?
As far as I'm aware, no existing facilities were upgraded/expanded? 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.
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/manufactu...
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.
https://www.brusselstimes.com/131709/biontech-buys-a-novarti...
But i did mention the facility in Puurs ( since it's from my country), i wasn't keeping track on all of them ofc
Scaling up production is not all about expertise, but mostly about existing production capacities and how quickly they can be retooled for another production.
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.
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)
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.)
Any way I look at it, OWS has been an inspiring success: it proves that regardless of political divisions or uncertainties, we as a species can achieve wonderful things.
They secured the lowest prices and have a higher vaccination rate and overtook the US by now.
But it's also comparing apples and peers. It should be more reasonable to compare it with the UK. Where the US was indeed also faster.
I think the rollout in Europe ( and others ) was actually delayed because of Operation Warp Speed. Buying all vaccines at premium prices.
But regardless your own article claims production capacity in Europe was the problem (precisely the thing that OWS and the Defense Production Act rectified in the US):
> “Production was always going to be a problem,” said Schulthess. The industry had been pulling back from Europe for years — in part because of growing vaccine hesitancy. “It takes five years and a pile of cash to build a [vaccine factory] by the book,” said Schulthess.
And European infrastructure was unprepared for vaccine distribution (again from your own article):
> The Hague had bet so strongly on the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab being the first to be approved that it hadn’t finished preparing to transport mRNA vaccines, which need to be kept at temperatures far below freezing
And there were bureaucratic delays associated with getting other vaccine variants (same article):
> Countries can’t just follow the U.K.’s lead by unilaterally authorizing vaccines purchased by the EU — doses purchased by Brussels can only be released after they get the EMA’s signoff, according to the agreement. So even though Budapest tried to make a point by green-lighting the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab, it won’t get any shots before the rest of the bloc.
Please read your own article as it names and shames all the reasons of the European delay, of which merely one is price.
> have a higher vaccination rate and overtook the US by now
Yes, but we're discussing the impact of OWS which would only change how fast the initial rollout was. Obviously now there are a lot of antivaxers in the US who will never get the vaccine but that's unrelated to OWS.
Not only 5$ difference, but a higher accountability from pharma. That was almost all waved in the US as usual.
But you probably didn't notice how there were almost no issues with the western countries in the EU and the article talked about the issue with the eastern countries in the EU?
That's not a problem the EU can really solve for them.
A country was responsible for their rollout and procurement. The vaccine was bought together as an option and countries could decide to participate, that's the EU ( https://www.ft.com/content/c1575e05-70e5-4e5f-b58c-cde5c99ab... ) - all of them did.
Germany also publicly blamed the US for buying too much vaccines and sucking up all the production at a premium price in front of other countries. You didn't really read my previous point about that ( looked for the article, but it's hard to find it seems)
Let's be clear,
I'm from Belgium and I'm pretty sure that we could used some military law to force dips on vaccines we created ( Pfizer/Biontech) and could have done everything faster than the US if we wanted. But we didn't, since it's not fair, selfish and we wouldn't get away with it like the US :)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/covid-vaccine-ex... ( read the part of Belgium)
Did we read the same article? It literally blames the Netherlands for having insufficient refrigeration infrastructure for mRNA vaccines.
> Germany also publicly blamed the US for buying too much vaccines and sucking up all the production at a premium price in front of other countries
Which as the article says, was politics to cover up for their own delays.
> I'm from Belgium and I'm pretty sure that we could used some military law to force dips on vaccines we created ( Pfizer/Biontech) and could have done everything faster than the US if we wanted. But we didn't, since it's not fair, selfish and we wouldn't get away with it like the US
That just seems like an excuse. The EU also failed to invest in sufficient production capacity by fronting capital to jump start production before the vaccines were approved. From your own FT link:
> But investments by the EU to help companies cover upfront costs appear to have been relatively modest compared with those agreed by the US. Mr Wojahn said the EU had pre-financed production capacity with roughly €2bn in the summer and early autumn. In contrast, Donald Trump’s administration in the US began funding vaccine producers through its Operation Warp Speed programme back in March. It has spent more than $12bn to date — more than a third of which was given to Boston-based biotech Moderna alone
Germany also blames the European Commission in your FT article:
> But German politicians, including Bavarian premier Markus Söder, who also leads one of Germany’s governing parties, the Christian Social Union, have said the blame sits with the EU. “There was probably too much bureaucracy at the European Commission . . . too few of the right vaccines were ordered and price debates went on for too long”, Mr Söder told German newspaper Bild am Sonntag.
