Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean argue in New York today that lockdowns were probably a miserable failure in the fight against COVID-19.¹ But they also say this in passing:
As the United States gains more and more distance from the COVID pandemic, the perspective on what worked, and what did not, becomes not only more clear, but more stark. Operation Warp Speed stands out as a remarkable policy success....
The more I hear this, the more I wonder where this automatic praise comes from. The vaccines themselves were developed in the private sector long before the federal government got involved. Money to guarantee production was authorized by Congress as part of the CARES Act, two months before Warp Speed was announced. Clinical trials proceeded on a normal expedited class. The FDA gave emergency approval based on protocols long in place. Vaccinations were then provided to 25% of the US population in three months, which is genuinely impressive but not that much more impressive than the 20% who got swine flu vaccinations during the same timeframe in 1976.
The development of the COVID vaccine was miraculous and the rollout was well executed. But it was nothing more than that aside from having a memorable name. It was competent, not remarkable.
¹Although they add that this is only "for any purpose other than keeping hospitals from being overrun," which is quite a caveat since that's precisely why lockdowns and other mitigation measures were adopted in the early days of the pandemic.
Mere competence from the Trump maladministration counts as remarkable, not to mention miraculous.
Pfizer and Moderna were competent companies in this case who developed and manufactured the vaccine in record time. As soon as it came time for the Trump administration to actually oversee the distribution of the shots and promote vaccine uptake (Dr. Fauci's efforts notwithstanding), things started coming off the rails.
Hell, lack of malice from the Trump maladministration was remarkable. "Mere competence", very remarkable, unless in service of malice.
Even before the COVID vaccines became available, the TFG administration had kneecapped the CDC external monitoring capability - cutting the budget for foreign outposts by 80% shortly after taking office. (These were the disease equivalents of the DEW line!) They disbanded the pandemic response team in the NSC (didn't fire them - but they weren't doing a very valuable function that, in fact, required doing).
And, before the vaccines were available, they were interfering with PPE supplies - basically stealing stuff states started buying after being told they were "on their own". The government of MA got the Patriots to volunteer their team jet to make sure a shipment of PPE got through without the feds getting to hijack it.
The development of the vaccine was pretty impressive. The rollout itself was a complete shitshow. In a lot of states, nobody at the state level was telling anyone at the county level what the fuck was going on, how many doses would be available, who was eligible, etc. That was because people at the state level were getting nothing from the feds, where well-known public health authority Jared Kushner was supposed to be in charge and moving vaccines was assigned to some Army general who gave like two press conferences and then disappeared forever. Yes, most people eventually got their jabs, but it was weeks and weeks of chaos and confusion.
They kept trying to be clever about the roll-out, restricting it first to health care workers, then old and preconditions, etc. I get why they did it, but it would have been better policy just to tell anyone to get the vaccine as quick as they can.
They were overrun with demand. I see why they did that as production ramped up. Got mine very quickly as soon it was available to GP. It only like a 2 month head start.
My cousin and her husband died in the hospital because of that two month headstart.
Fortunately they were the last of my family to die. I lost 5 my wife lost 1
If it's any comfort, the Australian government's performance was even worse. Not only did it assign Australians to a confusing variety of vaccine-eligibility categories (not just 1, 2, 3 etc but 1a,1b, 2a and so on), it changed the rules so often it was hard to keep up.
Then the process for making an appointment online to get the shot was so laborious and complicated, you'd swear they were trying to deter people from making the effort.
The development of the vaccine was pretty impressive. The rollout itself was a complete shitshow.
It wasn't perfect, but "complete shitshow" is a huge exaggeration.
The United States began jabbing arms in December, 2020, a grand total of three or four days after the UK started. We were one of the very first high income countries to start vaccinations.
There were queues in early going, sure. There were queues in every country. IIRC by April or so everyone who wanted to get vaccinated could do so (wait lists had been eliminated). So, approximately five months from introduction of vaccines to reach full "available on demand" status. Not bad!
Yes, after that point, anti-vax quackery became an increasingly potent force (and has surely claimed several hundred thousands lives) but I don't think that can be fairly attributed bo "rollout" problems.
People think WarpSpeed is good because it makes a better movie plot than the actual process.
