Time to Revive the Principles of Operation Warp Speed

 Experienced leaders, whether in combat, on the gridiron, or in business, may not be able to fully anticipate every possible outcome, but they learn and adapt without hesitation.

It’s a lesson lost on the Biden administration. Instead, the White House continues to implement a March 2020 approach to diminishing the COVID pandemic by focusing singularly on vaccines, recommending the use of masks even when outdoors, and, recently, banning flights from countries where the omicron variant had escaped weeks before.

Rather than anticipating and adapting to changing conditions, the White House is “leading from behind.” The two latest examples are the huge imbalance between supply and demand for rapid tests and the failure to invest in the manufacturing of promising oral therapeutics such as Pfizer’s Paxlovid prior to it receiving an emergency-use authorization from the FDA. What’s worse is that the White House call for testing appeared to be a function of  politics over science as it panicked at the prospect of damage to its approval ratings from omicron. Nevertheless, the Biden team was caught flatfooted when pharmacy shelves were empty and lines for testing in major American cities stretched around the block.

Team Biden reportedly rejected offers months ago to ramp up production of rapid tests, focusing instead on mandating vaccines. It then suggested that Americans buy the tests at the pharmacy and submit claims for reimbursement through their health insurers. Rube Goldberg would be proud. The president announced last week that the government would provide 500 million at-home tests for free starting in January, and that people could order through a new government website. However, omicron will likely have peaked before the end of January, and besides, several experts have suggested we would need at least 1 billion tests per month to fulfill the purpose of properly screening the population.   

President Biden casually dismissed a question about not anticipating the latest COVID mutation: “Nobody saw it coming. Nobody in the whole world. Who saw it coming?" And he said later: “What happened was the omicron virus spread even more rapidly than anybody thought.” Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Sunday, “We’ve obviously got to do better. I mean, I think things will improve greatly as we get into January, but that doesn’t help us today and tomorrow.” Nice candor , but no foresight and no leadership.

The Biden administration needs to adopt the spirit and principles of Operation Warp Speed. This Trump-led effort anticipated what would be needed months in advance, starting by expanding America’s industrial capacity to produce vaccines, then by procuring the equipment and raw materials necessary to manufacture them long in advance of FDA authorization. It placed advanced orders not only for the vaccines but also for temperature-controlled storage containers, vials that could withstand minus 80-degree Celsius temperatures, a billion syringes and needles, and then developed distribution plans to get millions of doses of the vaccine to over 50,000 destinations across the country as soon as it was approved using an advanced information technology system to track every dose.

The principles guiding Operation Warp Speed were simple but compelling: Never let the federal government perform tasks the private sector can perform better; engage and utilize experts from the private sector to complement talented career government officials; distribute accountability and decision rights as close to where the action is as possible; assume financial risks the private sector is unwilling to take; and, if one does not get it right the first time, learn and adapt quickly. On this last point, the first three to four weeks of vaccine administration in December 2020 and early January 2021 admittedly did not go as we had planned. We did not fully anticipate that 30% of health care workers would refuse the vaccine. That is why HHS Secretary Alex Azar and CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield, on Jan. 12, 2021, opened up vaccinations to a much broader swath of Americans at many more vaccination sites than originally recommended. Eight days later, we were vaccinating over 1.6 million Americans per day — a pace scarcely maintained by the Biden team.

If the Biden administration is ever going to lead rather than follow, it will need to alter its federal government-centered authoritarian impulses, assume financial risks the private sector will not, de-centralize the management of the COVID response from the West Wing to the experts who know what’s happening on the ground, and become comfortable with admitting when it is wrong and adapt quickly. To wit, it needs to follow in the footsteps of Operation Warp Speed, the most successful public-private partnership since World War II.

Paul Mango was the deputy chief of staff for policy at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from 2019-2021, serving as Secretary Alex Azar’s formal liaison to Operation Warp Speed. His forthcoming book is “Warp Speed: Inside the Operation That Beat COVID, the Critics, and the Odds” (Republic Book Publishers, March 15, 2022).

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/12/29/its_time_to_revive_the_principles_of_operation_warp_speed_146956.html