https://www.ft.com/content/89acf0bb-8dac-4f73-8962-5780546eadca?segmentId=b385c2ad-87ed-d8ff-aaec-0f8435cd42d9
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.