Last year the Trump administration quietly shifted some funding meant for hospitals to fund vaccine development under Operation Warp Speed. Alex Tabarrok says there's nothing wrong with this:
The real scandal is why Congress never put big funding behind Operation Warp Speed—thus requiring the administration to fund OWS by surreptitiously cutting elsewhere.
But Congress made loads of funding available to OWS. Here's a recent Congressional Research Service report:
In the FY2020 laws, not much was appropriated specifically for COVID-19 vaccine-related efforts; instead, several accounts have funding available for relevant activities.
....In two of the four FY2020 coronavirus supplemental appropriations acts (P.L. 116-123 and P.L. 116-136), funding was made available for vaccine-related efforts to accounts at NIH, DOD, and the Public Health and Social Services Emergency Fund (PHSSEF)....In particular, up to roughly $30 billion (accounting for set-asides and transfers) in the PHSSEF account is available for vaccine development, manufacturing, and purchase until September 30, 2024.
This was all part of two bills passed in March of 2020, two months before Trump announced OWS. Was it enough? So far less than $20 billion has been spent, so I'd guess that it was. OWS has been a pretty good program, primarily aimed at guaranteeing purchases of vaccines as a way of reducing risk for vaccine developers, and it sure seems to have worked. Both Congress and the Trump administration seem like they handled it pretty well.
What we only found out recently is that OWS was too narrow in scope. It was known what materials would be required for large scale production. But now we have delays because apparently no one bothered to ensure timely production of these materials.
Had that been included 20 billion would certainly not have been enough.
Possibly so. But maybe not. If the administration had invoked the Defense Procurement tactic early on, they could have guaranteed the supplier companies to make them whole in case their efforts went for naught. In that case, nowhere near the whole $20B would have been needed for the R&D itself, and the pre-production costs of advance preparation would have been relatively small.
Alternatively, when the R&D was successful, then the underwriting of the potential lost cost of pre-production preparation that might have ultimately been wasted would have cost nothing, since those pre-production start-up costs would have been recouped many times over by the companies that were ready for production and distribution as soon as they had the R&D results as product specs.
OWS's successes -- how do you judge? It's not like there weren't parallel vaccine developments around the world that came out with vaccines at around the same time.
Had Team Trump been willing to throw money (even if wasted) at vaccines so that there were millions of doses ready to ship the day the FDA granted EUA, I would have said that they did things about as well as they could have. I mean, this was what I was advocating for, last spring, if you recall.
That's not what happened. And, Team Trump moofed on that option for 100M additional doses early on.
Pfizer wasn't part of Warp Speed for development--its vaccine was subsidized by the German gov't.--BioNTech is a German company.
OWS is an example of how Trump operates. It allowed him to talk out of both sides of his mouth. The virus is a hoax. The number of people who have it and die from it is exaggerated. You don’t need to wear a mask. If you get the disease, it just like the flu. It’s just going to go away, no need for a vaccine. Oh, by the way I am working hard to make a vaccine that will save everyone from this terrible virus and thanks to me millions of people will be saved.
He’s covered all his bases. No matter what happens he can call it a success.
Bingo!
I have no proof of this, but given Trump's history of bad business decisions and his susceptibility to flattery and manipulation, I'm guessing he was conned out of several billion dollars by pharmaceutical companies who tricked him into thinking they were on the verge of a miracle cure (which would make him the greatest president ever!) if only they could somehow get hold of a few billion bucks right away.
There is no reason to think that OWS was necessary to get pharmaceutical companies to develop vaccines. In fact the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were developed almost immediately after the Chinese published the genetic information in January 2020. Of course this is in retrospect - at the time many experts were saying it might take a year or more. As Dean Baker and other commenters here have said, where a lot of money should have been spent is in setting up production and distribution, even if some had been wasted on failed candidates. The distribution especially could only be done by the federal government.
The nature of those mRNA vaccines and end the Jansen/J&J vaccine is that you just need the sequence to design a new vaccine. But you still have to test them for safety and efficacy--and to do that at scale, you have to ramp up and test production protocols. All these steps takes time. Where at the point where these seem to be safe enough so that reprogramming them for the variants won't require a brand new series of testing.
As for building out production pre-approval, companies were doing that in house, or by working with other companies, e.g. BioNTech with Pfizer. There are a lot of constraints to doing more--namely the people who have to get the production up and running in house are the same people needed to oversee the construction of new facilities--and they can not do both. In house production needed to be up and running, and in the process new people trained, then, i.e. now, new facilities could be built and run. But that would take at least a year or so.
The Biden administration has been taking on the role of supply chain management--basically doing what it can to remove the roadblocks to production. The has been getting the right needles, approving more doses per vial, helping ramp up production of precursors, etc. That, and getting Merck to produce the J&J vaccine once it's set up, has helped a lot to ramp up production.
If more is needed to help treat the world, then maybe partnerships with companies in India would help, along with lower costs.
^^^Both Congress and the Trump administration seem like they handled it pretty well.^^^
Maybe. Was OWS just the vaccine development part, or did it also include funding to set up the inoculation apparatus?* I don't think the latter has been quite as problematic as some are saying. If you had told me in early December that more than 50 million Americans would have at least one jab by early March, I'd have said "That sounds about right" and "Quicker would be better, but it's not disaster as long as we can increase the pace moving forward."
Still, we really are way behind the UK in the pace of vaccinations, I believe, and it can no longer be attrivuted solely to the fact that Britain started a week or two before the USA. Mind you, the United States is well ahead of the pace of most countries on earth -- and just about all European ones. So, again, it's not a disaster.
But I do think the Trump administration (no surprises here) were insufficiently attentive to the nitty gritty of actually getting the country geared up to handle mass inoculations once vaccines were approved. And so we got off to a weaker start than should have been the case.
*Also, we kept hearing that the pharma sector would mass produce the vaccines in advance of approval, so as to ensure ample supply and rapid progress once FDA approval was forthcoming. And some of this obviously did take place. But my impression is this effort likewise fell short. Perhaps the UK possesses greater vaccine manufacturing capacity relative to population than the US? But manufacturing capacity isn't set in stone; it can be expanded. Perhaps the Trump administration did oversee an expansion in this area (but again, it seems insufficient).