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The crash landing of ‘Operation Warp Speed’

"DrHarleyboy, Better to start with Trump's dismantling of protections Obama left him."

Born as a second Manhattan Project, the Trump administration vaccine program actually achieved most of its goals – until distribution problems marred its success.

By Dan Diamond
01/17/2021 07:00 AM EST

As the nation’s Covid-19 response was careening off the rails in March and April 2020, about a dozen top health and defense department officials huddled in antiseptic meeting rooms to devise what they believed would be the Trump administration’s greatest triumph — a vaccine program so fast, so special, so successful that grateful Americans would forgive earlier failures and business schools would teach classes about it for decades.

They dubbed their project “MP2,” for a second Manhattan Project, after the race to create the nuclear weapons that ended World War II. Alex Azar, the Health and Human Services secretary who was often at odds with the White House and his own department, sounded like an Army general rallying his troops: “If we can develop an atomic bomb in 2.5 years and put a man on the moon in seven years, we can do this this year, in 2020,” Azar would declare, according to his deputy chief of staff, Paul Mango, who helped lead the strategy sessions.

“It was just a spirit of optimism,” Mango added.

Now, in the final days of the Trump administration, their “MP2” — later redubbed “Operation Warp Speed” — occupies a peculiar place in the annals of the administration’s ill-fated response to Covid-19: In many ways, it was successful, living up to the highest expectations of its architects. The Trump administration did help deliver a pair of working vaccines in 2020, with more shots on the way. But the officials who expected to be taking a victory lap on distributing tens of millions of vaccine doses are instead being pressed to explain why the initiative appears to be limping to the finish.

Governors say the Warp Speed effort has made promises it didn’t keep, with deliveries of doses falling short and reserve supplies exhausted. Physicians and logistics experts have critiqued the disorderly rollout, arguing that the Trump team should have done a better job of coordinating the nation’s mass vaccination effort. The incoming Biden administration on Friday morning announced they’d even do away with the initiative’s branding, which President Donald Trump has touted for months.

Operation Warp Speed “is the Trump team’s name for their program. We are phasing in a new structure,” tweeted incoming White House press secretary Jen Psaki, adding there’s an “urgent need to address failures of the Trump team approach to vaccine distribution.”

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Problems mount

In recent weeks, critics of Operation Warp Speed have increasingly been proven right, as the vaccine rollout has been plagued by a series of well-chronicled problems.

The Trump administration’s decision to punt much of the work of vaccine distribution to the states has left many local health officials overwhelmed, saying that they didn’t receive sufficient funding or resources to handle the work of administering doses. State leaders in December also announced that HHS had steadily lowered the total number of promised doses, prompting a war of words between governors and the Trump administration before Operation Warp Speed’s top logistics official apologized for misleading states and admitted the federal effort had wrongly inflated estimates.

“It was a planning error, and I am responsible,” Army Gen. Gustave Perna said last month. “We’re learning from it. We’re trying to get better.”

Inside the administration, officials insist that some of the operational challenges don’t rest with Operation Warp Speed but separate efforts that fell to the CDC. The Atlanta-based public health agency has been at odds with HHS for much of the pandemic — with Trump appointees seeking to muzzle CDC scientists and change the agency’s reports — and the vaccine rollout prompted new tensions, despite a somewhat different cast of officials involved.

“CDC made it very clear that they owned working with the states on the last mile of getting people vaccinated — that was their turf,” said one HHS official closely involved in the vaccine project. As a result, CDC ended up playing a major role in determining how vaccines should be prioritized, making recommendations that have guided states’ own strategies.

While CDC officials have complained that HHS interference has made it harder to accomplish their mission during Covid-19, department leaders say that they’ve only tried to push the science-focused agency to be more operational.

“In June, they wanted to send out the H1N1 playbook to the states with literally the title changed,” the official added, referring to the years-old guidance that was used to fight a decade-old pandemic. “While there were plenty of good ideas in there, rubber-stamping that was not a good idea.” HHS instead held back the agency’s vaccine-distribution playbook until September for reviews and changes, sparking complaints within CDC that valuable time was lost, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

“The CDC needs to stop treating ‘who’s getting the vaccine next’ like they’re announcing a beauty pageant,” said another HHS official, who pointed to one agency slide session from December about allocating vaccine doses. “Is that clear or is mud clearer?”

Azar himself has grown frustrated with CDC, said a person who’s spoken with him, saying that the health secretary believes the agency’s approach allowed states to be “overly prescriptive” in administering vaccines, slowing the process down.

Amid the clamor to speed up the pace of shots, Azar cloistered himself in recent days at Camp David, revising vaccine plans and dealing with a new, last-minute complication: the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol, fueled by Trump’s rhetoric that the presidential election was “stolen.” The crisis prompted fellow Trump appointees like Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao to resign, and senior officials to weigh the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment to take power away from Trump.

“I’m committed — I’ve wrestled with this — I’m committed to see this through in my role as health secretary during a pandemic, to ensure that vaccines and therapeutics get out to the American people and to ensure a smooth hand-off to President Biden’s team,” Azar said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Tuesday, pressed over his response to Trump’s comments.

On Jan. 12, the health secretary announced an overhaul of vaccine distribution, saying that the administration would quickly ship more doses instead of keeping some in reserve, expressing confidence that the pace of production had improved. “We are releasing the entire supply we have for order by states, rather than holding second doses in physical reserve,” Azar said.

But that move — initially welcomed by state leaders, who began to plan for a vaccine surge — has only sparked a new round of recriminations, with governors surprised to learn that the federal reserve is effectively exhausted and there aren’t any additional doses to come.

“I am demanding answers from the Trump Administration,” tweeted Oregon Gov. Kate Brown on Friday morning. “This is a deception on a national scale. Oregon’s seniors, teachers, all of us, were depending on the promise of Oregon’s share of the federal reserve of vaccines being released to us.”

The health department rushed to clarify its stance, with Azar saying on NBC News on Friday night that “there’s not a reserve stockpile” and that the department was just announcing its updated policy to move more quickly.

Health officials also have said that some of their goals have been mischaracterized in the media, with Azar claiming to NBC on Friday that “we said we would have doses available for 20 million people,” not 20 million people vaccinated.

“Because we didn’t control the shots in the arms, we never had that internal goal,” a person with knowledge of Azar’s thinking said, adding that the internal goal was 20 million available doses. “That became a narrative and a way to attack an incredible sensitive project and that bothers him because that was never the intention.”

However, Azar and other officials expressly promised “20 million vaccinations” by the end of December.

The Trump team’s projections of total doses manufactured and distributed across December and January also were “wildly off-target,” concluded Yale University health policy professor Jason Schwartz.

The shifting expectations and patchwork policies have unsettled public health experts, and the incoming Biden administration has pledged to be more aggressive on vaccinations than the last.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/17/crash-landing-of-operation-warp-speed-459892