 If you look back at news reports and commentary at the time, you know, spring 2020, just when COVID started taking off, a lot of experts, public health experts, medical experts said, you know, the fastest we've ever invented a vaccine is four years. And many vaccines, you know, are never possible to be invented or take just much longer than four years. And so there were a few voices and some inside the Trump administration saying, let's set the goal of the year. And like, because this is a crisis and an emergency, let's really move quickly. And I think they were, you know, they really defied the odds and delivered that with the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines delivered in less than a year. And I think it's a really important initiative to learn from. It ultimately cost $18 billion, which at the height of the pandemic, the COVID lockdowns and cost to our economy and to our health, were costing $36 billion per day. So if operation warp speed just ended the pandemic, you know, 12 hours earlier, it paid for itself. And so it sounds expensive, but it has Alex Tabrock at George Mason University, economics professor, described as it may be the greatest return on investment of any government program in like 50 years. I want to pull up a little bit of data that you referenced earlier, Alec, which is the sort of pace of vaccination innovation over the years. This chart shows, it goes from 1880 to 2020 and shows the time from the introduction of disease to the licensing of a vaccine. And at the top there, we've got malaria, which this only goes to 2020. There actually is a malaria vaccine now. It's not indicated on this chart. But you can see that's a long time without a malaria vaccine. And then down at the bottom, you see that tiny sliver for the COVID-19 vaccine. That is just a remarkable visual there. Do you, is your vision that things are going to look much more like that now as the norm? Maybe not a year, but much closer to that than, say, this hepatitis vaccine that's halfway down the chart. Yeah. I think it's definitely, it's a question of political will, because we've definitely shown it as possible at this point. I don't think it'll be quite a year just because I think that's part of that is definitely due to the emergency environment. And when you're in normal times, it's harder to get consensus and coordination among the necessary stakeholders to move that quickly. But we can definitely do much faster than we have in the past. And I think this is where some people criticize Operation Warp Speed, but I think it's more of a defensive Operation Warp Speed to talk about investments in mRNA technology and the science of mRNA have been happening since the 1980s. And so through public and private investments, in that scientific evidence base, we were ready when the crisis struck. And so we'd already had an mRNA vaccine in animals. And this was the first one in humans. But then there were either decades of scientific literature and companies like Moderna that had not brought product to market yet, but had raised lots of money from private venture capital and from the government to prepare for future products in the market. And then when the emergency, the crisis happened, they were ready to try their hand at designing manufacturing a vaccine. And I think also people don't realize that Moderna and Pfizer and their partner BioNTech designed the vaccine in a weekend. Like once they had the genetic sequence for COVID-19, they designed it in less than two days. And then the rest of that process was safety and efficacy testing and preparing manufacturing capacity for the doses. But with modern biotechnology, we have a lot of opportunity to move more quickly into design really innovative biomedical products. I was just about to ask about the mRNA thing. I think that that's a really good point, because on one hand, we attribute an awful lot of success rightfully to Operation Warp Speed. But on the other hand, also for people who follow mRNA technology development, it was something that was in the works for a while. And this very much got it through the finish line and expedited development and certainly expedited administration of these vaccines. But it is also worth splitting hairs and saying, well, mRNA had been in the works for a while, so it wasn't totally starting from scratch. So I pulled this article, this opinion piece that you published with your co-writer, Ariel D'Souza, in The Washington Post saying, Biden's vaccine project needs to be more like Operation Warp Speed. And one of the things that you point to in kind of helping this $5 billion public-private partnership achieve its goals would be to speed up regulatory processes in a similar way as Operation Warp Speed did in both in developing, testing and distributing vaccines. And you mentioned the US Food and Drug Administration, for example, allowed clinical trial phases to be conducted concurrently. And so FDA trials, they have three phases. There's a safety phase. There's a testing phase. And then there's a kind of bigger final testing phase. And some of those were actually overlapping. And so getting into the regulatory component here is something that might be libertarians are perhaps more friendly to or an easier sell than the