Ezra Klein sez:
Donald Trump had exactly one, you-gotta-hand-it-to-him, that was an insanely successful policy that saved countless lives and we should do it again and again: Operation Warp Speed.
And it's the only policy from his first term he has completely disowned and is now salting the…
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) November 20, 2024
This drives me crazy. There are three great myths of the past five years that I'm going to go to my grave still fighting everyone about:
- The 2021-22 inflation surge was sparked by the excessive size of Joe Biden's ARP. But it wasn't. The "excessive" size of ARP contributed no more than a fraction of a percent to inflation. Larry Summers was wrong.
.
- The Afghanistan withdrawal was a chaotic mess. But it wasn't. Under the circumstances it was actually a remarkable success and one of the great achievements of Biden's presidency.
.
- Operation Warp Speed was Donald Trump's greatest triumph. But it wasn't. It was conceived entirely by Congress and the private sector. All Trump did was parachute in a couple of months later and give it a name.
These are all hills I'm willing to die on. And I probably will.
Ezra Klein is best ignored these days. A useless purveyor of conventional wisdom.
Exceptionally lazy reporting. He has completely internalized Trump's blathering as truth.
Indeed. On OWS, I have yet to hear one thing--one single thing!--that Trump did that wasn't (a) simply failing to impede the work of our expert agencies and biotech folks, or (b) something that literally any/every other government would have done/actually did.
Not bumblefucking the progress that the grownups were making may be a personal achievement for Trump, but it's hardly something to attribute to him as a success.
Moreover, wtf does Ezra mean by saying "we should do it again and again"? Rapid development of vaccines for things that aren't a pandemic? Or just "again and again" in the sense that next time there's a pandemic, he hopes that the president has the awesome wisdom and steely judgment to say "oh fuck, tell those eggheads to not stop developing vaccines"?
That's overly critical. The US military did provide their logistics experts with power to commandeer shipments to Moderna, and Pfizer . There wee examples of these guys getting orders delivered faster. But the biggest thing Trump did to speed vaccine licensing to December 2020 from the original predictions of January 2021 was to cause infection rates to be an order of magnitude higher in the fall of 2020. This caused the control groups in the trials to achieve sufficient infection rates a month earlier than expected.
My thoughts exactly. The juicebox mafia never did amount to much and I never understood the hype; Hilzoy's stuff was far superior in tone and content, to name but one example of many.
Yeah no. You can argue with him on this or that point, including this one, but to ignore him is an idiocy of your own making. I find myself convinced by some of his takes and disagreeing with some of his takes. He’s “best ignored?” Buddy, point that finger back at yourself.
Ezra Klein is best ignored these days. A useless purveyor of conventional wisdom.
He really can be terrible. Right wing ref working, uh, works! And some of the clearest manifestations of this are in how supposedly intelligent liberals internalize their baseless claims.
It’s not just Klein, the overwhelming majority of journalists also make that claim. They also obsessesed about inflation because they completely swallowed the conservative economists + Larry Summers claim that Biden caused inflation. There was almost no acknowledgement that inflation was as bad or worse in countries that didn’t spend big.
The myth that really incenses me is the persistent lie that Democrats offer nothing for working class people. Apparently all those reporters who are so in touch with working class folks think that things like affordable health care, good public schools, home health care for seniors, affordable child care, job training, higher minimum wage, more unions, SS, expanded internet access, etc. are not needed by working class people. Hillary even had a multi-billion dollar, detailed plan to help revive coal country — a plan the media deliberately ignored because it would have wrecked their chosen narrative that Hillary is an elite snob who doesn’t care about those people like Trump pretends to.
Agreed. Klein has nothing more to say and you should stop reading him along with the Times itself. Simply repeating the same debates in Democratic circles endlessly is just stupid and a waste of time but he gets paid for it and it interests him so I don't blame him for doing so. But before long he'll be irrelevant as Trump 2.0 goes along. I don't need him to tell me to be outraged.
I agree with everything you say but you should understand this: The one thing Trump does better than anything is cover his tracks That's why he's never held accountable for anything because he's very smart of making sure catching him the act or red handed is impossible because he's smart enough to not allow for it. So he engineers a treaty with the Taliban to get out Afghanistan, but its Biden that has to carry it out so he escapes any responsibility because the collapse and deaths don't occur on his watch. Trump doesn't brag about Operation Warp Speed because he doesn't want anything to do with the vaccines for COVID given their rejection by the red-brown coalition and what do you know? They turned out for him against Harris. Inflation, despite the rebate checks that went out under his name too? Biden got the blame because the rate shot up under Biden, not Trump under whom there were negative oil prices.
