Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Carol Masser, and this week's cover story is
Speaker 1: about Operation Warp Speed and calling the search for a vaccine.
Speaker 1: Operation warp Speed, which is of course the federal government's
Speaker 1: mission to accelerate development of a COVID nineteen vaccine. Well,
Speaker 1: it hasn't always engendered confidence. The name comes from Star Trek,
Speaker 1: and Trek eas know that when a spaceship travels at
Speaker 1: a high warp factor, well things can go wrong. And yet,
Speaker 1: amid the horrors of the pandemic and America's mishandling of
Speaker 1: the crisis, Operation Warp Speed is looking like a rare
Speaker 1: bright spot for the United States. So far, Operation Warp
Speaker 1: Speed has awarded more than twelve billion dollars in vaccine
Speaker 1: related contracts and has an overall budget of as much
Speaker 1: as eighteen billion dollars, all of which may end up
Speaker 1: looking like a bargain if it helps end the pandemic,
Speaker 1: and there's a chance that may happen relatively soon. You
Speaker 1: wouldn't bank your future on someone you don't know. Financial
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Speaker 1: it comes, amid the horrors of the pandemic and America's
Speaker 1: mishandling of it, some good news. Operation Warp Speed is
Speaker 1: likely to produce a vaccine zoon by Stephanie Baker and
Speaker 1: Cynthia Coon's On a late August day, in an industrial
Speaker 1: corner of Baltimore that had been mostly silenced by the pandemic,
Speaker 1: a red brick manufacturing plant was buzzing with activity. Deep
Speaker 1: in the building, in a zone called Area three, the
Speaker 1: stainless steel shell of a bioreactor lay on its side,
Speaker 1: Having just arrived from Massachusetts. Employees had begun the task
Speaker 1: of making the bioreactor operational. Within weeks, it would be
Speaker 1: the center of a production line for coronavirus vaccines. When
Speaker 1: the owner of the plant, Emergent BioSolutions, ordered the bioreactor,
Speaker 1: one supplier said some critical parts wouldn't arrive until November
Speaker 1: or December, and so Emergent enlisted the help of Operation
Speaker 1: Warp Speed. The federal government's mission to accelerate development of
Speaker 1: a COVID nineteen vaccine officials working with OWS, a couple
Speaker 1: of whom are embedded with Emergent called the supplier to
Speaker 1: say the order couldn't wait, throwing the weight of the
Speaker 1: government behind the request. It's almost like having that bat signal,
Speaker 1: says Sayed Hussein, who heads the company's contract manufacturing business.
Speaker 1: They've been a great partner for US. Emergent might be
Speaker 1: the ultimate operation warp speed company. In June, it secured
Speaker 1: a six hundred and twenty eight million dollar no bid
Speaker 1: contract to produce vaccines and therapeutics, one of the biggest
Speaker 1: allocations of OWS funding outside of the pharmaceutical companies actually
Speaker 1: developing the vaccines. It subsequently signed two hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: one million dollars in contracts to make doses for astra Zenica,
Speaker 1: and then a four hundred and eighty million dollar contract
Speaker 1: with Jensen Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of Johnson and Johnson. Those
Speaker 1: companies are themselves Elves recipients of billion dollar plus OWS awards.
Speaker 1: Earlier in the year, Emergent produced vaccines for trials by
Speaker 1: the biotechnology company Novavax, which subsequently received one point six
Speaker 1: billion dollars from OWS. Emergent is in business with three
Speaker 1: of the six vaccine makers. OWS is known to have
Speaker 1: backed Over the past decade, Emergent turned itself into a business.
Speaker 1: The US government couldn't live without, the sole producer of
Speaker 1: approved anthrax and single dose smallpox vaccines stockpiled for emergencies.
