Covid-19 Vaccine Push Lacks a Key Ingredient: Trust
Operation Warp Speed is pursuing a worthy goal, but it still operates in the shadows.
Vaccine trials are underway.
Photographer: Joe Raedle/Getty ImagesIn the war against the coronavirus, only one weapon has the potential to ease the conflict quickly: a vaccine. With about 164,000 Americans dead from Covid-19, the economy battered and communities forced into recurring lockdowns, the federal government has made a $10 billion wager that public funds and expertise wedded to private research and production can jump-start a vaccine’s arrival — possibly by early next year.
Operation Warp Speed, launched in April, is administered by the Department of Health and Human Services, the Biomedical Advance Research and Development Authority, and the Department of Defense, along with several other federal agencies. A handful of pharmaceutical companies, including AstraZeneca Plc, GlaxoSmithKline Plc, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna Inc., Novavax Inc., Pfizer Inc. and Sanofi SA, have received the lion’s share of the federal funding.