And from your Washington Post article:
> Even as Brussels and European capitals cry foul over bearing the brunt of supply chain issues from manufacturers and point to continued exports, sluggish vaccination programs in many European countries mean millions of delivered doses haven’t been used. The E.U.’s most populous member state, Germany, has administered just over 8 million vaccine doses but still has a backlog of 4.3 million doses in storage, according to government figures.
Did you read your own articles or did you have an opinion you were looking to confirm coming into this conversation?
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.
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?
Derek Lowes “In the Pipeline” column has a number of articles relating to mRNA vaccine manufacturing:
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/more-mrna-vaccine-... https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/myths-vaccine-manu...
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.
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...
Which is definitely not something unique and hard.
Why do you rely on it? A serious question. Why trust this article and this author?
It’s simply a very dense and well cited article that is best understood by being read multiple times.
The first time I read it, I hardly understood a word. So I read it again and again and it became clearer.
Doesn’t mean the article is right or wrong. Just means you have to put some work into understanding and evaluating it.
Trump is a loathsome character, but OWS was a well executed initiative.
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.
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-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.)
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.
> 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.
I think OWS highlighted what could be done if incentives were aligned, and the only things that stopped it from being an inarguable success were 1) the same thing that made it a success (speed and comms to get shit done), which caused a lot of people to say "hey that's weird the government never does anything right when they move fast" based on most of their lived understanding and experience; and, 2) the utter failure of honesty from the institutions most needed to be honest.
If the CDC etc. had remained publicly politically unbiased throughout Trump's admin, they would not have been so distrusted, I think. If the Biden admin (and Democrats in general) had not campaigned almost entirely as anti-everything-Trump and instead recognized the few good things done, the polarized Republicans (and listless independents/others) might not have had such a visceral negative reaction.
All it would have taken to prevent a large majority of "vaccine hesitation" would be to have had Biden and Trump on stage together saying "Hey we might disagree on a lot but we need to work together on this." Maybe one or both parties refused to do this or maybe they didn't think to, I don't know. But I do know, deep down inside, it would have helped. Now, though? Way too late.
Do you have any support for these statements? Biden had much better support for Covid than Trump, especially at the beginning when vaccine availability was a crisis and people remembered Trump's actual performance, not the revisionist history that accompanies everything he did.
Omicron-targeting boosters are currently being trialed, and might see the light of day if Omicron hangs around for a bit.
If the next Big Variant had been closely related to Delta (as might have not unreasonably been expected), the Delta-targeting booster might have been a bigger deal; as it is, Omicron is quite different. If whatever comes next happens to be Delta-related, the Delta-targeting boosters will presumably be revived.
Pfizer/BioNTech and AZ were significant beneficiaries of state funding outside of the US, tho.
when biontech and pfizer succeeded without any of it
Those are subsidies for eg. doing simultaneous clinical trials and to compensate it's additional costs.
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
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.
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.
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.
Having a promising vaccine is about 5% of the work and cost to get it into people.
And to say getting a brand new vaccine scaled up and approved in record time is “not something new” tells me you aren’t that close to the process.
There were a million ways the process could have failed (see J&J, AZ screw ups).
Pfizer pulled it off almost flawlessly. That’s never been done before.
The faster approvals were because of prioritisation of the government's during a pandemic and nearly flawless execution of Pfizer.
But doing something faster doesn't mean it's new. In many cases it means you made your existing processes more efficient. Not changed them.
You are also changing your point. You said Biontech did almost nothing and compared it to a iphone app, lol. They could have chosen someone else and there aren't many that failed approvals. ( Except if you count Russia). But as mentioned, Pfizer was the best choice.
The largest difference in making it faster was an in-place term that allowed simultaneous clinical trials, which was unique and funded by the government due to extra costs and risks for pharma. This was not due to Pfizer and shouldn't be attributed to them as you are trying too.
Without that regulation it would have taken multiple years like before.
The government's also quickened feedback from months to weeks, which was an additional efficiency improvement.
If you're "in the know", you sure are forgetting the most important "details" for cutting the duration till approval vs. the past.