Speaker 1: When the novel coronavirus hit earlier this year and the
Speaker 1: US government went hunting for surge capacity to make vaccines,
Speaker 1: it turned to Emergent. This was actually a kind of
Speaker 1: global race to secure manufacturing capacity, says Paul Mango, Deputy
Speaker 1: chief of Staff for Policy at the Department of Health
Speaker 1: and Human Services and a key figure at OWS. We
Speaker 1: knew we would need an enormous amount of manufacturing capacity
Speaker 1: to get this done, hundreds of millions of doses in
Speaker 1: a time that has never been done in history. There
Speaker 1: wasn't a lot of idle manufacturing capacity laying around in
Speaker 1: the US. Operation warp Speed isn't an agency as such,
Speaker 1: but rather a mechanism to coordinate among private companies and
Speaker 1: an array of US government bodies, the Department of Defense HHS,
Speaker 1: the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control
Speaker 1: and Prevention, and beyond. More than six hundred people in
Speaker 1: HHS and ninety people from the d o D are involved.
Speaker 1: It's a coordination activity that helps to cut through the
Speaker 1: bureaucracy faster, says Paul Stoffel's chief scientific officer at Johnson
Speaker 1: and Johnson. O WS has awarded more than twelve billion
Speaker 1: dollars in vaccine related contracts and has an overall budget
Speaker 1: of as much as eighteen billion dollars. As if the
Speaker 1: logistics and science aren't challenging enough, President Trump has dialed
Speaker 1: up the pressure to get a vaccine cleared before the
Speaker 1: November third election. F d A Commissioner Stephen Hahn dashed
Speaker 1: those hopes in lates September when he drew up tough
Speaker 1: new safety guidelines for approving coronavirus vaccines just after he
Speaker 1: was released from the hospital for his own case of COVID.
Speaker 1: Trump attacked Han by tweet just another political hit job
Speaker 1: at Steve. F d A. The precedent's single tangible, constructive
Speaker 1: contribution to the pandemic response has been to bless the
Speaker 1: establishment of ows, Denying the virus was a real threat
Speaker 1: for months, Trump failed to come up with a national
Speaker 1: strategy to control it spread and left it to the
Speaker 1: states to respond. Then he endorsed a company driven approach.
Speaker 1: Mango says There are now more than twenty five manufacturing
Speaker 1: sites producing or gearing up to make vaccines, vials, and
Speaker 1: other things necessary for a mass vaccination program. With ows
Speaker 1: tracking progress through streams of spreadsheets, it appears to be
Speaker 1: a conspicuous exception to the otherwise disastrous management of the pandemic.
Speaker 1: The only part of the pandemic Trump responded to was
Speaker 1: things he could get companies to manufacture. As Peter Hotez,
Speaker 1: dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor
Speaker 1: College of Medicine in Houston, there was never an understanding
Speaker 1: that the hard part is giving adequate time to make
Speaker 1: sure the vaccines work. It was always reframed as a
Speaker 1: manufacturing problem. It was Trump bringing in his personal relationship
Speaker 1: with CEOs to get them to make stuff. Calling the
Speaker 1: search for a vaccine operation warp speed hasn't always engendered confidence.
Speaker 1: The name comes from Star Trek, and trek eas know
Speaker 1: that when a spaceship travels at a high warp factor,
Speaker 1: things can go wrong. More to the point, Anthony Fauci,
Speaker 1: director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases NAID,
Speaker 1: has expressed concern that the name suggests recklessness. No one
Speaker 1: is cutting corners. Fauci insists perception issues aside. The idea
Speaker 1: behind OWS makes sense. A top notch vaccine specialist from
Speaker 1: the private sector, former Glaxo Smith Klein executive of Monsef
Speaker 1: Sloughie is paired with military logistics expert Gustav Perna, a
Speaker 1: four star general who led the U. S Army Material
Speaker 1: Command and is now the OWS Chief operating officer. They
Speaker 1: are a study in contrasts. On a recent visit to
Speaker 1: a Cincinnati hospital taking part in a vaccine trial, Perna
Speaker 1: was in camouflage fatigues while Sloughie wore a blue button
Speaker 1: down shirt. Guided by Sloughie, a Moroccan born Belgian American scientist,
Speaker 1: OWS selected a portfolio of coronavirus vaccine candidates being developed
Speaker 1: by some of the world's top pharmaceutical companies, as well
Speaker 1: as some untested newcomers. By betting on several horses, OWS,
Speaker 1: in theory, increased the chances that one or more would
Speaker 1: cross the finish line everyone hopes at a warp like speed.
