 For Democrats, they're very reticent to give the Trump administration credit for anything. Just do the traditional partisan politics. And then for Republicans, obviously, everyone knows vaccines are highly controversial and divisive within the Republican Party. And so we're seeing presidential candidates in the next election kind of running away from this huge success. If you flash back to Trump introducing this concept, we've pulled a clip from 2020 when he first was rolling out Operation Warp Speed, which will play in just a second. The reaction to that was quite interesting and telling from both sides. And things have kind of flipped back and forth multiple times, but let's have Adam, our producer here, play that clip and then talk about that issue for just a second. It appears to be employing the promise of a vaccine as part of his reelection strategy. Today, he took three opportunities to suggest that we could even see a vaccine by election day. So what's the earliest we could see that a vaccine? Sooner than the end of the year. Could be much sooner. Sooner than November 3rd? Oh, I think in some cases, yes, possible before, but right around that time. I believe we'll have the vaccine before the end of the year, certainly, but around that date, yes, I think so. It wouldn't hurt, it wouldn't hurt, but I'm not doing that. I'm doing it not for the election. I want it fast because I want to save a lot of lives. Under Operation Warp Speed, two vaccines are already in the final stage of clinical trials and we'll have a vaccine very soon, I hope, long before the end of the year. Dr. Anthony Fauci weighed in on that with his own reality check. We're trying very hard to ultimately get a vaccine that might be available by the end of the year or the beginning of 2021, but that's many months away. So what strikes me about that, first of all, is Fauci seemed to be pretty much cautiously agreeing with Trump on the timeline, despite how Brian Williams was characterizing at the time. And secondly, it's a reminder that the hesitancy back then was coming often from the political left. We've got a tweet here from Eric Topol, a well-known Twitter MD who at the time was stumping and here in this tweet, he's actually kind of bragging about the fact that his efforts delayed the authorization of the vaccines until after the presidential election. This was right in the midst of a major COVID wave. So who knows how many lives that potentially cost, but I am curious from your perspective, as someone who's trying to put together this kind of transpartisan coalition to look at issues of technological progress or medical progress, what are some of the strategies you're using to try to overcome that kind of partisanship? Yeah, I like that you use that phrase transpartisan coalition because that's a term we like to use a lot here internally within our organization. I think for some of your audience, that might be a new term, they've obviously heard of bipartisan or nonpartisan. The way we think of transpartisan by contrast is that if bipartisanship is a messy compromise where one side gets half of what they want, other side gets half of what they want, then everyone kind of walks away dissatisfied with the bipartisan compromise. A transpartisan deal would be if Republicans and Democrats support the same policy but for different reasons. And so I think Operation Warp Speed is a great example of in theory, and not practice is a different, but in theory it has a lot to offer each party. So Democrats like to say they're pro-science, pro-public health, they're pro-masking. I know all the things that go along in that bucket. And Operation Warp Speed delivered these amazing biomedical innovations very, very quickly. And then for Republicans, there's often a concern every year around wasting taxpayer money. So whenever the government has a multi-billion dollar big public spending program, there's skepticism that like the government will get a return on its investment or it's worthwhile. And I think some of the tools they use in Operation Warp Speed could be used to get in part of their programs. And the key is that you're paying for performance. So the government said, we're gonna do pre-purchase contracts with all these companies that participated in the program. And if they deliver, invent a safe and effective vaccine approved by the FDA, then we'll purchase hundreds of millions of doses from the company. But if the company can't deliver on its end, then the government does not spend the money. And so I think that kind of public-private partnership that protects taxpayer money should be highly appealing to Republicans. And then also talking about the feasible alternative at that point in time if you don't get the vaccines quickly is a continued quasi-lockdown in much of the country. And so what's the more freedom-oriented, liberty-oriented thing to do? It's to get the vaccines out quicker as opposed to more draconian measures that would need to happen in a counterfactual scenario. But why did government need to guarantee demand in that manner? Yeah, so again, I think this is where like there's a hindsight situation where we know at this point in time that there were lots of variants that the pandemic ended up dragging on for two to three years, even post when the vaccines were available. We can go on more into like promises around transmission and things like that with the vaccines. But I think it's useful to look at previous epidemics around the world. And this is what obviously vaccine manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies do. There are previous SARS outbreaks in East Asia that seemed like they might become global pandemics but ultimately didn't. And so if you were a vaccine manufacturer, in particular, building capacity of like, are we gonna actually start winding up manufacturing capacity to deliver hundreds of millions and ultimately billions of doses of vaccine? You're in a really wait and see cautious scenario. You wouldn't wanna sink too much money into fixed investments that ultimately there might be close to zero demand for the vaccine. And so the government is de-risking that. They're guaranteeing demand for the product so long as you meet the performance metrics in terms of it's safe, it's effective as a term by the FDA. That could have been a world we lived in where the pandemic did peter out for other reasons and they