"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.
The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or Barda, did announce in June 2021 that it would pay $1.2 billion for 1.7 million courses of Merck's investigational antiviral pill molnupiravir, but only if the FDA granted emergency-use authorization. That meant Merck had to put its own money at risk to expand manufacturing in advance, which may have reduced the supply that was available once the drug was authorized in December.
When the Delta variant slammed the South in July, GOP governors promoted the Regeneron and Eli Lilly monoclonal treatments. Supplies had to be rationed as demand surged. As the Delta wave crested in mid-September, the Pentagon and the Health and Human Services Department ordered 1.4 million more doses of Regeneron's antibody and 388,000 doses of Eli Lilly's.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sought to circumvent the feds by ordering a monoclonal antibody treatment from GlaxoSmithKline and Vir. The antibody binds to a target on Covid-19 that is shared with the SARS virus, making it more difficult for variants to evade. It was authorized by the FDA in May, but the Biden administration then declined to add it to its meager treatment arsenal. This was a colossal mistake, since it was the only monoclonal treatment for infected patients that turned out to be effective against the Omicron variant.
The administration couldn't have anticipated that, but Operation Warp Speed's strategy was to diversify its bets expecting some to fail. The Biden team relied almost exclusively on Regeneron and Eli Lilly antibodies, even though scientists had warned that new variants might be able to evade them. The additional doses that Barda ordered in September were helpful for a couple of months until Omicron arrived.
Only in November did GSK and Vir announce a $1 billion contract with Barda. Around the same time Barda reached a $5.3 billion agreement with Pfizer for 10 million courses of its oral antiviral Paxlovid. Had it ordered these treatments earlier, much more supply would have been available this winter.
Why did the new administration abandon the successful Operation Warp Speed playbook? Most likely because progressives loathe pharmaceutical companies. Recall how congressional Democrats attacked Mr. Slaoui, a former GSK executive, without evidence, accusing him of profiting off his public service. Or maybe the Biden team believed their own cynical 2020 campaign line that Operation Warp Speed "lacks sound leadership, global vision, or a strategy."
Asked by New York Times columnist Ezra Klein last week whether the government should adopt OWS's strategy for other technologies, Mr. Klain, White House chief of staff under President Joe Biden, replied: "I think we have to be careful about the level of government intervention in the economy and make sure that we're not putting our judgment in the place of private-sector thoughts and consumer demand and whatnot. I think vaccines are a very, very special case, a public good we wanted everyone to get."
He's right, but life-saving Covid-19 therapies are also a special case.
At the same time, the Biden administration wants to spend hundreds of billions of dollars intervening in the economy to support green energy technologies that consumers largely don't want and are unlikely to do much public good." [1]
Voters usually severely punish those who cause many deaths unnecessarily. We’ll see how it happens this time soon. Including Lithuania.
1. Operation Warp Speed Slowly Gets Its Due
Finley, Allysia. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 01 Feb 2022: A.15.
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