advanced purchase agreements. But for the non-libertarians out there, kind of overlapping safety trials with efficacy trials, that sounds kind of scary. How is that actually safe? Yeah, so I would just say that they weren't overlapped completely perfectly. So there still was some very early safety data before they moved to efficacy. So there's some overlap to save time, but not 100% overlap. And I think there's also a relative risk factor. I think usually the stronger case for the multi-phase thing is just it fails to get out of phase one or fails to get out of phase two. Then the companies and the government don't want to waste money on clinical trials, large phase three trials that aren't gonna go anywhere. And so given the emergency environment and the desire to move very quickly, having those phases run concurrently made a lot more sense. But I could see how it's not, doesn't make sense for all drugs and therapeutics going through the system to necessarily be structured that way in the future. It just made sense kind of in the crisis. And this is also where I think we have to keep tying it back to the voluntary aspect of all this, because if you are accelerating things and kind of bypassing the normal processes, seems to me that that makes it even more necessary to make this voluntary and not be using the power of the state, whether that's federal or local or state level to kind of push this onto people. It's one thing to have public health messaging and encourage people and try to sell the vaccines to people in an ethical, true way. But I think that's like, what I was gonna ask you is like, how far this can be pushed? Because I think that for that, one of the reforms that's been proposed by a lot of libertarians is to get the FDA out of the efficacy business altogether and just have it focused on safety or even make FDA certification altogether voluntary because there's this unseen cost to FDA regulation. We think of the FDA as like protecting and saving lives, but the unseen cost there is that there are life-saving drugs that are safe, that just get delayed for years and years. And in the meantime, people die. So you could imagine a system where you have FDA approval and then you have the non-FDA approved drugs that people can kind of voluntarily opt into. Does that sort of framework make any sense to you? Yeah, and before I comment on that framework, just one quick thing about another more aggressive thing we could have done that we did only the UK did, which is in terms of human challenge trials. So having volunteers sign up to be intentionally exposed to COVID-19 while they're participating in a clinical trial with some of those candidate vaccines. And I think, especially what we knew at the time, usually the case against human challenge trials is there's not a rescue therapy, then it's dangerous like someone could die. But at that point in time, late spring, early summer, we were getting indications I think that young, healthy people were very unlikely to die from COVID. And so I think, again, I just support human challenge trials in the principle of like people should be able to volunteer to take risks to protect others and protecting others by accelerating the development of safe and effective vaccines. We let people serve in the military, service police officers, firefighters. Can I ask a quick question about the human challenge trials? Is that, would that be like placebo controlled? Would some people be getting the placebo or is this everyone in the trial is actually getting the vaccine? Yeah, I think everyone in the trial is getting the vaccine and you're exposed, you're challenged with the virus. Right. Instead of what we normally do, we'd be waiting around to be exposed in the natural environment. Reasons Ron Bailey has written about this pretty extensively. I'm a huge fan of human challenge trials just because I think like, if we're going to fundamentally be libertarians and in favor of people's bodily autonomy, then I think it makes an awful lot of sense that we should allow, I don't know, I'm always a big fan of like Gonzo journalism, just personally, like I enjoy just like, the reason TV filmed me like getting tattooed for a piece on how pandemic policy hurt tattoo shops a few years ago. And there's something delightful about having yourself be the human guinea pig for fun, but it's even more delightful when you're the human guinea pig for medical advancement, right? Like it's odd to me that we would prevent people from voluntarily choosing to do that if they're 25 or 30 and super healthy and feeling comfortable with the risks. Definitely. And then just to get back to your framework question, Zach, I think it's an important one. I think at the very least I support moving away from the current binary system we're in where a drug is either declared safe and effective and pretty much it's mandatory for public health insurers and a lot of private insurers to purchase the drug if a doctor prescribes it or it's just completely illegal and no one can take it. Like that binary system is untenable in the long run and yeah, it leads to a lot of the negative outcomes that you mentioned. And so having more of a tiered system where something that we suspect is dangerous, definitely illegal, no one can