Tribune. Many people attribute America’s success in the anti-Covid vaccine race to massive investments in research. This vision is very imperfect, even erroneous. There was indeed an exceptional innovation effort across the Atlantic to develop a vaccine in twelve months, but this effort did not concern research and development: it mainly concerned the management of an exceptional operation combining public organizational skills. and private to speed up all decision-making processes.
Faced with the surge in contamination and the number of deaths, and despite Donald Trump’s initially skeptical posture, senior officials of the American health administration, considered today in the United States as living heroes, have, from April 2020, designed and launched an unprecedented operation, called “Operation Warp Speed”.
“Warp Speed”, which could be translated as “lightning speed”, is an expression taken from the imagination of science fiction: it is the speed allowing to pass from a space-time to a other, by ignoring, science fiction obliges, known rules of physics which prohibit to travel faster than the light. Everything is said in this appellation. Urgency, absolute urgency. Forget the constraints, get moving. Pragmatism and speed.
Three key ideas
Three key ideas were mobilized in this extraordinary operation.
– Start from a large portfolio of solutions, wherever they come from; and lead them all head-on by putting the package together – 11 billion dollars (approximately 9.20 billion euros) – by betting on several horses. There will be many winners, the faster the better.
Some large pharmaceutical manufacturers have no experience with vaccines? It doesn’t matter! Let them try their luck, we support them too! Do you have to buy foreign technology? Regardless, we get it right away. Pfizer is not a leader in vaccines, BioNTech is a German start-up, which is moreover founded by two Turkish immigrant biologists? So what ? We also finance them! (Pzifer will refuse funding, but not a pre-order of 300 million doses). Moderna is an American start-up run by a Frenchman, so what? It doesn’t matter if there are failures, including Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline, which are also funded, if others come out with one or two vaccines very quickly.
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