Coronavirus: Donald Trump's Operation Warp Speed was no small step but was a ‘giant leap for mankind’ in vaccinations
At the time of writing, that figure, from AFP’s global count, is now 2.1 billion vaccines administered in 215 countries. By the time this column is published it will be closer to 2.3 billion.
There has been some domestic to-ing and fro-ing about our own vaccination roll out amid the usual media obsessions of who said what, when and why. Is it a race or not?
Let’s assume it is a race. Israel is three lengths in front at the turn with almost 65 per cent of the population fully vaccinated. Then there are countries whose populations have had at least one jab, such as Canada (59 per cent), the UK (58.3 per cent), Chile (56.6 per cent) and the US (51 per cent). Nearly four out of 10 people in the EU have had at least one shot, with Germany leading with 43.6 per cent.
It’s fair to say Australia is well back in the field with only about 15 per cent of the population having had at least one jab, according to the Health Department, and just 2.1 per cent of the population fully vaccinated. While it might charge home later in the year and more likely early in the next one, it’s hard to see Australia making up the numbers in the trifecta.
But this column is not a gripe, not a whinge about public maladministration here or in other parts of the world.
The first thing that occurred to me is what a monumental human achievement this is. This is a triumph of science and a victory for public and private partnerships.
If we take a look in the rear-view mirror to a year ago, we were less than three months out from the World Health Organisation’s declaration of a pandemic on March 11, 2020.
Previously, the fastest vaccine to go from development to deployment was the mumps vaccine which began in the lab in 1963 before being rolled out for the first time four years later.
The major driver for this extraordinary accomplishment was the Trump administration. How history judges the Trump presidency is still a matter of conjecture and pandemic management will inevitably loom large in that historical assessment.
Back in May 2020, Donald Trump announced Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership initially funded with $13 billion of public money to promote mass production of vaccines based on preliminary evidence. Every stage of production – research, development, manufacture and distribution – was abbreviated to avoid delays in the roll-out of safe vaccines. Manufacture often occurred prior to US Food and Drug Administration approval in the anticipation some vaccines would not make the FDA cut.
It didn’t just cut red tape. It slashed it, pulled it away and threw it in the bin while ensuring the ultimate products that would go into arms were safe and effective.
And the scientists, the virologists, the microbiologists and the immunologists had their own way of speeding up the process by using existing platforms for the COVID-19 vaccine, albeit those at the pointy end of immunology.
Most vaccines rely on inactivated viruses (flu and tetanus) or weakened or attenuated virus strains (measles, mumps). To fight COVID-19, scientists used more advanced available vaccine platforms, in laboratory use for the research and development of HIV, SARS and Ebola vaccines.
Those platforms rely on messenger RNA and viral vectors to produce spike proteins which stimulate the immune system to produce antibodies to combat coronavirus, just as it would in the case of infection.
I hesitate to use the third person plural pronoun because most of us, including me, can barely understand it but let’s put that to one side and reflect on the obvious — as a species, we really are pretty damned smart.
Of course, there will continue to be problems. Variants of SARS CoV-2 have arisen and will continue to arise straining the efficacy of existing vaccines. The scientific work will have to continue, supported by governments and health administrations.
One predictable emerging problem is the prospect of a vaccine-rich and vaccine-poor world, based on existing global socio-economics.
Six countries have failed to initiate any vaccinations — North Korea, Tanzania, Burundi, Haiti, Chad and Eritrea — with a mix of entrenched poverty and terrible politics, the root causes. Therein lies a possible threat of a two-speed global recovery from the pandemic. We cannot have an eradication of the pandemic with one third of the world still unprotected from it.
But what Operation Warp Speed and advanced scientific method have already told us is that these problems are solvable, too.
Two billion vaccinations administered 18 months after this virus took its first victim (officially a 61-year-old Wuhan man was the first to die of COVID-19 infection on January 11, 2020). Don’t underestimate it.
It is man sets foot on the moon stuff and today, with all that might be going wrong in your part of the world, in or out of lockdown, if you’re furious with government for the mistakes they’ve made and maybe wondering where it will all end, take a moment to celebrate this benchmark.
It means we’re winning.
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Two billion reported vaccine doses and we’re winning. Early on Friday morning AEST the world passed a significant milestone. At some tick of the clock or other, the two billionth COVID-19 vaccine was administered.