In the context of this article, it's important to note that the first authorized vaccine was not funded by the program.
https://www.pfizer.com/news/articles/shot_of_a_lifetime_how_...
It is so unrelated to Covid that FDA’s description of the fast track program hasn’t even been updated since 2018. https://www.fda.gov/patients/fast-track-breakthrough-therapy...
The vaccines were approved through Emergency Use Authorization. Since no Covid vaccine had ever been produced before, the manufacturers and FDA had to come to an agreement on trial design, data needs and minimum thresholds.
That’s what OWS helped facilitate.
They did manufacturer outside the US just fine. A simple Google search could have given that info.
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.
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/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-qui...
It was in late January/early February of 2021 that the Purus plant shut down. I mean, it did that to upgrade the plant, and it caught back up later in 2021. And they fell behind schedule getting Marburg online in early 2021. So they had to rely on precursors shipping from Missouri during that time.
I tried to find a link, but it's non-trivial.
Not that it matters. The random distribution of plants in the US and EU and the easy of converting them over is not really that significant.
Israel had the faster vaccination rate because the government (cleverly) offered to turn the entire country into a sales/research tool and promised a ton of data transparency back to Pfizer. It's how some new variants moving through vaccinated populations get modeled.
The contract was purchasing the doses even if the FDA didn't approve them. Even if they made people frog people, the US government would pay Pfizer. They did turn down the US research money, but instead took money from Germany and China (technically, a "totally independent* Chinese company). And they walked back the "never took OWS money" line.
I'm not sure why "money up front" matters. If the US government commits to buy 100 million things from you for $2billion, it's trivial to get external or internal financing.
I was saying the worst case from writing a check to Pfizer was 2 billion.
> a 10 billion $ risk of funds taken from hospitals for COVID care that could need it, which paid for "operation Warp speed"
Look, the fact that instead of getting Congress to authorize additional money (which they would have) and instead proceeded to waste a bunch, try to (successfully?) skim off some for themselves and then fail at most administrative tasks because they tried to work around instead of through the bureaucracy was really bad. Buying vaccines of unknown quality in massive quantities was a good, if obvious, idea.
> I don't even know where your fraud argument comes from
Oh, it's a minor point. Most US regulations around contracts specify that the existence of the regulation is to prevent "waste, fraud or abuse". My only point is that, in an emergency, optimizing for reducing those over saving lives is a bad idea. Of course, we hope that we go back and prosecute those engaging in them after the fact.
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.
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.
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.
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?
And that sentence is a comfortable cliche that invites one to stop thinking about the matter any further.
Often, if you have a "shades of gray" situation, I think it's more interesting to examine the seeming contradictions and try to find out where exactly your intuition went wrong. In this case, how did a chaotic organisation like the Trump administration, headed by someone with a history of scam and fraud, manage to pull this off?
...or you could just say "world is complicated" and be done with it.
As for undercutting experts, the current Vice President literally said she wouldn't take the vaccine, implying it couldn't be trusted because Trump was engaged in the rollout [1] while the current President said the vaccine was rushed and that people shouldn't trust it. [2]
Numerous "experts" threw FUD at the vaccines, calling them rushed repeatedly. [3] Dr Fauci himself said a vaccine's approval was "rushed" by regulators in some markets. [4]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dAjCeMuXR0
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/us/politics/biden-trump-c...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/us/politics/coronavirus-v...
[4] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fauci-says-uk-rushed-covid-vacc...
He was never branded as racist over the travel restrictions, but rather over his overt racism. Things like derisively calling it the Wuhan Flu. Trump, in fact, is the one who lied about Biden's criticism.
https://www.cnn.com/factsfirst/politics/factcheck_8df18b2a-2...
And Fauci was clearly expressing surprise at British regulatory process, not casting any doubt on the vaccine efficacy since Fauci had already endorsed the vaccines in question.
Here's a pretty thorough breakdown of the dozens of explicit lies Trump told specifically about covid and covid policy up until election day
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/11/trumps-...
I posted the receipts, they repeatedly questioned whether the vaccines could be trusted -- publicly, often.
You say my claims are untrue, yet you don't provide counter evidence that they did not claim the vaccines were "rushed" or could not be trusted. That'd be very hard to prove, since it's plastered all over media :)
>He was never branded as racist over the travel restrictions
Yeah, that's false. [1] He used the word "xenophobia" in direct response to the border closures.