The name itself is also pretty good.
It's an absolutely massive caveat, since hospitals came close* both in NYC in Spring 2020 and everywhere else in Fall 2020, but ultimately didn't crumble under the strain because of masking and restrictions. There's a counterfactual where the death rate from Covid - either directly or because it swamped hospitals and people died of other stuff - is much higher than what it was.
* Speaking for my home state, I remember when they were at something like 95-96% ICU capacity in the state, and Intermountain Healthcare was bringing in nursing students in their senior years of college just to get the desperately needed staffing.
And of course in the US, the restrictions were basically voluntary. We never had anything like the coercion most European countries applied to their lockdowns, to say nothing of what New Zealand, Taiwan, or China did that worked tremendously well in 2020 and most of 2021.
This! We underestimate the benefit of masks and social isolation because our healthcare system didn't collapse. It also likely helped that the least compliant states were either sparsely populated or have warmer than average winters.
100%. NYC was getting buried and it has huge healthcare capacity. These NYT folks live here and the Gov explicitly told everyone why we had the mandates. A tad odd they forgot.
Yes, there is a huge difference in mortality between Asian countries which adopted drastic measures and the US and European countries:
https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=eur&areas=usa&areas=jpn&areas=nzl&areas=kor&areas=e92000001&areasRegional=usny&areasRegional=usnm&areasRegional=uspr&areasRegional=usaz&areasRegional=usfl&areasRegional=usnd&cumulative=1&logScale=0&per100K=1&startDate=2020-01-01&values=deaths
There are lots of question about this, and about differences between European countries, but instead of addressing the real questions of what actually does work people are more concerned with politically-driven arguments. Kevin almost never addressed the difference between the Asian countries and others, nor does he now.
By the way, despite what the New York piece says, China may be in the group of low-mortality Asian countries. We may never know because the Chinese aren't giving out the real data (you can enter China on the graph, but the numbers are impossibly small). What people say about Chinese mortality is basically anecdotal.
“China may be in the group of low-mortality Asian countries.”
The fact that China suppressed their mortality data suggests they weren’t especially low mortality. If they had been, they’d be trumpeting their mortality stats, not deleting them from public view.
NZ and Taiwan are islands. Even South Korea is a peninsula. Its just far easier to restrict entry. China is a better comparison.
The 245 hospitals in NYC were never "close" to collapse. The data show masks there and lockdowns did nothing to "flatten the curve."
While Warp Speed might have had an effect, it was something that literally any other administration would have done.
And the lockdowns did reduce the speed of the spread, resulting in the hospitals not being overrun, resulting in the healthcare system not breaking. No small thing.
@newtons.third
The Reagan Administration completely ignored the AIDS epidemic for quite some time. Who knows how they might have handled COVID-19?
You think a different administration would have handled AIDS differently than Reagan's did?
Yes. Reagan had tapped into the right wing evangelical vote to get elected, and his handlers were not about to get caught spending hardworking taxpayer dollars fighting what many of them considered God's justifiable vengeance on gay people. Eventually they couldn't ignore the epidemic, but they tried. I think a liberal administration, such as Carter's or Clinton's, would have seen it as a public health issue and taken action sooner.
According to one of the graphs in this page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_in_the_United_States
The maximum number of anual deaths from AIDS in the USA was 41699 (1995). Another graph shows a little more than 50000.
Either way it is dwarfed by Covid-19.
50k is a normal flu season.
They ignored AIDS because the vast majority of its victims were gay men, and acting like they mattered would have pissed off the GOP's evangelical base. And even the Trump administration tried to politicize Covid early on, acting like it was something only big, heavily Democratic cities like NY and Seattle had to deal with.
There’s no way even Reagan would’ve ignored Covid, especially once it was killing people in large numbers in red states a few months after appearing in the country. AIDS could be ignored because it only killed small numbers of people relatively nobody cared about in blue cities for the first 5 years or so. (I write this as a gay man who hates what Reagan did, so please don’t interpret this as “nobody died of AIDS who mattered,” but it definitely mattered that the early victims of AIDS were gays and drug users vs regular suburban/rural folk as with Covid.)