still invented safe and effective vaccines. And then we bought a lot of doses we couldn't use. But that's the kind of, I think, preparation you need to have for the worst case scenario. And we were in a bad scenario where a pandemic just kept going. We wanna go through each individual components of operation warp speed just to understand exactly how it works and exactly what lessons we wanna learn. But I think it's kind of important to address like the, you know, what the vaccine did and didn't deliver, you know, what we all kind of think about that because that is partially how you judge whether it was a success, whether it, you know, what level of protection did it deliver? What level of risk did it bring with it? And, you know, just from our previous conversation, I think where Liz and I are both kind of coming from and you can chime in here, Liz, if you want to is that, you know, vaccines were on net, imperfect and certainly far from perfectly introduced but overall a lifesaver, a net lifesaver. And we're both keenly aware on the heels of some recent work that we put out that a certain segment of our audience strongly disagrees with that. But I do take it as extremely likely at this point that the vaccines on that saved a lot of lives which you can see just by observing the gap between vaccinated and unvaccinated deaths per capita. Is there anything else you wanna say on that point, Alec or Liz, before we move forward? Yeah, I'll just add there that, yeah, I think that the data we have is extremely strong that the vaccines save lives on net. But yeah, it's not to say that the operation warp speed or the messaging from public health officials following the invention of the vaccines was perfect. And I think the key mistake they made in terms of communication was, and again, it's well intentioned they wanted to encourage people to get the vaccine because they wanted to save lives and hopefully end the pandemic was they made claims about the vaccines effect on transmission of the virus from person to person that I think ultimately did not hold up in real world settings. That's because the clinical trials weren't designed to test the effect on transmissibility. And but the vaccine, the clinical trials were designed to precisely measure effects on severe outcomes in terms of hospitalization and death. And those outcomes mostly did hold up in real world effects. And so talking about like 90% reductions in severe disease and death. And that's a huge benefit, but I think it's understandable if people were promised like, hey, get this vaccine you're gonna protect your friends and family you're not gonna infect them. And also you won't die yourself. That transmissibility part I think they didn't deliver on and they shouldn't have made that claim in the first place because they didn't have the evidence. So that was the kind of messaging error from the CDC and the public health establishment more so than some sort of failure of operation warp speed. Exactly, yeah. But I think they're also not so separable just because operation warp speed was an interagency effort. All those officials were also being asked all the time to comment on these particular things. And so we held an event last fall with the original operation warp speed team. That's one of the things that Secretary Azar said he wishes they would done differently is they would have handled communications differently. He didn't say anything particular about operations or how the contracts were written but it was around how they were communicating with the public. I struggle with this a lot because it seems like so many pandemic era health authorities are very sort of like late with their apologies and then very imprecise in it. And it's like, well, I would actually have preferred not to have been nobly lied to and a little bit more of a robust atoning for such sins and learning from those mistakes. And ideally some of those people being out of jobs would probably leave a better taste in my mouth. The other thing that I think about here because I'm very grateful for vaccines being administered to the 70 and 80 year olds in my life. But the other thing that I keep coming back to is like was there really a reason for like New York City where I live to force children to be vaccinated in order to like go dine inside in restaurants in the winter with their families just given the what we know about transmission and then also given the mortality risk to six year olds and seven year olds that just seemed totally unjustifiable to me. But of course this was this patchwork of federal government policy and media pressure and then lots and lots of localities and states making their own decisions on these things. And New York was a particularly dumb and bad place surrounding a lot of this. I do want to go into a few more specifics though. So like what were the specific components of Operation Warp Speed? You guys identify like a few different prongs. Basically the thing that I'm really curious about in general, which you mind describing for our audience solving market failures, using market-shaped mechanisms what exactly are those? What do those actually mean? What did they look like in this case? For sure. And just one quick comment on what you said about the, I think this patchwork thing is so important. This is where again, I would just separate what IFP works on and kind of our mission from other really controversial, tricky public policy questions that are gonna be handled in different states and cities across the country. Which is we think there should at least be agreement that it's really good to quickly invent a safe and effective vaccine. And then that's outside of our wheelhouse in terms of what's the best policy in New York City? What are the values and decisions that go into regulations around access to public spaces? Those are really important questions other people can kind of decide. But I think what we shouldn't do is let that latter conversation affect whether we design government programs to work with private industry that invented vaccine in the first place. Hey, thanks for watching that excerpt from our conversation with Alex. Stop of the Institute for Progress about Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration plan to accelerate development of COVID-19 vaccines. If you liked it, you can watch the full interview right here or another clip right here.