>Things like derisively calling it the Wuhan Flu
Very dishonest argument, considering even NPR used this terminology early in the pandemic. [2] CNN, which you cite, also used this terminology. [3]
You must appreciate the irony of you claiming this terminology "derisive", while citing outlets who use the very same terminology, right?
>And Fauci was clearly expressing surprise at British regulatory process
You didn't refute my claim that he called it "rushed", which he did. Calling vaccines "rushed" is anti-vaccination disinformation.
[1] https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1223727977361338370
[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/01/30/8003939...
[3] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/05/health/wuhan-coronavirus-...
I've watched the debate on this specific quote from Europe. I don't know how it was meant but I read it as "Please stop calling this the Chinese virus" (or something such, I don't remember the exact terminology adopted by Trump at the time).
Seen from Europe, the way that Trump called it was indeed... surprising. Everybody else (in our media) called it "the coronavirus" or "covid". I'll take your word that everybody was using that term in the US, I don't follow CNN or NPR.
Took me some time to realize why US Conservatives understood that tweet as branding closing travel from China as racist.
Now, I remember that closing travel from China was very much criticized, but for other reasons:
- the way it was implemented was extremely porous (you only needed to change plane anywhere on the way and you could get into the US), so this travel ban was guaranteed to have very little impact on circulation of the disease;
- actual policy didn't block travel from China, as US citizens (and I think several other countries, if my memory serves) could take a plane from China to the US.
- numbers from China closing internal travel showed that it had delayed the epidemic by ~24h, if my memory serves, so epidemiologists kept warning that it wouldn't solve anything but were drowned in the media circus;
- epidemiologists were begging for quarantines to be implemented – they weren't.
In other words, that travel ban was basically security theater.
> Calling vaccines "rushed" is anti-vaccination disinformation.
Have to agree with you on that one. Fortunately, I believe that this didn't last.
Oh come on. Yes, NPR and CNN referred to it as “the Wuhan coronavirus” at a time when it had just left China and looked like it might still be containable to the region. The only people still calling it “Wuhan flu” (particularly in fall of 2020 when it had long ago spread to everywhere else) were people who wanted to downplay its severity by comparing it to the flu and who wanted to really hammer home the point that it was from China. “Wuhan flu” is not some organic thing that people were just saying, it’s deliberate vice signaling on the part of conservative politicians.
I already said this isn't true. It's already a facile argument when you say "the vaccine" knowing that multiple are in production. Biden, Harris and Fauci all very unequivocally endorsed the vaccines that passed the rigorous approval processes laid by my medical experts. Trump said vaccines cause autism repeatedly and as recently as 2015
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/health/trump-vaccines.htm...
He endorsed Hydroxychloroquine and injecting disinfectants.
But you didn't prove it. Your source doesn't mention it, mine does. At this point, it's merely conjecture on your part. I cited a source for my claim.
Who are you attributing this to? It's a cheap way to delegitimize people who disagree by making general derogatory statements about nobody in particular.
> Let's applaud the achievements that saved lives, regardless of the administration that promulgated them.
If that's what happened.
While I wholeheartedly applaud this amazing achievement of technology, I think that it's an open question as to if this was a political "noteworthy achievement" that differentiates the previous US administration from any other past, future or hypothetical alternate administration.
i.e. Yes, they signed off on "operation warp-speed", but who wouldn't? Isn't this the bare minimum, easy decision that any administration would affirm? It's throwing money at big private company, and that is how the US government under any administration likes to tackle big problems, rather than than the messy details and "big-government" stigma of co-ordinating a response in house?
In normal times, there is the potential for reputational damage from a Solyndra-style failure, but this was clearly not normal times.
We still underspent especially on manufacturing leading to the winter of 2020-2021 with very little administered.
Around 200 other countries did not!
Other powers with large economies also spent a lot - notably, Germany funded the development of Pfizer's COVID vaccine, and the UK funded the Oxford-AZ vaccine.
So, it would not be accurate to say that "operation warp-speed" was unique.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
1) Vaccine development in itself was no doubt a historical achievement and will go down in history books. Regardless of causality, Project Warp Speed will be there by association.
2) It is a meme that legitimizes government spending. "We need a project warp speed for FooBar" will be a powerful way to get things funded, in particular by republicans in the US, for many years to come.
