A LONG SHOT
At least they got the name right. “OperationWarpSpeed” is the Trump Administration’s code name (from the science fiction series Star Trek) for the colossal government-corporate partnership, with bottomless public funding and satellites across the globe, that boldly aims to be able to inject every person on the planet with a coronavirus pandemic vaccine at breakneck speed.
“That means big and it means fast,”Trump said, launching Warp Speed in April with Dr Anthony Fauci, head of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, standing at his side, wearing a face mask and adjusting his tie. “A massive scientific, industrial and logistical endeavor unlike anything our country has seen since the Manhattan Project.”
The Manhattan Project was the secret government program that developed the atom bomb, which killed nearly a quarter of a million Japanese civilians. The Warp Speed bomb is supposed to rain down at least 300 million doses of injectable COVID-19 vaccines by January 2021. But that is just the beginning.
“We need to make billions of doses, we need to get them out to every part of the world, and we need all of this to happen as quickly as possible,” Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates of the eponymous Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation wrote April 30.
“Our foundation is the biggest funder of vaccines in the world, and this effort dwarfs anything we’ve ever worked on before. It’s going to require a global cooperative effort like the world has never seen,” Gates said. “But I know it’ll get done. There’s simply no alternative.”
It’s been hard to guess from what he says whether Trump will allow for COVID vaccine mandates or not, but Gates is suggesting there will be little choice in the matter for the entire world population of seven-plus billion because, in his view, “in order to stop the pandemic, we need to make the vaccine available to almost every person on the planet.”
It’s a dream come true for drug company execs. Operation Warp Speed is funneling billions of dollars to pharmaceutical companies big and small for COVID-19 vaccine research and development. It’s hustling vaccine candidates through administrative red tape and over licensing hurdles, fast-tracking clinical trials and financing the scale-up production and distribution of vaccines before there