Speaker 1: Sloughy steered investments not just to different companies, but also
Speaker 1: to different ways of making vaccines. MODERNA and Viser, which
Speaker 1: is teamed up with Germany's bio in Tech are testing
Speaker 1: vaccines that use messenger RNA, a genetic material that instructs
Speaker 1: the body to make viral proteins that in turn trigger
Speaker 1: and antibody response, in this case against stars cove to
Speaker 1: the virus that causes covid J and J and Astra
Speaker 1: Zeneca are using a viral vector technology that deploys an
Speaker 1: altered common cold virus to carry the genetic material of
Speaker 1: the coronavirus and produce an immune response. The novavax vaccine
Speaker 1: and one from Glaxo and France's Sinophi are based on
Speaker 1: the virus is spike protein and use an immune boosting
Speaker 1: adj evan to spark antibody production. Fiser might be first
Speaker 1: out of the gate. The company has said it could
Speaker 1: be ready to apply for authorization by late November. Unlike
Speaker 1: the others, the company chose to pay for its own
Speaker 1: testing and production and will recoup some of its investment
Speaker 1: only when its vaccine gets authorized and OWS buys the shots.
Speaker 1: Slowey says his being new to government is an advantage.
Speaker 1: Everybody is party to a given kingdom, he says, having
Speaker 1: somebody from the outside come in that's effectively blind to
Speaker 1: all the history and politics the bureaucracy that may exist
Speaker 1: and is uniquely focused on integrating their work was an
Speaker 1: essential element of how warp speed was able to go
Speaker 1: very fast. O WS released a document in mid September
Speaker 1: outlining how it would distribute vaccine doses. It has a
Speaker 1: military tone. The title is from the Factory to the
Speaker 1: front Lines. General Paul Ostrowski, perna's deputy, has said the
Speaker 1: goal is to begin delivery within twenty four hours of
Speaker 1: any approval or emergency use authorization, with distribution centralized and
Speaker 1: farmed out mainly through McKesson, a Texas drug distributor that
Speaker 1: had an existing contract with the CDC to deliver vaccines.
Speaker 1: To track where every dose goes, OWS is building an
Speaker 1: integrated computer system that brings in the CDC's existing systems
Speaker 1: o w S, as it expects to have as many
Speaker 1: as seventy five thousand injection sites across the country. States
Speaker 1: have sent the CDC proposals for how to manage distribution locally,
Speaker 1: but in mid October, the bipartisan National Governors Association submitted
Speaker 1: a long list of questions to the Trump administration about
Speaker 1: everything from funding to storage, making it clear the states
Speaker 1: don't see a workable federal plan in place. Some observers
Speaker 1: have questioned how a victory for Joe Biden might affect
Speaker 1: the course of the program. According to Mango, the point
Speaker 1: is largely moot. The US is on track to produce
Speaker 1: more than one million doses of coronavirus vaccines manufactured by
Speaker 1: multiple companies by the end of the year, he says,
Speaker 1: and by inauguration day, the vast, vast majority of the
Speaker 1: heavy lifting will be behind us. The Biden campaign says
Speaker 1: it will back scientists involved with warp Speed. Joe Biden
Speaker 1: and Kamala Harris will provide the leadership that has been
Speaker 1: lacking under Trump, to empower scientific professionals throughout our government,
Speaker 1: including those involved in warp Speed, to ensure that a
Speaker 1: safe and effective vaccine is distributed equitably, efficiently, and free
Speaker 1: to all our Americans. Spokesman Andrew Bates said. Mango says
Speaker 1: more than six hundred million shots should be available by April.
Speaker 1: Behind those big numbers are a lot of variables and uncertainties.
Speaker 1: Five of the six OWS backed vaccine candidates require two doses.