produce it or take it. And then moving up to things that we know are safe but it's unclear if they're effective. We shouldn't mandate that Medicare or Medicaid buy that for everyone if there's no evidence that it's effective or more cost effective than other alternatives currently available. And then you can move up that tier given the evidence we have in terms of effectiveness and cost to ultimately public health insurers being required to pay for something. And I think just the current binary system is kind of outdated at this point. Like I feel like both Zach and I are in that category of like, and correct me if I'm speaking out of turn Zach but like super interested in scientific innovation and doing as much as possible and allowing everybody to be a human getting pig if they want to, like I love that type of thing. But then so adamantly opposed to any coercion that we saw like with the way these vaccine mandates were handed down. And it's like, it's funny because it seems like so frequently the Venn diagram overlap of those two types of people, it's really small. Like sometimes it feels like it's just me and Zach hanging out over there in that space. I'm like a few other colleagues that reason. But it's funny, it's like there's this odd, almost like reflexive anti-tech innovation type strain that you see from some of the people who were rightfully pissed off about pandemic policy. And that really bothers me watching that play out. Yeah, and the only thing I would add is, to go back to this model here, we're about to talk about things like purchase, purchase guarantees and advanced market commitments. That's where I'm a little bit torn. Like is that, is it as separable as we want it to be? Because if you are saying, you know, part of this model was that the government guaranteed we're gonna buy X many doses of this vaccine or, you know, whether it works or not, just to like guarantee you at least give it a shot. And if you do make it successful, we're gonna purchase this many doses. I worry, the thing about that arrangement that concerns me is then it creates sort of sunk cost for the government. And then there's an incentive to push it out to as many people as possible, even if not everybody needs it or wants it. And, you know, it's hard to prove that that's exactly what happened, but that looks kind of like what happened the way it was so aggressively pushed and mandated by OSHA in the workplace, which I think was total overreach. I'm glad the Supreme Court, you know, knocked that one down. But is that a danger? Because, you know, you mentioned a couple different ways to solve, quote unquote, market failures. There's the, these purchase guarantees. And then there's things like prizes, which are separate from purchase guarantees. The prizes, that seems more, that's something that feels less problematic to me. The purchase agreements feel like it comes with a lot of potential baggage. But what do you think? Yeah, so just to first kind of define some of these terms explained for the audience, by market failures, we just mean things, the free market, you know, uninfluenced by the government would fail to deliver on its own. And usually that's due to a negative externality of some kind. And so we've been talking, I can reference back what I said earlier about like there's a market failure when it comes to pandemics because it's so unclear when an outbreak turns into an epidemic, turns into a pandemic. When is this going to end? And private companies don't have unlimited capital and unlimited liquidity in terms of like, oh, we can just, you know, waste a lot of money on a building out manufacturing capacity on the chance that this thing continues for two to three years. And there's demand for billions of doses. And so they're very hesitant to commit early to lots of investment in the development of the R&D process and into the manufacturing process. And so I think there's a clear market failure here where given, I think to your point about, you know, government waste or we're being committed here, I think just keeping the magnitudes in mind is so important of like ultimately operational speed cost $18 billion. But again, like it was costing tens of billions of dollars per day to the US economy in terms of health and economic costs. And so even if, I know there would have been a political problem if it ended up being quote unquote wasted, but the math is just so overwhelmingly in favor of doing programs like these that I think it's worth the investment. And another idea, I think a clear market failure is when it comes to climate and pollution issues, companies don't internalize the cost of CO2 emissions. And that's why I gave the carbon dioxide removal example of seems like a promising technology that's just currently really expensive. But if we think that, you know, this is something worth investing in, this is one way to do it where the government is paying for performance. So the government's only on the hook if the private industry, private sector delivers on the product that the government defined and it's contract agreement. So I think that's why it's can be really promising. Hey, thanks for watching that excerpt from our conversation with Alec Staff 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.