The rush to take the blame

Ah, warp speed. The Trekkian-turned-mainstream plot device that allows humans to ‘hack’ the fabric of space in order to move from one point to another point faster than would be possible given the light speed-limit of the universe. Who would not be excited by such a concept?

Well, that was the same excitement that the Trump administration hoped to draw on when they announced not just funding and logistical support for the development of vaccines, but also a timeline. On July 1, 2020, the NIH announced the idealistic goal of delivering 300 million doses of a vaccine by January 2021. Operation Warp Speed was born.

The program would allow industrial scale manufacturing of a vaccine before efficacy and safety had even been confirmed. Essentially, as one infectious disease researcher Dr. Michael Callahan noted, taking away the R&D and regulatory risk. But the distance between virus and cure could not be changed by such a government program; as it turns out, the only thing that was warped were societal values.

It remains difficult to quantify how incentives changed with warp speed. Did the program strengthen incentives for pharmaceutical companies to innovate? I doubt it. There were billions of reasons these companies had to innovate. Did it increase incentives for these companies to eliminate competition in the form of well-known generic drugs that appeared to have anti-viral properties like Ivermectin? Maybe, though, these incentives may have already been in place.

In any case, the timeline created a new incentive: a political incentive. Suddenly, enormous government investments in potential cures tied the outcomes of those cures to political outcomes. The political class became a stakeholder, which is a danger in itself, but this danger was magnified by the fact that throwing money at these companies to expedite development of vaccines created the risk of bad or faulty products entering the market. Rick Bright, the director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, noted that there were “efforts to fund potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections”. Of course, his attack was likely political in and of itself, and he has been more than happy to get in line with a new administration, but his original point was not wrong.

Alex Azar, the brain behind OWS, a former lobbyist and pharmaceutical executive who had some political clout may or may not have had financial motives to create the project, but Moncef Slaoui, who resigned from the board of Moderna to lead the project almost definitely did. He played a prominent role in narrowing down 114 vaccine candidates to just 6 including, of course, Moderna.

Yet, we were promised that there would be no compromises on safety. So, at least the dangerous part must have been wrong?

Well, no. We do not even need to debate the nuances of individual safety checks and balances, which would assume they are free of regulatory capture in normal times. We only need to look at three factors.

1. Vaccines were given license under Emergency Use Authorization, and still to this day the vaccines that are being distributed are not fully approved. Nor will they be until the companies are fully indemnified. Thus, these companies have little reason to pull faulty products from the market.

2. The speed of the trials themselves did not allow the time to observe long-term outcomes; thus, it was a complete surprise to regulators when the vaccines became less effective over time.

3. The speed of the distribution mechanisms meant that tens of millions of vaccines would be distributed before any data on safety signals, which could not have been definitively captured in a small RCT, would even be noticed by regulators. This created the further incentive for regulators to cover up all evidence of danger because the truth is they fucked up beyond all recognition.

These points were all further complicated by those political outcomes I mentioned earlier. The vaccine companies did not even need to worry about advertising. The politicians and, by extension, the government provided them with billions of dollars in free advertisement.

For Trump, this was his “greatest achievement”, and for the Biden administration, Trump left them “without a plan” and they had to “start from scratch”.

I am a little shocked, at this point, with all the information that has come out as to why Trump doesn’t let the Biden administration place the blame squarely on themselves. At the very least, they have implemented as broad of mandates as they could from a federal perspective, something that I cannot personally imagine the Trump administration doing (he has even come out against the passport system). Strangely, though, instead of taking the off-ramp available to him, Trump continues to promote the vaccines despite the vaccinated being infected at much higher rates than the unvaccinated combined with increasingly mainstream concerns over adverse events.

With politicians still seemingly content to tie their political outcomes to the vaccines non-existent efficacy, can someone explain why there is such a rush to take the blame?