Speaker 1: It's possible the FDA will not approve all of them,
Speaker 1: which means untold millions of doses could end up in
Speaker 1: the garbage, and indeed, Astra Zeneca and J and J
Speaker 1: have had to pause their U S trials because of
Speaker 1: safety concerns. Both companies resumed on October. Visers needs to
Speaker 1: be kept at negative seventy five degrees celsius, which makes
Speaker 1: distributing it across the country a daunting task. The creation
Speaker 1: of Operation Warp Speed might have been unnecessary if not
Speaker 1: for a series of decisions that now look tragically myopic.
Speaker 1: Public health experts had been sounding the alarm about the
Speaker 1: lack of pandemic preparedness for the past two decades, but
Speaker 1: they were drowned out by con turns over a bioterrorist attack.
Speaker 1: Those fears were amplified in June two thousand one when
Speaker 1: a group of US officials and policymakers convened for Dark Winter,
Speaker 1: an exercise which simulated a biological weapons attack involving smallpox.
Speaker 1: In many ways, the exercise gamed out much of what
Speaker 1: is unfolded in the US during the COVID pandemic, including
Speaker 1: the lack of surge capacity to treat victims and the
Speaker 1: difficulty of controlling the outbreak. After Dark Winter came September
Speaker 1: eleven and a series of highly publicized anthrax attacks in
Speaker 1: the US, ushering in a new round of government spending
Speaker 1: to ward off a bioterrorist attack. Emergent, then called Bioport,
Speaker 1: was the loan producer of the only FDA licensed anthrax vaccine.
Speaker 1: The federal government soon began stockpiling millions of doses. In
Speaker 1: two thousand four, Congress passed the Project BioShield Act, which
Speaker 1: provided five point six billion dollars over the following decade
Speaker 1: to develop and purchase medical counter measures, vaccines, and therapies
Speaker 1: against biological and chemical attacks for the strategic national stockpile,
Speaker 1: including emergence anthrax shot. The Act wasn't designed to tackle
Speaker 1: naturally occurring infectious diseases, despite coming right on the heels
Speaker 1: of severe acute respiratory syndrome or STARS, which was caused
Speaker 1: by a coronavirus. STARS had by that time infected eight
Speaker 1: thousand people globally and killed seven dred and seventy four
Speaker 1: with outbreaks still popping up in Asia that year. Drug
Speaker 1: companies weren't eager to invest in the development of drugs
Speaker 1: and vaccines needed for the strategic national stockpile. They're often
Speaker 1: risky research bets with an uncertain payoff. So in two
Speaker 1: thousand six, Congress created the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development
Speaker 1: Authority known as BARDA to fill that void. Through a
Speaker 1: series of BARTA contracts and acquisitions, Emergent consolidated its grip
Speaker 1: on the bio defense industry. In two thousand seven, it
Speaker 1: secured a contract to deliver nineteen million doses of its
Speaker 1: anthrax vaccine for the national Stockpile. It then acquired and
Speaker 1: renovated a facility in Baltimore, the one now producing COVID vaccines.
Speaker 1: There's a world in which those vaccines might have come sooner.
Speaker 1: In Hotez, the Baylor scientist, got a large NAAID grant
Speaker 1: to devise a vaccine against stars. By twenty seventeen, the
Speaker 1: grant ended, and even though the vaccine looked promising, he
Speaker 1: couldn't find money to begin testing it in humans. He
Speaker 1: says it might have provided some protection against the new coronavirus.
