Operation Warp Speed's goal is to produce and deliver 300 million doses of safe and effective vaccines with the initial doses available by January 2021, as part of a broader strategy to accelerate the development, manufacturing, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics (collectively known as countermeasures).
The fine OWS folks narrowed the competition down to 14, from which they were going to select 7 finalists.
On June 3rd, they announced their 5 finalists. What happened to 7? There were not 7 in the 14 that were good enough.
The 5 finalists included Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and Merck. At that point, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and the Oxford-AstraZeneca group had already received billions (combined) from the US government. In theory, all 5 were then to get access to more.
As for who said it couldn't be done, pretty much everybody with any experience in vaccine development said it couldn't be done - both in and out of government. The target of early 2021 to distribute a vaccine was seen as overly optimistic. I was certainly one of those voices, but only because the scientists around the world, including at these companies, were skeptical.
The RNA delivery mechanism certainly speeded things up for the first two out of the shoot, but even the more traditional approaches have been coming along faster than anybody would have guessed (or did guess)!
I don't know how much OWS changed things. I am pretty sure that had the US played with the international coalition, the results would have been more similar than not.
But having been sufficiently wrong on the speed, my being sure of
anything with regard to the creation of these vaccines is pretty suspect.
That said, the delivery issues seem explicitly a product of the OWS team and/or the Trump administration and I am very curious to know what went wrong - and if it was intentional to slow it down.
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