Paul Mango - Warp Speed: Inside the Operation That Beat COVID, the Critics, and the Odds

WARP SPEED

First Edition

Copyright 2022 Paul Mango

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All information included in this book is based on the Authors recollections, opinions, and views. Publisher makes no representations, warranties, guarantees or otherwise with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book.

ISBN (Hardcover 9781645720546) (ebook 9781645720553)

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China gave the world the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. America developed the vaccines to end it.

Warp Speed tells the remarkable story of Operation Warp Speed, the crash effort to produce the Covid-19 vaccines. Few people can tell the story as ably as Paul Mango since he played a leading role in Operation Warp Speed from the very beginning.

Ive known Paul for years as a friend and trusted advisor. He served his country in the Army, succeeded in business, and then ran for governor of Pennsylvania in 2018. While I was disappointed that Paul came up just short in the primary, Pennsylvanias loss was Americas gain. Paul subsequently went to work for the Department of Health and Human Services, where his leadership, management skills, and strategic vision contributed directly to Operation Warp Speeds success.

This success wasnt by chance, and it wasnt a miracle. Like the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program before it, Operation Warp Speed was the product of hard work and a brilliant team coming together to do the near impossible: develop a vaccine, test it, get it approved, get it produced, get it distributed, and get it in armsall in less than a year while the pandemic raged.

The success of Operation Warp Speed is even more remarkable given the sheer number of mistakes and inaccurate predictions made by the public-health bureaucracy during this crisis. Despite their overweening self-confidence and self-regard, the public-health experts seemed to get everything wrong when it countedand thats if they could make up their minds at all. First, they told us that masks dont work. Then they told us that masks are mandatory, then optional, then mandatory again. By the time you read this book, the guidance may have changed yet againand not based on scientific evidence, but on political fads. These so-called experts also advocated for protracted lockdowns that resulted in the sharpest economic contraction in American history, destroying the livelihoods and dreams of millions of Americans. They then stubbornly fought every attempt to lift these restrictions and give us back our freedom. At the time of writing, the public-health bureaucracy is still working with their cronies in the teachers unions to keep kids out of the classroom, despite clear evidence showing that it is safe for them to return.

Unsurprisingly, many of these same experts scoffed at Operation Warp Speed. Talking heads on CNN, ABC and MSNBC derided the possibility that a vaccine could be approved on an accelerated timeline. After all, they said, no vaccine in history had been developed in under four years. Some fatalistically predicted a coronavirus vaccine could take as long as a decade.

These skeptics were wrong. They may have known the long odds, but they didnt know Paul Mango and the extraordinary team that President Trump had assembled.

I asked a high-level pharmaceutical executive directly involved in Operation Warp Speed if this program could have happened under a different administration. His answer was unequivocal: No. The Trump administration was willing to take risks, create precedents, slice through red tape and other bureaucratic Gordian knots, and do whatever was necessary to develop safe and effective vaccines in record time. An administration made of weaker stuff would have hidden behind process, lowered expectations, and generally moved at a much slower pace. It speaks to the leadership of President Trump and the patriotism of the men and women of Operation Warp Speed that they rejected these excuses and charged ahead.

Ultimately, Operation Warp Speed is not just an extraordinary technical achievement. Its a testament to American ingenuity and greatness. We should learn from its success and build on its achievement.

On Friday, January 3, 2020, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, phoned Alex Azar, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and with those words, We have a problem in China, broke to the secretary and those of us on his immediate staff news that was about to change the entire world. Neither he, nor any other expert, knew much at that time about the characteristics of the virus that would become known formally as SARS-CoV2, but he knew enough to sense that we needed to respond, and respond quickly. The virus, which originated in Wuhan,

Thus began an odyssey of pandemic response actions, strategies, and regulatory processes that would consume the department of Health and Human Services (HHS), along with much of the administration, until inauguration day 2021. Only one of these responses, Operation Warp Speed, which delivered more safe and effective vaccines more quickly than almost all of the worlds experts thought possible, has been universally acclaimed as a resounding success. This did not happen by accident.

Shortly after the call from Dr. Redfield, the assistant secretary for Preparedness and Response at HHS, Dr. Bob Kadlec, activated the Disaster Leadership Group to assess the healthcare systems capacity and resilience, to determine supply chain readiness, and to initiate work on medical countermeasures (i.e., vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics). The administrations initial strategy in response to a potential pandemic was to attempt to contain the virus in China, and this led initially to a screening process for anyone entering the country from Wuhan and was followed in late January by the presidents imposition of an outright travel ban from China. When the strategy of containment proved insufficient, we moved on to mitigation (e.g., social distancing, washing of hands, masking) designed to inhibit the spread of the virus in the United States. When this strategy proved insufficient, we moved on to one of effectively absorbing the surges of hospitalized COVID patients in concentrated geographies such as the tristate area around New York City. In support of this, the administration mobilized the private sector to manufacture tens of thousands of additional ventilators and millions of articles of personal protective equipment (PPE). Because of the logistical requirements associated with distributing these goods, FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Administration, was activated on March 19, 2020, as the federal governments lead agency in the pandemic response.