Speaker 1: We had it in the freezer. He says, these are
Speaker 1: not really money making products. President Obama said in an
Speaker 1: October speech that he left the Trump administration a sixty
Speaker 1: nine page document on how to deal with emerging pathogens,
Speaker 1: including coronaviruses. We literally left this White House a pandemic playbook,
Speaker 1: he said. But the Trump administration has made a habit
Speaker 1: of pulling the plug on Obama era initiatives. Int eighteen,
Speaker 1: Trump's National Security adviser John Bolton dissolved the Directorate for
Speaker 1: Global Health, Security and Bio Defense, created by Obama after
Speaker 1: the Ebola epidemic of to coordinate the White House response
Speaker 1: to outbreaks of infectious diseases around the world. Bolton said
Speaker 1: via Twitter that global health remained a top priority of
Speaker 1: the National Security Council and that its experts effectively handled
Speaker 1: the nineteen Ebola outbreak. Responsibility for pandemic planning has long
Speaker 1: been scattered across the federal government. There's nothing as visible
Speaker 1: as a federal emergency management agency. Perhaps the closest thing
Speaker 1: is the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response,
Speaker 1: headed by Robert Cadolick, a doctor and retired Air Force colonel.
Speaker 1: A year after being appointed to the position by Trump,
Speaker 1: cadlik took control of the six fifty million dollar budget
Speaker 1: for the Strategic National Stockpile, which had been managed by
Speaker 1: the CDC. Catholic was at one time a paid consultant
Speaker 1: for Emergent and had been in business with the company's founder.
Speaker 1: The Washington Post reported in May. Asked whether emergence relationship
Speaker 1: with Catholic put it in a favorable position, the company
Speaker 1: said it's worked with multiple administrations, both Democratic and Republican.
Speaker 1: Under the Trump administration, Emergence revenue has more than doubled
Speaker 1: to one point one billion dollars in twenty nineteen from
Speaker 1: four hundred and eighty eight million in twenty sixteen. When
Speaker 1: the pandemic hit, the Strategic National Stockpile had millions of
Speaker 1: doses of anthrax vaccine and enough smallpox vaccine to inoculate
Speaker 1: every U s citizen. It's not as though Cadolic didn't
Speaker 1: recognize the risk of a naturally occurring pandemic. In twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: his office oversaw a simulation of an influenza pandemic emanating
Speaker 1: from China. The exercise, called Crimson Contagion, laid bare how
Speaker 1: unprepared the US was for something like the novel coronavirus.
Speaker 1: In testimony before Congress in December twenty nineteen, Catholic said
Speaker 1: the US lacked sufficient manufacturing capacity for almost all necessary
Speaker 1: pandemic supplies, vaccines, therapeutics, needles, syringes, and masks. If the
Speaker 1: simulation was designed to spark significant changes to the government's planning,
Speaker 1: they didn't come in time. On January, Shaan Kirk, Emergent's
Speaker 1: head of manufacturing and technical operations, grew worried as he
Speaker 1: watched the news about a respiratory illness spreading in Wuhan, China.
Speaker 1: He walked down the hall to his colleagues running the
Speaker 1: company's global supply chain and told them to start locking
Speaker 1: up critical raw materials. I was fearful that this thing
Speaker 1: could blow up, he recalls. Later that month, Emergence submitted
Speaker 1: an in depth white paper to BARDA reminding the agency
Speaker 1: of everything the company could do. Rick Bright, who was
Speaker 1: serving as director of BARDA as the virus hit the US,
Speaker 1: filed a whistleblower complaint earlier this year that painted a
Speaker 1: picture of a federal government that was slow to act
Speaker 1: on vaccines. He says he was ousted in April after
Speaker 1: fighting pressure to allow use of hydroxy chloroquine, an anti
Speaker 1: malaria drug that Trump had been pushing despite the lack
Speaker 1: of rigorous trials to prove it was safe and effective.
Speaker 1: In January, Bright says he tried and failed to persuade
Speaker 1: Catolic and HHS Secretary Alexaser to allocate money for COVID
Speaker 1: drug and diagnostics development. In a written statement, the HHS
Speaker 1: said that from his position, Bright couldn't know everything being
Speaker 1: done to combat the pandemic. Bright didn't respond to requests
Speaker 1: for comment for this story. BARDA pressed ahead on COVID anyway.
