Operation Warp Speed Was Another Grift


Back in October I thought to myself, well, one thing Trump did right was getting the vaccine developed and planning for its distribution. Now it's looking like the Operation Warp Speed was mostly just another grift.

The first step of the con was getting people to overestimate the administration's role in vaccine development and production. Vaccine makers did develop and test their products in record time. But other than easing some regulatory burdens the administration had little to do with that. One of the big players, Pfizer-BioNTech didn't even take the government money being offered.

The next step was convincing us there was a solid plan for distribution. On January 8, there were reports that Biden's pandemic team planned to order release of stockpiles which were being held for second doses. They did this citing expected improvement of reliability of the supply chain from manufacturers. Four days later the Trump administration, in an obvious attempt to upstage their incoming rivals, announced that it planned to do the same thing. But wait...three days after announcing the copy-cat move, the administration admitted that there wasn't any stockpile to release.

The more we learn, the worse it gets. Back in December, Pentagon officials were stonewalling the Biden transition team. This included preventing them from learning details about the hilariously-named Operation Warp Speed (needless to say while denying they were doing so). Now it's looking like maybe they were behaving this way because there was no "there" there, and they wanted this to be a nasty surprise for the new team.

Last week, we got word about the mess the incoming team was finding. Biden's pandemic response coordinator Jeff Zients said, "what we're inheriting is so much worse than we could have imagined." This includes twelve supply issues that blindsided the incoming team. Mission accomplished!

At this point, the pandemic team is in many ways flying blind. Incoming CDC director Rochelle Walensky said yesterday, "one of the biggest problems right now is I can't tell you how much vaccine we have, and if I can't tell it to you then I can't tell it to the governors and I can't tell it to the state health officials." 

So despite grandiose claims by the Trump administration, all Project Warp Speed did was facilitate development of vaccine by other organizations. Although spokespeople talked a good game about the program's excellent distribution logistics, there were few logistics. As just noted, Biden officials don't even know how much vaccine there is coming to distribute. The whole thing looks like the government equivalent of vaporware.  

Moreover, this amounts to real harm. Had there been a competent plan in place, we might already be seeing the downhill side of the infection curve.  Israel is. They lead the world in delivering vaccines—to Israelis, anyway, Palestinians not so much. Now they are seeing sharps drops in hospitalizations, on the order of 60% in groups that have received their first dose.

Maybe if we'd had competent leadership that could have been us.  Now that we have new leadership, maybe it will be...at least once they can figure out what's going on. 

Image by the blogger


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