As I said, the only way you're going to break this evil spell people are under is for Trump to be fully responsible for government that he can't blame the Democrats, media, deep state, etc. for the failures of his administration. Unfortunately all that's going to fall on J.D Vance in 2028 but like with Bush II when he leaves office in 2029 with a 28 percent approval rating and neutered politically because he can't run for office again and will be too old to do anything other than fart, it'll get him in the end. He won't go to prison but he'll be scorned and forgotten like Bush II, and for him that's just as bad.
As your timeline notes, Operation Warp Speed did not contribute to the development of the mRNA covid-19 vaccines.
What it did was provide guaranteed purchases so that manufacturing scale up could be expedited. This may have sped up manufacturing scale up by perhaps 6 months,
Note that all other developed countries were also ding the same thing.
Warp Speed was the right thing to do, but so obviously right that anyone would have signed off on it. So there is no reason to credit Trump.
Also please note Pfizer got nothing and managed just fine to be the dominant vaccine here.
It's not true that Pfizer got nothing. They didn't get the up front cash (that a start up like Moderna needed) because they had deep pockets an didn't need it.. But they did get the logistics help and the contracts that guaranteed they'd get paid in the future.
It should be pointed out Biden never recovered politically from what happened in Afghanistan. The best he did in the polls afterwards was 45 percent and this despite low unemployment, falling inflation rate, U.S. troops not involved in active shooting wars, falling border crossings by 2024 and getting much of his agenda through Congress. People don't like Presidents who lose wars fair or unfair. Jerry Ford, after all, got tagged with the loss of South Vietnam and I think it hurt him too, especially in the wake of the Panama Canal negotiations and Kissinger's unpopularity. Reagan's challenge may well have failed early on without this and Ford would have been in a better position to defeat Jimmy Carter than he was in the summer of 1976. Unfortunately, history will have to say it was the right thing to do.
In the 1983 Beirut Marine barracks bombing 241 US personnel were killed and many French as well. Reagan pulled all our forces out instead of taking revenge and there was no backlash in the media to speak of.
Democrats and Republicans are just treated differently.
I'm sure the Reagan Administration said to itself "Thank God for Grenada!"
I used to like Ezra Klein. But now it seems he's been infected with Compulsive Contrarianism. Kevin is the master of data analysis, and I can't really weigh in on most of his work because I don't have the expertise or time. But I can absolutely confirm what he says about Warp Speed. The clueless school of fish that constitutes our political media keeps saying that it was a program to *develop* COVID vaccines. But it wasn't. Development was already well under way. It was a program to "coordinate" the disbursement of money that had already been authorized by Congress to 6 companies to help accelerate *production* of vaccine doses without waiting for all clinical trials to be completed.
Ironically, this decision helped fuel skepticism of vaccine safety among the very people who supported Trump. Of course, he managed to slither away from taking any heat for this.
Also worth noting is that in the big splashy announcement that Operation Warp Speed would deliver 300 million vaccine doses by the end of 2020, only 17 million were actually delivered, and only 5 million we administered. When Biden took office in January 2020, his team managed to clean up some of the distribution mess and ramp up the deployment of the vaccines.
All that said, it was objectively a good move to get those vaccines produced in large quantities without waiting years for approval. But giving Trump credit for signing a piece of paper authorizing OWS, when he barely - if at all - understood the pros and cons, complexities, and risks, is preposterous. Ezra Klein just wants to establish his "true journalist" bona fides by showing that he's willing to credit a president who doesn't fit his ideological preferences - even when the credit has not really been earned.
I'll occasionally listen to some of Klein's podcasts when he has someone interesting on. But he's lately got so full of himself that he talks more than the person he's "interviewing"; other than the Waltz interview I've skipped him over the whole election season. I've read him since he and Jesse Taylor wrote the Pandagon blog. He was and remains a middling pundit, not a journalist.
I liked Ezra back then. Read Pandagon religiously. Fame and being at the NYT seemed to have changed him, much for the worse, unfortunately.
Photo of Trump looks like he just realized he's finally dug his own grave,
https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1gvy0br/trumps_hair/
Or at least his hair realized that.
Trump didn’t name OWS. Nor did Azar. According to Paul Offit, it was someone in the FDA who was a Star Trek fan.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/fdageneral/108179
As easy as it is to imagine Trump as a Star Trek character, it’s hard to imagine his being a Star Trek fan—and therefore someone capable of coming up with the name.
The Star Trek tv show presented more love and harmony for people who are “different” than trump and his fans could ever tolerate.
Closest Trek character match I can think of, that oil slick of evil thing from Next Generation.
He could have scrapped the vaccine effort and mandated his own quack cures as RFK Jr. would have doubtless advised him to do. So we are in steep decline.