Speaker 1: In January, the agency contacted Johnson and Johnson to discuss
Speaker 1: using the same approach for the novel coronavirus that it
Speaker 1: had used for its Bola vaccine, recalls Staffles, the chief
Speaker 1: scientific officer, we know the technology you have is developed
Speaker 1: and you can scale it, he recalls BARDA experts, saying
Speaker 1: over three meetings in Washington in February, Staffel says the
Speaker 1: company and BARDA came up with a development plan. As
Speaker 1: at hammer out the initial contract, J and J began
Speaker 1: talking to Emergent about locking up manufacturing capacity. On marcht
Speaker 1: HHS announced four hundred and fifty six million dollars in
Speaker 1: funds to support clinical trials and manufacturing of J and
Speaker 1: J's eventual candidate, followed by an additional four dred and
Speaker 1: eighty three million dollars for Maderna. In April, Emergent signed
Speaker 1: an initial one thirty five million dollar agreement to manufacture
Speaker 1: J and J's vaccine, with some work starting in twenty
Speaker 1: and large scale production beginning in By mid April, daily
Speaker 1: deaths from COVID were surging and the pressure to act
Speaker 1: was growing. HHS officials were fleshing out how to set
Speaker 1: up OWS. The decision to create a new body struck
Speaker 1: some as an unnecessary gimmick, given there were existing inter
Speaker 1: agency structures in place that the government used to respond
Speaker 1: to Ubola. Although OWS wasn't formally announced until mid May,
Speaker 1: HHS and the d D started laying the ground work
Speaker 1: by interviewing as many as ten people for the role
Speaker 1: of Chief Advisor ASAR, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and White
Speaker 1: House advisor and Trump's son in law Jared Kushner interviewed
Speaker 1: Slowie and decided he was the right person for the job.
Speaker 1: He joined OWS as an outside contractor instead of as
Speaker 1: a government employee, which meant he wasn't subject to federal
Speaker 1: ethics rules regarding disclosure and investment of shareholdings that might
Speaker 1: conflict with his role. Slowly agreed to work for OWS
Speaker 1: for a nominal one dollar salary, with his expenses covered
Speaker 1: under an HHS contract awarded to Advanced Decision Vectors based
Speaker 1: in Alexandria, Virginia, which is handling compensation for several OWS consultants.
Speaker 1: Sloughie has come under fire from congressional Democrats who say
Speaker 1: he has too many conflicts of interest with OWS companies.
Speaker 1: He vociferously denies that. He says he's a registered Democrat
Speaker 1: who joined o w S because he believed finding a
Speaker 1: vaccine was more important than party politics. After heading vaccines
Speaker 1: at Glaxo Smith Klein, he'd taken board seats at Maderna
Speaker 1: and briefly the Swiss drug manufacturer Lonza Group, Maderna's vaccine
Speaker 1: manufacturer of choice. When he agreed to join o WS,
Speaker 1: he resigned from Lonza and Maderna and promised to sell
Speaker 1: all his Maderna shares. He insisted on keeping his multimillion
Speaker 1: dollar stake in Glaxo, which he's called his retirement, but
Speaker 1: pledged to donate any gains to the National Institutes of Health.
Speaker 1: From the day he started at OWS, he says he
Speaker 1: wasn't involved in negotiating the deals with Maderna or the
Speaker 1: Sinophi Glaxo partnership. I stayed completely out of it, so
Speaker 1: Lowie says. On July two, Francis Collins, the NIH director,
Speaker 1: and Gary Disbrow, acting bar to director, testified on o
Speaker 1: WS before Congress, but refused to provide details on how
Speaker 1: the program would pick vaccines to fund. At that point,
Speaker 1: o w S had announced one point to billion dollars
Speaker 1: for Astra's Enica's vaccine, developed with the University of Oxford.