Perfectly right, it was kind of an obvious thing to do (in some variation of it). I mean, apparently the Russians, British, and Chinese did something somewhat similar because they all got vaccines out in about the same amount of time as well.
Yeah, saying the words "yes, do it" when an exceptional scientific innovation is right there waiting to be exploited and sufficient funding is right there waiting to be spent on it absolutely constitutes a "remarkable policy success." Many props to Donald Trump for uttering those words, surely no other president would have done so.
How exactly can something be miraculous and merely competent at the same time?
The *development of the vaccine* was miraculous. The *rollout* was well-executed, but was nothing more than that; aside from having a memorable name, it was competent but not remarkable.
Hope that helps.
The initial vaccine rollout was not at all well-executed. Nobody in WA or nearby states could get any information on delivery timing OR quantities. That's pretty important when most of the MRNA based vaccines needed to be kept very cold until just before use.
It wasn't until AFTER the Biden administration got in office that the effort came together in a remarkably short time. My wife and I had been resigned to not getting vaccinated till summer. Got our first jabs in early March 2021.
Amazing how quickly a guy who actually knows how things work can get the vast power of the administration going. (Hint - not referring to TFG or any of his incompetent and corrupt minions.)
BioNTech, a German pharmaceutical company, started its development of the first successful COVID vaccine four months before Operation Warp Speed was initiated. Most of the financing came from private equity and the EU.
My last edit got eaten by the timer!
I wanted to add that the rest of the funding came only from Germany and the company's partnership with Pfizer, but absolutely no funds came from OWS for the vaccine's development.
Pfizer did not take Warp Funds. Did it on their own and I am forever in debt to them for waiting until after the election to announce it. Sure enough the Orange idiot loses.
The thing that Operation Warp Speed did that was successful was not put road blocks on the development and distribution of the vaccine. Given right wing opposition to even the existence of the disease I consider that a win.
Although they add that this is only "for any purpose other than keeping hospitals from being overrun," which is quite a caveat
Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did the lockdowns do?
I remember a NYTimes article in Aug 2020 about FedEx and UPS building "freezer farms" in a central location because the vaccines were looking good but would need to be kept in special facilities before overnight shipping. If we had adequate government at the time, the Army Corp of Engineers and the USPS might have been involved, but instead we had private companies doing it for profit. Remember that video of the first doses rolling out on special FedEx and UPS trucks? So whatever they charged us for that service, they deserve it.
Recall that the Defendant had his man running the USPS into the ground, both to fatten his own bottom line (DeJoy ran a for-profit mail delivery service), and to delay absentee ballots for the 2020 election.
+10, at least!
"aside from smoothing the curve and from preventing hospitals from being too overwhelmed, respiratory machines and other scarce resources from being overtaxed, and preventing patients from dying in hospital hallways (or from having to build china-style entire hospitals from scractch in weeks), aside from that, lockdowns were a failure."
It's like people have no memory of what happened.
There was an irony to the 2012 election campaign when Mitt Romney, for all intents and purposes, was unable to tout his greatest accomplishment, the implementation of a government healthcare plan in Massachusetts while he was governor. It became a model for Obamacare, which in Republican circles had famously become the most evil program in history.
Likewise, the single good thing Trump did, speeding the development of a Covid vaccine (just a wee bit), is an accomplishment he cannot brag about because of the antivax mania that has since spread through red states and districts. (The announcement that the vaccine was ready came in the days after the election. Fortunate timing, I think.)
It's a conundrum for GOP pols. Develop a government program worth bragging about and your own voters will crucify you for it. Which is another reason why they don't bother, and another reason not to vote for them.
I remember my wife working a lot of hours for a lot of months, trying to make sure that the hospitals here didn't run out of PPE. (They quickly went to a program where equipment was turned in, hung in the animal facilities, and disinfected with large hydrogen peroxide machines that previously were used to disinfect the facilities. Then the PPE would be handed back.) That was just one part of the whole program to keep the hospitals up and running. Lockdowns were another part. And it all worked in the early days -- the system didn't collapse. But it's hard to know just how awful it would have been without a lot of people working very hard to keep the system running. My recollection is that they were always keeping a couple weeks ahead of things going to hell but you'd never know that unless you were on the inside working very hard trying to keep it all from going to hell.
