In initiating Operation Warp Speed (OWS), former President Trump actually made a serious contribution to President Biden’s ability to kick-start his entire national vaccine plan. And now Biden needs to personally convince Trump to take one more step in the fight against Covid-19. He must convince his predecessor to call on his supporters to get vaccinated, now!
You might well be surprised to know that in spite of plenty of implementation flaws, Donald Trump’s much hyped OWS, which aimed to fast track Covid-19 vaccine development and production, was successful enough to give President Biden’s high-energy vaccine distribution a significant jump start.
Specifically, the Trump Administration invested about $18 billion dollars to promote vaccine development and preorder some 400 million doses of the new Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. So, in spite of my relentless criticism of almost every aspect of Donald Trump’s presidency, I have concluded that OWS was a genuine success and crucial building block for the Biden Administration. (Trump, naturally, agrees, boasting to Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker in their new book about his final year that “I’m a big believer in science. If I wasn’t you wouldn’t have a vaccine.”)
