11/30/2022 0 Comments Operation warp speed vaccines![]() ![]() “It was the partial fulfillment of an obligation I incurred over forty years before, when I raised my right hand on The Plain at West Point for the first time.” “My involvement in Operation Warp Speed was simple,” he writes. Mango’s emphasis on loyalty, duty, and teamwork as guiding values may stem from his career in the army, which began in the 82nd Airborne Division in Fort Bragg, and included training at the US Army Ranger School, US Army Airborne School, and US Army Jumpmaster School. Donald Trump displays Executive Order 13962, mandating that COVID-19 vaccines be made available to Americans, signed on December 8, 2020. ![]() But from the beginning, Mango appreciatively recounts, Slaoui (formerly the head of GlaxoSmithKline’s vaccine unit), emphasized the value of teamwork: “When someone in the room would refer to himself as a member of his originating organization (e.g., BARDA, NIH, CDC), would interrupt and say, ‘You meant to say you are a member of the Operation Warp Speed Team.’ Everyone got the message instantly.” Indeed, Mango’s criticism of former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx (who recently testified before a congressional committee investigating the federal pandemic response) is based largely on the contention that she was not a good team player and acted in an unnecessarily confrontational matter at meetings. ![]() Instead, he focuses on acknowledging and applauding the efforts of other Warp Speed protagonists, including project lead Moncef Slaoui, HHS secretary Alex Azar, development lead Colonel Matt Hepburn, Peter Marks of the Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins, HHS Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response Bob Kadlec, Chief Operation Officer General Gus Perna, and Carlo De Notaristefani, OWS’s lead advisor manufacturing & supply chain.Īs that list will attest, OWS’s leaders came from a range of specialties and organizational backgrounds. But aside from setting out a generally conservative approach to healthcare policy (more on this below), Mango hasn’t written a partisan or self-promotional book of the kind one might expect from a former (or future) political figure. ![]() Prior to joining Trump’s administration, Mango made an unsuccessful run for governor of Pennsylvania in 2018, losing in the Republican primary to former state senator Scott Wagner. Mango, a West Point graduate and former healthcare executive, served Donald Trump as deputy chief of staff for policy at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) from 2019 to 2021. Yet relatively few appreciate how much of this success was owed to Operation Warp Speed (OWS), the $US18 billion public–private partnership initiated by the United States government in the spring of 2020 with the goal of “accelerat the development, manufacturing, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics.” Those wishing to learn about the subject will find a wealth of information in a newly published first-hand account by healthcare expert Paul Mango, Warp Speed: Inside the Operation that Beat COVID, the Critics, and the Odds. Most of us know the names of the companies and collaborations that announced the first major vaccine breakthroughs-including Pfizer–BioNTech, Moderna, and Oxford-AstraZeneca. This urgent project represented a once-in-a-generation technological challenge, arguably on par with the Manhattan Project or Apollo Program. But when viewed by historians, the real story will be the race for a vaccine-which has proved to be the single most important anti-COVID public-health weapon. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020, much of the media attention has focused on policy controversies over short-term public-health measures such as masking and social isolation. ![]()
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