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/2021/12/05/1059828...
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'.
Clarification: some of his supporters.
It's a key thing to keep in mind when considering his actions. He can rile people up in directions they're already leaning... He hasn't really demonstrated much ability to lean people in any particular novel direction, or against their pre-existing biases. He'll provide a focus to existing anger and say things that people don't want to say out loud, but he's as much a component of the overall anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment political wing as a leader of it.
> 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.
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.
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-... )
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.
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-pf...
( And were willing to share countrywide data)
...
The painting at the top of the article (https://americanaffairsjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/0...) shows 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... is a really interesting read.)
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.
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.
I thought much the same, and I lean further lefty than most on this forum. It was a great read.
Yes, that’s why I commented—it is easy to nerd out on long pieces like this, but the magazine that hosts it does not have a neutral and/or nerd POV (nerds aren’t necessarily neutral, but are perfectly willing to write long explainers out of sheer enthusiasm).
There’s fine information to be had here, and interesting points to debate about industrial policy writ large. But the magazine’s an organized intellectual undertaking intended to influence, and so close reading and critical thinking are warranted.
This article is similar. Free trade is a good thing, but right now we're seeing an influx of foreign firms and capture of key industries and supply chain stops by foreign authorities. Rebuilding a strong American private and public sector and re-diversifying our economy by not having it based solely on the service part is a fairly noble goal, and I do agree with the author that OWS is a massive success story that offers some elucidating details that could help rebuild our infrastructure and lead to more effective public-private partnerships.
Who is capturing what? What data is there supporting it? People have been raising such alarms for generations (and usually the 'key industries' alarm is from a vested old guard trying to prevent economic change, and the industries were 'key' in the past).
However, there are several industries which have been decimated domestically. Off the top of my head, the US has lost its competitveness in the following industries:
- Shipbuilding
- Photovoltaic manufacturing
- Wind turbine manufacturing
- Cell phone manufacturing
- Pharma manufacturing
- Book binding
Lots of industries has moved since the dawn of time. Generally, lower-paying, lower-margin, lower-skill business moves to places where that can be done more cheaply, and new high-skill, higher-margin businesses form here.
'Creative destruction' is essential to capitalism (and the economy); it reallocates resources from less efficient to more efficient uses. Otherwise, you get stuck in stagnent, less efficient uses.
Foreign capital seems like a great thing to me: It's a larger pool of finance to support Americans. Would it be better of someone needing investment to start a business or build a house had less financing available?
Honestly, it all seems xenophobic: Why are people on the other side of political borders somehow bad to do business with?
For the later, well, Chinese shipyards can now build aircraft carriers at at comparable rates and at lower price than the US. Loss of US Navy power has not happened yet, but if China keeps innovating the writing is on the wall. Loss of US Naval monopoly would imply that the Pax Americana and the petrodollar itself are in jeopardy. Maybe that's a good thing if 'creative destruction' is the goal, but I would personally not be better off under a Chinese-led global order than under an American one.
rather than being Trumpist if anything the point is to move people on the right away from unproductive culture war issues towards economics, at times they have straight up Marxist economic analysis on their site and manage to talk about it in a way that doesn't scare away Conservatives.
American Affairs is if anything guilty of the opposite of what you seem to imply. It's not trying to sell Trumpism by talking about OWS, it's trying to sell industrial policy to a conservative readership.
I don't have a dog in this fight, but this doesn't sound right. As newly minted socialist-libertarian (anarchist), I don't spend a lot of time parsing intellectual conservative notions, either movement conservative or otherwise.
In his own words:
https://www.vox.com/21528267/the-ezra-klein-show-trumpism-do...
At the time, I more or less agreed with u/Metacatalepsy's hot take:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ezraklein/comments/jfzujb/new_episo...
> So, please read critically.
Again, I don't think this is fair.
OC contrasts DARPA with Operation Warp Speed. Like how programs and contracts are managed differently, in an effort to "right size" their respective efforts.
It's like the difference between angel and later stage investors. DARPA's remit is to try a bunch of crazy ideas, see what happens. OWS's mission was to rush promising ideas to market.
Being a huge fan of the book Diffusion of Innovations, the basis for pop-biz books like Crossing the Chasm, the need for Operation Warp Speed strategy is both obvious and necessary.