So now the question is, who gets credit for hiring Gustav Perna and when did Perna start working on the logistics of vaccine distribution? I remember folks complaining in 2021 they couldn't get new Mason and Ball canning jars because glass vials for vaccines. The arsenal of public health at work!
I remember reading, very shortly after the sequence was posted, about making an mRNA vaccine. I had been aware of the research into mRNA "vaccines" for cancer, and knew what mRNA did from HS biology. My thoughts in early January 2020 was: "this is fucking brilliant!". I was also aware that funds for vaccine development had been allocated in the CARES act. Which has always made me wonder why Trump, of all people, gets credit for creating a program which was already well along in May when he announced, "Operation Warp Speed". Fuck that fucker. He's never had an original idea in his life.
Operation warp speed guaranteed government money to companies even if their vaccines didn't pan out. Took the risk out of development and also guaranteed if only one vaccine worked that the owner of that vaccine couldn't demand exorbitant prices.
Whenever you talk about Operation Warp Speed, you always leave out details that you don't think is important, are naive to, or deliberately gets in the way of your message.
- Through OWS, clinical trials overlapped or were combined, rather than run sequentially, and used far fewer volunteers than would ordinarily be used.
- They added billions more for development on top of the initial amount given via the CARES Act, and added funding for therapeutics such as antibody treatments.
- They purchased hundreds of millions of doses without first having safety and efficacy confirmed via clinical trials, allowing the federal gov't to carry the risk of companies producing vaccines before they even met EUA approval.
- They coordinated to procure intermediates required to produce the vaccines and hundreds of millions of vials and needles and swabs used to package and administer the vaccines, and tracked every dose produced.
Truth be told, he wasn't responsible for anything more than the signature on the order. But, diminishing OWS also diminishes all of the work the ordinary folks in government did to get all this stuff in writing for Trump to sign his name on.
As for all the comment section criticism of Ezra, often I disagree with his guests and/or his perspective on things, but he's still providing voices that people ought to spend the time to listen to. You can't have a properly informed let alone an independent opinion if you don't know the perspective of others. There's nothing wrong with being reflexively contrarian; some people would call that being skeptical. Socrates, anyone?
" and used far fewer volunteers than would ordinarily be used." That's 100% false. But it did seamlessly merge the transition between phase 2 and phase three trials.. Also, the biggest reason for the speed of vaccine development was the massive demand by people to participate in the trials. Getting volunteers had never been easier.
"They purchased hundreds of millions of doses without first having safety and efficacy confirmed via clinical trials, allowing the federal gov't to carry the risk of companies producing vaccines before they even met EUA approval." But this also guaranteed that the manufacturers could not charge high prices when their vaccines turned out to work. But yes, the logistics provided by warp speed were important and extremely helpful.
BioNTech had 21 different arms in Phase I and targeted just 15 volunteers per arm. Moderna had 3 arms and a total of 45 participants, again, just 15 volunteers per arm. Remarkably smaller (1/2 to 1/3rd) than what would have been expected of a novel (mRNA) vaccine pathway.
OWS money allowed for much larger (in some cases 10x) Phase III, but that was to compensate for a significantly shorter initial Phase III evaluation for an EUA.
Thank you for your comments about the Afghanistan withdrawal. I have heard almost no one say this. I happen to think it was one of the most successful operations in US military history.
The biggest reason why no one thinks this, and I think this is a problem with the Biden admin and really with Democrats in general, is that they never made the case. There's a saying that a liberal is someone who won't take his own side in an argument and we are really suffering from that.
Everyone in the Biden admin should have been trumpeting the amazing success of our military every day and saying that anyone who said different was attacking our brave troops. No matter what response this got they needed to keep saying it loudly and constantly.
But dems never operate this way. They are way too afraid of being criticized in a NYT editorial and have to be fair and consider the other sides arguments and framing of the issue.
If Trump has taught us nothing else he should have taught us to stop doing that.
+1
This. 1000%. It's just infuriating that Democrats can't stand up for themselves even when they have a winning argument.
I was watching Morning Joe this morning and Operation Warp Speed came up. All five or six of the regulars that were on at the moment agreed that it was, by far, Trumps greatest achievement and he should be given credit for it. Joe said the ironic thing was that Trump can't tout it as an achievement because his base wouldn't consider it as such since it would be championing vaccinations.
I'm curious, has Larry Summers ever admitted that he got it very wrong ?
Kevin, you're ignoring the whole long period between May 2020 and when people actually started getting vaccines (Dec 2020-spring 21). Operation Warp Speed didn't create the vaccine, but it had a lot of power in getting it distributed faster and overcoming the bureaucratic inertia that otherwise would have sickened and killed a lot of people while we waited months (years?) more for the vaccine.