How Trump’s vaccine effort produced results at ‘warp speed’ Moncef Slaoui, the pharma industry veteran who joined US federal Covid effort, feels vindicated
Sitting in the shadow of the health department building in Washington, with only a leather jacket for protection against an autumnal breeze, Moncef Slaoui cuts a defiant figure. Six months after the former GlaxoSmithKline executive left the private sector to become President Donald Trump’s coronavirus vaccine tsar, Mr Slaoui feels his decision has been vindicated, and critics of the ability of Operation Warp Speed to develop a vaccine in record time having been proved wrong.
“The easy answer for experts was to say it was impossible and find reasons why the operation would never work,” he told the Financial Times. But the vaccine push is now hailed as the bright spot in the Trump administration’s Covid-19 response, as products from Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna, and AstraZeneca and Oxford university move closer to approval.
Operation Warp Speed is a more than $10bn investment programme with a remit to fund vaccines, therapeutics — such as two recently approved antibody treatments — and diagnostics. So far it has spent the vast majority of its money on Covid-19 vaccines. The entire planet is going to benefit from it. We’re going to . . . hopefully have a vaccine available in France and Spain and Italy, all paid for by the US government Stéphane Bancel, Moderna chief executive As well as funding some vaccine developers directly, it has also signed pre-orders for the products others are working on, guaranteeing them an income from an approved vaccine when the normal commercial decision might be to not take the risk.
Mr Slaoui’s team also helped manufacturers secure supplies and sped up responses to usually laborious regulatory queries. Scientists had warned that, with much still to learn about Covid-19, a vaccine might take longer to develop, manufacture and distribute than Mr Slaoui — and his boss, the president — might have hoped. The central achievement of Operation Warp Speed had been accelerating investment in manufacturing, said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Columbia University School of Public Health. “Normally, that would be a huge investment for a vaccine manufacturer to make, and potentially be a huge loss for them if they developed a vaccine that never went on to the market,” she said. Recommended Coronavirus treatment Vaccinating a nation: can Biden manage America’s biggest health project? Even Pfizer, which did not take direct investment from Operation Warp Speed, benefited from having a $2bn pre-order for when its vaccine gets approved, said Peter Bach, director of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at Memorial Sloan Kettering. “Even if J&J or someone else beat them to the punch, they were going to get paid,” he said. Stéphane Bancel, chief executive of Moderna, the lossmaking biotech which took about $2.5bn in government funding from different bodies, said the money was “very helpful”, covering the costs of trials and helping it buy raw materials. “The entire planet is going to benefit from it,” he told the FT. “We are going to file [for approval] in the UK based on the US data paid for by the US government. We’re going to file in Europe and hopefully have a vaccine available in France and Spain and Italy, all paid for by the US government.” Backing many horses Mr Slaoui breaks off from his conversation with the FT to take an urgent call. “The White House,” he explains. Later that afternoon he would appear in the White House Rose Garden alongside Mr Trump to give an update on Operation Warp Speed — a sign of how he has managed to navigate the politics of the pandemic. Despite being a registered Democrat, he became one of few scientific experts in the administration to retain both their closeness to the president and their professional reputation. Mr Slaoui said he took the job on the condition that there would be no “political interference” and he believes that has been fully met. Mr Slaoui spent almost 30 years at GSK, where his biggest research triumph was developing the first malaria vaccine. Francesco De Rubertis, a partner at Medicxi, a venture capital group, where he worked alongside Mr Slaoui, said it was his “mission” to deliver the vaccine, even though it took decades. Jean-Paul Clozel, chief executive of the Swiss biotech company Idorsia, worked with Mr Slaoui when he was at GSK. He said Operation Warp Speed’s plan to back so many horses looks to have been inspired by how Mr Slaoui ran R&D at the UK drugmaker, where he splintered the department into smaller teams to compete against each other. “You had to fight for money for your research,” Mr Clozel said. Which companies got Operation Warp Speed money?
Comments are closed.
