Credit Trump for vaccine; best way to unite country

WASHINGTON — Joe Biden promised in his victory speech to “unite us here at home” and told Trump supporters that he wanted to “put away the harsh rhetoric, lower the temperature [and] see each other again.” There’s one simple way he could show he is serious: Give President Donald Trump credit for the stunning success of Operation Warp Speed.

On Monday, the first Americans were vaccinated against SARS- CoV-2. This is the greatest public health achievement in history.

Until now, the record for the fastest vaccine development was four years. Operation Warp

Speed did it in nine months.

Critics mocked Trump when he pledged a vaccine by the end of the year. After the president announced in May a Manhattan Project-style effort to develop, manufacture and distribute “a proven coronavirus vaccine … hopefully by the end of the year,” MSNBC’s Brian Williams interviewed one expert who assured him that timeline was “preposterous” and that Trump was a “POTUS in Wonderland.” Another expert told Bloomberg News that it would be “virtually impossible,” while an NBC News “fact check” declared that “experts say that the development, testing and production of a vaccine for the public is still at least 12 to 18 months off, and that anything less would be a medical miracle.”

Well, we got our miracle. How? The genius of Operation Warp Speed was the decision to run the vaccine development process in parallel rather than sequentially. The Trump administration invested about $10 billion in eight vaccine candidates — purchasing hundreds of millions of doses of vaccines before they were proved, clearing away regulatory hurdles, and putting a four-star general, Gustave Perna, in charge of logistics and distribution.

The administration pledged $1.95 billion for the purchase and nationwide distribution of 100 million doses of Pfizer’s vaccine, which began this week. It also provided $955 million to support the development of Moderna’s vaccine — which will likely receive FDA emergency approval this week — and another to $1.5 billion to support large-scale manufacturing and distribution of the vaccine. It also pledged to purchase 100 million vaccine doses each from AstraZeneca ($1.2 billion), Johnson & Johnson

($1.46 billion), and Novavax ($1.6 billion) — all of which are in final, Phase 3 clinical trials.

This strategy was not without risks — the government provided about $2 billion to Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline for

100 million doses of their vaccine, which recently suffered setbacks. But because the administration spent billions to buy vaccines before the clinical trials were over, it is now able to distribute upward of half a billion doses of vaccine over the coming months — first to the most vulnerable Americans, and eventually to all. As Moncef Slaoui, chief science adviser to Operation Warp Speed, explained to me in an interview, “Between the first quarter and the second quarter of 2021, the most at-risk populations will have been, I hope, immunized.” This, he said, “should decrease dramatically the burden of this disease on society in general, because … most of the burden of the disease is on a highrisk population.” By next summer, the worst of the pandemic should be over.

In addition to vaccines, Operation Warp Speed simultaneously invested in revolutionary COVID-19 treatments — including Regeneron’s and Eli Lilly’s monoclonal antibody therapeutics — that have been shown to help reduce the severity of disease. While the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have proved about 95% effective, these antibody treatments can provide a backup for Americans who still fall ill with COVID-19.

Nothing like this has ever happened in the history of modern medicine. As my American Enterprise Institute colleague, former FDA chief Scott Gottlieb, told me, “We’ve never really had this level of development work undertaken over such a short period of time with so many successes. This is a singular achievement. I can’t think of any historic proxy.”

So why has Biden refused to acknowledge it? On Monday night, in a speech hailing his electoral college victory, he ended by noting that we had just passed a “grim milestone” of 300,000 COVID deaths. But he said nothing about the historic vaccinations that were administered that same day. It was like ignoring the moon landing.

Biden has criticized Trump’s pandemic response failures, so why not give the president credit for this unadulterated success? Because that would mean acknowledging that, for all Trump’s flaws in managing the pandemic, he is also responsible for ending it. And Biden is saving that credit for himself.

Perhaps, given Trump’s terrible behavior, Biden is in no mood to praise the president. But it’s not about Trump; it’s about Biden delivering on his promise to reach out to his opponent’s supporters and bring Americans together. If he truly wants to unite the country, he should give credit where credit is due — and pledge to continue Operation Warp Speed.