You’d be hard-pressed to find many public health experts who have positive things to say about Donald Trump’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States. Alongside his numerous policy failures, one Cornell University study found that he was the biggest source of Covid-19 misinformation. But if there’s one redeeming feature to Trump’s pandemic record, it has to be his leadership on Operation Warp Speed – a massive, government-funded initiative that played a pivotal role in fast-tracking Covid-19 vaccines.
“Operation Warp Speed stands as one of the most remarkable scientific and humanitarian achievements of the past half-century,” the former US surgeon general Jerome Adams said. It directed billions of dollars into vaccine development and manufacturing, particularly into the mRNA platform, which became the backbone of the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines.
Vaccines work by preparing the body’s immune system to identify and successfully attack foreign agents entering the body. Traditional vaccines use weakened or inactivated viruses to offer a baby version for the body to fight and learn from. These vaccines are often produced by growing the virus in hen’s eggs, which means production is slow and can take months to scale up. In contrast, the mRNA platform functions like a plug-and-play video game console: you just “plug in” the genetic code of a particular virus or pathogen. The vaccine provides instructions to our bodies to make parts of the virus in our own cells, which then prompts an immune response.
The process of creating and manufacturing these vaccines is much faster and more flexible than their traditional counterparts. This is especially important for a disease such as avian flu, which has an up to 100% mortality rate in chickens. But despite the speed in which they come together, there is still a considerable time-lag before mass rollout to allow for clinical trials to ensure human safety, test for side-effects and figure out optimal dosing. During the Covid pandemic, the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines were created within weeks of research teams receiving the genetic sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 from China in January 2020. What took a year was the testing and regulatory approval processes to ensure there was trust in their safety.
Given Trump’s success with Operation Warp Speed, it’s particularly bizarre that Robert F Kennedy Jr, his health and human services secretary, has announced $500m in cuts to the mRNA vaccine…
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