Kushner and Selective Others: Find CoVID-19 Vaccine at "Warp Speed" This Year or Sooner

Latest Trump Project: I want virus vaccine ASAP

(Red Tape: How Appropriate)

Kushner & former Head of Glaxo-Smith-Kline Pharm @ Helm

(What could possibly go wrong)

A startling, troublesome, and also maybe a promising story from Bloomberg in part:

The Trump administration is organizing a Manhattan Project-style effort to drastically cut the time needed to develop a coronavirus vaccine, with a goal of making enough doses for most Americans by year’s end.

Called “Operation Warp Speed,” the program will pull together private pharmaceutical companies, government agencies, and the military to try to cut the development time for a vaccine by as much as eight months, according to two people familiar with the matter. 

As part of the arrangement, taxpayers will shoulder much of the financial risk that vaccine candidates may fail, instead of drug companies.

The project’s goal is to have 300 million doses of vaccine available by January, according to one administration official. 

Note: There is no precedent for such rapid development of a vaccine.

Trump’s top medical advisers, led by the infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, have repeatedly said that a coronavirus vaccine won’t be ready for 12 to 18 months at best. Until then, White House guidelines envision some economically damaging social-distancing practices maintained even as the U.S. begins to resume a more normal social and business life.

Last month, Trump directed HHS Secretary Alex Azar to speed development of a vaccine, and administration officials have been meeting on the effort for three to four weeks, one of the people said. A meeting on the project was then scheduled at the White House.

The people familiar with the project and the administration officials asked not to be identified because it hasn’t yet been publicly announced.

A spokesman for HHS, Michael Caputo, said the president refused to accept the timeline for standard vaccine development and encouraged a breakthrough process (at warp speed).

Now this important update all that above: A veteran epidemiologist who helped deal with the polio outbreak in the 1950’s warns that rushing a vaccine for political purposes could backfire horrifically.

In his letter to the Los Angeles Times, Dr. Lauri Thrupp drew upon his experience working for the Centers for Disease Control to urge caution in rushing to produce a COVID-19 vaccine, saying:  “Research showed that each lot of [polio] vaccine required sophisticated testing to ensure that no live virus remained. This caveat was not adequately conveyed to the several pharmaceutical companies rushing to produce the vaccine… Cutter Laboratories, inexperienced in viral research, failed to detect live virus in multiple lots. The resulting thousands of infections and several deaths is called the Cutter Incident.”

Dr. Thrupp concludes by writing that the Trump administration risks making a deadly error if it pushes out a flawed vaccine that ends up actually giving people COVID-19, adding: “In the Warp Speed push for a COVID-19 vaccine, (1) the Trump administration’s anti-science policies, (2) its budget cuts to key agencies, (3) its silencing of scientists like Dr. Rick Bright, and (4) its initial suppression of the CDC’s safe opening guidelines are dangerous to the public’s health not only in America, but worldwide.”

My 2 cents: Based on this very detailed and extensive article (Washington Post) about Jared Kushner many failures, e.g., failed to get Middle East peace, failed to get medical personnel’s much-needed PPE and ventilators out quickly that now he has been tasked with accelerating a CoVID-19 vaccine. That too, is based on his getting a job for which he has no qualifications and zero expertise whatsoever. 

Most recently, Kushner declared the administration’s coronavirus response a great success story, a mind-boggling assertion that raises the question of what, if anything, Kushner thinks failure looks like. 

Kushner, a lot like Trump, also continues to bash the actual experts, 

dispute their assessments, and imply that they, not he or Trump, are the amateurs, and that he and Trump are here to clean up their mess – just as Trump taught him how to act and talk. 

This new project is named Operation Warp Speed (described above) and it is ostensibly a descriptor of his ambition to get a vaccine to market quickly not like the medical-vaccine experts say could take 12-18 months – which in true Trump and Kushner style is to not trust, believe, or cast aside for their own “gut feeling.” 

But if it proceeds the way Kushner’s shadow task force has so far, it may simply describe the velocity with which the task force’s efforts slam into logistical walls because the driver is an amateur who shouldn’t have the keys to begin with. 

Then if that happens, expect it to be cast as a spectacular success (Kushner’s words for virus successes to date), then they will say that “…maybe we never needed a vaccine because herd immunity was the strategy all along.” 

Then Kushner will be given even more responsibility — because in this administration’s perverse calculus, he’s racked up enough failures to finally earn more missions. 

Thanks for stopping by.