ICYMI: "Operation Warp Speed Slowly Gets Its Due"
Operation Warp Speed Slowly Gets Its Due
The program’s premature abandonment left the country unprepared for the Delta and Omicron Covid waves.
By Allysia Finley
Jan. 31, 2022 1:37 pm ET
The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed delivered three Covid-19 vaccines in record time. Yet liberals are giving the program its due only now, amid President Biden’s Covid-19 stumbles. Some, including former Biden adviser Ezekiel Emanuel, are even calling for another Operation Warp Speed to boost therapies. Operation Warp Speed also delivered the two monoclonal antibody treatments. More such treatments would have been available this winter had the Biden team not abandoned the program
Early in the pandemic, the government struggled to persuade drugmakers to invest in vaccines and therapies. Many companies lost money during previous public-health emergencies when treatments they developed turned out not to be needed. “I’m not like a drug company fan, but there’s no question that a lot of them lost a lot of money trying to produce an Ebola vaccine,” said Ron Klain, now White House chief of staff, in February 2020.
Operation Warp Speed shifted the financial risk to government by placing orders for vaccines and therapies before they were authorized by the Food and Drug Administration or even shown to be effective. This encouraged pharmaceutical companies to expand manufacturing capacity so vaccines and therapies were ready to be distributed once they had the FDA’s green light.
Three Operation Warp Speed leaders explained the strategy in a September 2020 commentary for the New England Journal of Medicine. “Predicting drug performance in a new disease is difficult,” Moncef Slaoui, Shannon E. Greene and Janet Woodcock wrote. “Many candidates may fail to demonstrate efficacy or have safety problems. It’s necessary, however, to take a financial risk early to scale up manufacturing in order to have drug supplies on hand if the results are positive. If we wait for clinical trial readouts before initiating large-scale manufacturing, developing an adequate supply could take months or years.”
In July 2020, Operation Warp Speed announced a $450 million manufacturing and supply agreement with Regeneron for up to 300,000 doses of its experimental monoclonal antibody. A few months later, it ordered 300,000 doses of Eli Lilly’s experimental antibody. The FDA granted emergency-use authorization to both treatments in November 2020.
Supply of both monoclonals exceeded demand last winter because many people were unaware of the treatments. Still, during the final two months of the Trump presidency, Operation Warp Speed ordered another 1.25 million doses of Regeneron’s and 650,000 of Eli Lilly’s antibody treatments, leaving the Biden administration well supplied.
When the Biden team took over, they dismissed Mr. Slaoui, announced they were “phasing in a new structure,” and retired the Operation Warp Speed name. Cases and hospitalizations fell as vaccines rolled out. President Biden prematurely declared success last Fourth of July and failed to prepare for another wave by stockpiling treatments and investing in new ones.