As the nation’s Covid-19 response was careening off the rails in March and April 2020, about a dozen top health and defense department officials huddled in antiseptic meeting rooms to devise what they believed would be the Trump administration’s greatest triumph — a vaccine program so fast, so special, so successful that grateful Americans would forgive earlier failures and business schools would teach classes about it for decades.
They dubbed their project “MP2,” for a second Manhattan Project, after the race to create the nuclear weapons that ended World War II. Alex Azar, the Health and Human Services secretary who was often at odds with the White House and his own department, sounded like an Army general rallying his troops: “If we can develop an atomic bomb in 2.5 years and put a man on the moon in seven years, we can do this this year, in 2020,” Azar would declare, according to his deputy chief of staff, Paul Mango, who helped lead the strategy sessions.
“It was just a spirit of optimism,” Mango added.
Now, in the final days of the Trump administration, their “MP2” — later redubbed “Operation Warp Speed” — occupies a peculiar place in the annals of the administration’s ill-fated response to Covid-19: In many ways, it was successful, living up to the highest expectations of its architects. The Trump administration did help deliver a pair of working vaccines in 2020, with more shots on the way. But the officials who expected to be taking a victory lap on distributing tens of millions of vaccine doses are instead being pressed to explain why the initiative appears to be limping to the finish.
Governors say the Warp Speed effort has made promises it didn’t keep, with deliveries of doses falling short and reserve supplies exhausted. Physicians and logistics experts have critiqued the disorderly rollout, arguing that the Trump team should have done a better job of coordinating the nation’s mass vaccination effort. The incoming Biden administration on Friday morning announced they’d even do away with the initiative’s branding, which President Donald Trump has touted for months.
peration Warp Speed “is the Trump team’s name for their program. We are phasing in a new structure,” tweeted incoming White House press secretary Jen Psaki, adding there’s an “urgent need to address failures of the Trump team approach to vaccine distribution.”
It’s a deflating end for the Trump officials who conceived of Operation Warp Speed last spring, hanging themed posters inside the health department that boast the slogan “Because Winning Matters!”
POLITICO spoke with 11 officials closely involved in the conception of the vaccine project, in addition to other government officials and outside advisers, about how that optimistic vision of “MP2” became “Operation Warp Speed” — and where the rollout went astray in recent weeks. Many expressed frustration and disappointment, but also a faith that the long arc of history will prove they succeeded — pointing to data that roughly 1 million Americans per day are now getting vaccinated under Trump’s watch, ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s own vow to accomplish the same.
The recent news about distribution problems “just sucks,” said one health official. “This time it was supposed to be different… it still can be.”
And asked if he was disappointed by recent news of setbacks, the cabinet secretary who steered the project offered a response as enigmatic as the program itself.
“You fail to achieve 100 percent of the goals you do not set,” Azar says now.
Setting the ambition
The first Manhattan Project, conceived at the dawn of World War II, was an audacious gambit to marry American science with U.S. military might in the race to develop the atom bomb. The self-styled second project would similarly pair scientists and military experts — although in the pursuit of cures, not combat — and stake the pharma industry to make billion-dollar bets on coronavirus treatments that might otherwise never be funded.
And the hope — carried for months by Azar and his deputies, bruised from their battles last spring with the White House’s coronavirus task force — was that their tightly run MP2 operation, and not a task force consumed by political rivalries, would deliver the desperately needed end to this generation’s world war on the virus.
As MP2 was rebranded as Operation Warp Speed, and as promising Covid-19 vaccines sped through trials and into Americans’ arms, the officials believed they’d turned their vision into a reality, racing the clock as the pandemic worsened and the potential end of the administration loomed.
“By the end of this year, 20 million Americans could be vaccinated,” Azar effused on Dec. 14, cheering as the first shots were administered at George Washington University Hospital. “By the end of January, 50 million Americans could have had a first vaccination.”
But the Trump administration’s heady optimism about vaccine development has collided with sluggish vaccine rollout, tarnishing the $15 billion-plus effort they hoped to leave as a legacy.
Only about 13 million Americans have received their first dose of the vaccine, according to federal data, a far cry from the 30 million-plus people that the Trump administration had hoped to vaccinate by now. Logistical breakdowns have plagued the process; just more than one-third of doses distributed by Operation Warp Speed have been administered, and the initiative’s top military official recently issued a public apology for misleading states on how many vaccine doses they’d get.
