The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
VACCINE PROSPECTS
Ex-pharma exec Moncef Slaoui says he’s unfazed by president’s timeline.
Getting a vaccine by the end of the year is a “credible objective” but will not be easy, the leader of the government’s program says.
The former pharmaceutical executive picked this week to lead a crash program to develop a coronavirus vaccine says that developing and mass-producing a successful vaccine by January is a “credible objective” but acknowledged it would be difficult.
Moncef Slaoui, a former chairman of vaccines at GlaxoSmithKline who is heading the program, conceded in an interview that even the time frame repeatedly cited by Dr. Anthony Fauci as necessary for developing the vaccine, which President Donald Trump has rejected, would still outpace what many scientists believe is possible.
“Frankly, 12-18 months is already a very aggressive timeline,” Slaoui said. “I don’t think Dr. Fauci was wrong.”
But Slaoui said he was undaunted by the president’s goal.
“I would not have committed unless I thought it was achievable,” Slaoui said, adding that he told the president that when he met with him for the first time Wednesday at the White House and Trump asked if the goal was realistic.
The president announced the effort, which he called Operation Warp Speed, with the goal of having 300 million doses of a vaccine available by January, a number that would likely be needed to halt the spread of the pathogen, an unheard-of timeline to develop, test and produce a vaccine on such a scale.
The Warp Speed project has been described by administration officials as an organizing mechanism for an already fierce race to find a vaccine, one that involves big pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and a handful of government agencies.
Slaoui will serve as the chief adviser on the effort, and Gen. Gustave F. Perna, a four-star general who is in charge of the Army’s readiness as head of the Army Materiel Command, will be the chief operating officer.
Their appointments were formally announced at the White House on Friday.
Slaoui and Perna met for the first time Wednesday, and they have been in frequent contact since then, the general said in a separate interview. They will have offices in the Department of Health and Human Services, where the secretary, Alex Azar, helped devise the program at Trump’s request.
Slaoui said hediscussed the job with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, who had been searching for a so-called czar for therapeutics and vaccine development, and Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator.
Perna, who runs the Army’s complex supply chain, said that he was asked by Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to help run the manufacturing logistics related to the vaccine development. Beyond the vaccine itself, there are also substantial challenges in ensuring adequate capacity of the supplies needed to distribute and administer it, starting with the special glass in which vaccine doses are transported.
Most questions about how the program will work remain unanswered, including the cost of it, whether the Defense Production Act will be used to impel companies to produce a vaccine developed by a different firm or whether particular groups may get access to the initial doses of a vaccine.
But public health experts said that the program was perhaps the only way to keep the United States on a brisk timeline in a health crisis as complex as the coronavirus pandemic.
“There may be no other way to do this other than through the government,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “Vaccine development has been plagued with economic difficulties that have gotten vaccine manufacturers out of the business.”