{"id":136036,"date":"2020-12-23T12:12:12","date_gmt":"2020-12-23T20:12:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=136036"},"modified":"2020-12-23T12:12:12","modified_gmt":"2020-12-23T20:12:12","slug":"who-made-the-vaccine-possible-not-who","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=136036","title":{"rendered":"Who Made the Vaccine Possible? Not WHO"},"content":{"rendered":"

Graham Allison writes in the WSJ<\/a>:<\/p>\n

…companies like Germany-based BioNTech, its Boston-based competitor Moderna, and the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer have also been racing for a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. There would be no Covid-19 vaccine today had there been no venture capitalists prepared to invest before a product or profit was visible, no corporate leadership willing to double down with the companies\u2019 own money in the spring to fund a crash effort to produce a vaccine by year-end, and no researchers pursuing a dream about mRNA as an unprecedented route for vaccines.<\/p>\n

Second is Operation Warp Speed. Had Mr. Trump not created the initiative, appointed as its leader a man who knows the vaccine development world, and given him license to spend $10 billion outside normal contracting procedures, Covid-19 vaccines would still be only works in progress. Even after they were finally approved, the vaccines\u2019 distribution could have been long delayed. Imagine a world in which Mr. Trump had not appointed as deputy head of the operation a general who knows logistics and had the authority to write contracts with FedEx and UPS to book space on their airplanes and in their network of distribution centers.<\/p>\n

So as Americans now look forward to getting vaccinated and resuming our normal lives, we should pause to give thanks to a remarkable group of scientists and entrepreneurs whose capitalism-fed competitive drive pushed them to venture into the unknown\u2014for fortune and fame. And to a deeply flawed, often dysfunctional disrupter in chief who in this case certainly did a good thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Graham Allison writes in the WSJ: …companies like Germany-based BioNTech, its Boston-based competitor Moderna, and the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer have also been racing for a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. There would be no Covid-19 vaccine … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42861],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-covid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=136036"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":136037,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136036\/revisions\/136037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=136036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=136036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=136036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}