The Homa Files

Most important: What did he do about it?
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In a prior post, we channeled an op-ed authored by members of a team that wrote a September 2019 White House report … and then we drilled down on the report’s details.

The report’s fundamental conclusions:

• Large-scale, immediate immunization is the most effective way to control the spread of pandemic viruses
• The current government-centric approach to vaccine research,  development and deployment is far too slow.
• To provide adequate risk mitigation for pandemics, public-private partnerships are needed to speed up the development and deployment of vaccines.

So, how did the Trump respond to the report?

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According to the authors of the aforementioned WSJ op-ed …

“The administration was well aware of the threat of a pandemic before the novel coronavirus emerged … and there was “immediate presidential action” to implement the reports recommendations.

Specifically, they report:

On Sept. 19, a few days after the CEA issued its report, the president signed Executive Order 13887.

The essence of the Executive Order:

It is the policy of the United States to modernize the domestic virus vaccine enterprise to be highly responsive, flexible, scalable, and more effective at preventing the spread of viruses.

This is a public health and national security priority, as viruses have the potential to significantly harm the United States and our interests, including through large-scale illness and death, disruption to military operations, and damage to the economy.

The EO created several initiatives to modernize vaccine production, including “incentives for the development and production of vaccines by private manufacturers and public-private partnerships.”

In other words, the September 2019 White House report and the EO that quickly followed laid the groundwork for Operation Warp Speed — perhaps, the most critical component of the coronavirus response, hastening the development and launch of therapeutic drugs and vaccines.

More specifically …

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Operation Warp Speed (OWS)

Directly from the HHS site:

Goal: Operation Warp Speed (OWS) aims to deliver 300 million doses of a safe, effective vaccine for COVID-19 by January 2021.

Approach: To accelerate development while maintaining standards for safety and efficacy, OWS has been selecting the most promising development candidates and providing coordinated government support.

Rather than eliminating steps from traditional development timelines, steps will proceed simultaneously, such as starting manufacturing of the vaccine at industrial scale well before the demonstration of vaccine efficacy and safety as happens normally. This increases the financial risk, but not the product risk.

The federal government is making investments in the necessary manufacturing capacity at its own risk, giving firms confidence that they can invest aggressively in development and allowing faster distribution of an eventual vaccine.

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Bottom line: “Flattening the Curve” was intended to slow the spread of the virus to avoid blowing past hospital capacity while awaiting a virus-blasting vaccine.

Trump placed a big bet on Operation Warp Speed … and the clock is ticking.

This entry was posted on September 4, 2020 at 10:00 am and is filed under Coronavirus - Covid 19. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.