Speaker 1: Democrats asked how many vaccines it would back more than one,
Speaker 1: dis Brows said with a chuckle, I'm sorry, it really
Speaker 1: is procurement sensitive. Over the next six weeks, OWS handed
Speaker 1: contracts worth more than eight million dollars to back five
Speaker 1: additional vaccines, those from Johnson and Johnson, Maderna, novavax Biser,
Speaker 1: and Sonophi jointly with Glaxo. The government reluctantly released some
Speaker 1: of the contracts heavily redacted over the summer in response
Speaker 1: to Freedom of Information Act requests. Slowe says the fuss
Speaker 1: is unnecessary. They are playing vanilla contracts. There's nothing special
Speaker 1: about them apart from the amount of money, which relates
Speaker 1: to the cost of developing the vaccines. In mid October,
Speaker 1: the advocacy group Public Citizen filed a lawsuit demanding the
Speaker 1: release of coronavirus vaccine contracts. SLOWI says the contracts will
Speaker 1: be released soon. On October, HHS released the Maderna contract
Speaker 1: heavily redacted. Ows has provided a huge payday for many
Speaker 1: pharma executives. Maderna executives netted a profit of one and
Speaker 1: fifteen point five million dollars from selling shares in their
Speaker 1: company from May fifteenth to August thirty one, according to
Speaker 1: Accountable Pharma, a nonpartisan watchdog group. A Maderna spokesman said
Speaker 1: the share sales were done through previously scheduled programs and
Speaker 1: in accordance with insider trading regulations. Emergent executives netted five
Speaker 1: million dollars selling shares during the same period, and in September,
Speaker 1: the company's executive chairman, fouled l Hebre sold an additional
Speaker 1: eighty thousand shares for a net profit of eight point
Speaker 1: one million dollars. Emergent said in a statement that executives
Speaker 1: regularly sell stock following all laws governing financial transactions. Emergence
Speaker 1: shares were up seventy eight percent this year through October.
Speaker 1: It's a perfect business, says Eli's Upnick, a spokesman for
Speaker 1: Accountable Armor of the OWS companies, their downside is covered
Speaker 1: by taxpayers, and their upside is already in their pockets.
Speaker 1: After announcing the six d and twenty eight million dollar
Speaker 1: OWS award for Emergent in June, Perna and Slowie visited
Speaker 1: the company's Baltimore manufacturing facility to deliver a message that
Speaker 1: the entire U. S. Military was ready to help work
Speaker 1: out supply chain glitches. He had said that everything is
Speaker 1: on the table Emergence. Hussein recalls of Perna's message, every
Speaker 1: day counts, every hour counts. Some farmer executives described the
Speaker 1: military's role in speeding up vaccine manufacturing as a genuine
Speaker 1: bright spot in the federal pandemic response. Much of the work, however,
Speaker 1: remains opaque. Ostrowski, Perna's number two, says, OWS intervened on
Speaker 1: behalf of suppliers working with Maderna to expedite orders of
Speaker 1: key equipment and supplies, but he didn't offer any specifics.
Speaker 1: My hat goes off to these great America ends that
Speaker 1: want to be part of the solution to this national pandemic,
Speaker 1: he said. An emailed responses to Bloomberg Business Week's questions.
Speaker 1: Maderna is the largest recipient of taxpayer funds a total
Speaker 1: of two point five billion dollars to advance and supply
Speaker 1: its vaccine, including a three hundred million dollar milestone payment
Speaker 1: if it's able to deliver one hundred million doses by
Speaker 1: January thirty first one under an FDA Emergency Use Approval
Speaker 1: or full license. Maderna said in a statement that it
Speaker 1: interacts with several federal agencies, but declined to say what
Speaker 1: support it's getting. The milestone payment didn't require the company
Speaker 1: to accelerate timelines for its trials, spokesperson says. Amid widespread
Speaker 1: fears there would be a shortage of key materials for
Speaker 1: a mass vaccination program, OWS signed contracts to finance large
Speaker 1: scale manufacturing of hundreds of millions of aisles. Corning secured
Speaker 1: two hundred four million dollars in funds from OWS in
Speaker 1: June to expand its capacity need to produce specialized glass vials.
Speaker 1: The company has weekly calls with OWS and has used
Speaker 1: a system under the Defense Production Act to gain priority
Speaker 1: with suppliers. It's been a helpful tool to make sure
Speaker 1: we're not getting stuck in line behind anything that's non critical,
Speaker 1: says Brendan Mosher, Corning's head of pharmaceutical Technologies. We're doing
Speaker 1: things at least three times faster than we would have not.