The New Yorker article is frustrating. You can't point to a Trump quote saying, "Open up the schools" and say, "He was right", while ignoring everything else he did. I think there's a legitimate argument that by Sept. 2020 opening up the schools could have been the "right" decision, *if* they weren't simultaneously trying to downplay everything else. Super spreader events? Don't worry about it! Masks? Worthless! Any restrictions on public gatherings? Meaningless, and Unconstitutional if a religious establishment! And when you finally get a vaccine, don't urge your followers to get it.
"Follow the Science" didn't mean choose a position and blindly stick to it from then on out. It should have meant follow a process of trying rational strategies, assessing the results, and reevaluating as we went along. But that was made all the more difficult when you have a large group pretty much covering their ears going "Nyah! Nyah! I can't hear you! Go away libtard!"
Tiny detail: "New York Magazine" (nymag.com) and "The New Yorker" (newyorker.com) are different publications. Both have their merits and demerits; both have published exceptional journalism, and also drivel.
You are indeed correct. "New York" I occasionally read on line. "New Yorker" my mother-in-law recently signed us up for a mailed subscription. Not that we really need to read the comings and goings of the NYC theater scene given that we are ~1000 miles away these days.
I wouldn't call this article drivel. But I think we are 10+ years away from an honest accounting of what worked and what didn't during the pandemic.
I still get snide remarks like, "it was just a flu." Let them have their win, in reality everybody knows how close to full medieval* it really was.
*You know, pyres and proclamations.
I am getting tired of articles that say that masks don't work, lock downs don't work, vaccines don't work by arguing that they did not change the overall impact of the pandemic.
Slowing down transmission has real benefits, even if at the end the number of infections is exactly the same. And in emergencies like in Italy or New York I don't see any other way to try and keep the medical system going and avoid people having to croak on the roadside somewhere like they did in the Middle Ages from the Black Death.
Precisely. And the great power of such simple measures was their very simplicity. Instead of just depending completely upon some future cure from a research institute or governmental organization, they gave us agency to minimize the virus' impact at least in a small but significant way.
These comparison also tend to conflate "lockdowns don't work" with "social distancing doesn't work."
The first proposition is at least arguable, because in countries/regions where lockdowns are necessary (because the population won't voluntarily follow public health instructions), they may be inadequate.
The second proposition is flatly risible. To put it another way, Japan didn't need lockdowns, because their non-lunatic people followed the advice of authorities. And in Texas lockdowns couldn't do much good because people thought social distancing was a Communist plot even worse than water fluoridation.
Maybe you should read the Jan 2021 GAO report: https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-319.pdf
CRS report a few months later on what was spent: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IN/IN11560
Also, FAS on using Warp Speed as a blueprint for the future:https://fas.org/publication/how-to-operation-warp-speed/
In the early days of covid there were a lot of predictions that it would take a decade for a covid vaccine. Updating the flu vaccine annually is not the same because manufacturing is already in place and we don't need all the phases of the trials. One idea of OWS was to get manufacturing ready at the same time as doing trials. Plus there was help with other roadblocks.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/10/operation-warp-speed-covid-19-vaccine
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-319
and see above for the full GAO report.
It's an astonishing reflection of the insanity that has overtaken the American right that state and federal Republican legislators are competing to see who can impose the most stringent bans on any measures which might be useful to minimise the impact of the next pandemic.
Come one, Kevin. I'm SURE Donald Trump, with his great foresight, and having realized the seriousness of the emerging pandemic, summoned all the experts in the various Federal agencies and told them "Here's what we're going to do, folks . . ." and then proceeded to lay out the details of the Operation. Then he sent them on their way, proclaiming, "Ladies and gentlemen, let's get to work!" to the inspiring sound of trumpets and drums.
Or maybe someone came to Bedminster between Trump golf games and stuck a paper in front of him, saying "Sir, sign this and you will be re-elected." To which Trump said, "What the fuck is it?" To which the answer was "Operation Warp Speed, Mr. President. It will throw money at people already working on curing COVID, and will get you re-elected!"
I'm sure it was the first version. Great movie.