Speaker 1: Every company is treating its relationship with OWS like a
Speaker 1: military secret. PSI O to Material Science of Auburn, Alabama,
Speaker 1: won a one three million dollar award in June to
Speaker 1: produce one and twenty million plastic vials with a thin
Speaker 1: glass coating from a Dernas vaccine and several others it
Speaker 1: declined to disclose. Lawrence Ganty, si O two's president of
Speaker 1: consumer Operations says the company has used the Defense Production
Speaker 1: Act to solve myriad problems to keep production humming. Over
Speaker 1: the summer, one of its suppliers outside Chicago shut down
Speaker 1: because of a local power outage. Ganti. He says he
Speaker 1: got the power company's head of legal affairs on the phone,
Speaker 1: gave her the suppliers Defense Production Act letter, and got
Speaker 1: the power restored within forty five minutes. They understood the
Speaker 1: gravity of what we were working on, he says. Mango
Speaker 1: says he's confident the US will be ready to begin
Speaker 1: vaccinating millions of people by the end of the year.
Speaker 1: The vaccines will be ready on the shelf, he says,
Speaker 1: declining to say which vaccine he's referring to. We'll have
Speaker 1: all the needles, syringes, stoppers, and vials. All of that
Speaker 1: stuff will be ready to ship literally the day the
Speaker 1: FDA gives us a green light. If Emergent is anything
Speaker 1: to go by, that timeline looks like a stretch. Its
Speaker 1: first doses of the astros ennica vaccine won't be available
Speaker 1: until late January at the earliest. Production finally started in
Speaker 1: mid September, but it will take ninety days to produce
Speaker 1: bulk doses, which will then be shipped to a separate company, Cattalent,
Speaker 1: based in Somerset, New Jersey, for filling into vials, the
Speaker 1: process that takes another forty five days, including quality control checks.
Speaker 1: With so many vaccines in the race, o w S
Speaker 1: can turn to others if the candidates made an emergent
Speaker 1: don't cross the finish line, but fewer approvals would diminish
Speaker 1: the chances of delivering millions of doses quickly. The world
Speaker 1: needs more than one shot to get back to normal.
Speaker 1: Success for Operation Warp speed is not six vaccines all working.
Speaker 1: It's enough vaccines and enough quantities by year end to
Speaker 1: vaccinate the most vulnerable Americans. Mango says, the odds of
Speaker 1: six out of six hitting in the time frame we want,
Speaker 1: I mean, you'd sooner get struck by lightning. The biggest
Speaker 1: threat to o w s's success may end up being
Speaker 1: not the science, not the logistical challenges, but people refusing
Speaker 1: to take an approved vaccine. A Pew Research Center study
Speaker 1: in September showed that just fifty one percent of US
Speaker 1: adults say they would definitely or probably take it, down
Speaker 1: from seventy two percent in May. I think this is
Speaker 1: a result mostly of the politicization of this process and
Speaker 1: the fact that it's happen around an election year and
Speaker 1: the kind of politics that are going on in the country.
Speaker 1: So Loowi says his hope is that six Americans will
Speaker 1: be immunized, at which point, though COVID won't disappear, the
Speaker 1: pandemic will subside. The circulation of the virus will be
Speaker 1: hugely impaired, he says, infections will go down, susceptible people
Speaker 1: will survive, and life will go back to normal. I
Speaker 1: look forward to that with David Koshnevski, and that's our
Speaker 1: cover story. Check out more stories in the current issue
Speaker 1: of Bloomberg Business Week magazine. That issue is on newsstands.
Speaker 1: It's also online at Bloomberg dot com, and it's on
Speaker 1: the Bloomberg terminal. I'm Carol mass Sir. Be sure to
Speaker 1: also check out Bloomberg Business Week Radio live Monday through
Speaker 1: Friday at two pm Wall Street Time, and catch our
Speaker 1: daily podcast feed, and also you can check us out
Speaker 1: on YouTube. No December four, join Bloomberg for a week
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