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Trump’s parting shot

Hate him with all the fervour at your disposal but his effort to speed up a vaccine against the virus should be applauded.

With his critics clamouring for post-poll attention by throwing verbal punches at US President Donald Trump who is down and almost out of the White House, there’s one positive shot from the administration that many choose to ignore — Operation Warp Speed. While the president refuses to concede following his defeat to Joe Biden, let me take this opportunity to laud him for launching a concerted fightback against the coronavirus pandemic that has swept the world.

I shall explain after my initial burst of moral outrage at Trump for preventing a peaceful transition to a Joe Biden administration. The president deserves all the condemnation he can get, and deservedly so. There was even talk of a coup to control the arms of the government which could have meant stealing the people’s verdict. If one were to take the president’s critics seriously, America’s democracy could soon go off its rails, but that’s far from the truth in a torrent of exaggeration, speculation or plain lies.

Trump, as predicted, screamed fraud and claimed he had won the election. It made me laugh. Comic relief after an election that has further distanced Americans from each other and the Covid-19 reality. I now find it funny and have settled down to happily listen to his protestations that are failing to hit the spot.

Meawhile, Trump has lost voice in the Twitter melee . There’s a new president-elect in town. The narrative is changing and everyone loves hating a sore loser like the US president. Others have given up on him though he’s still in contention to make a return to the White House in 2024.

Which gives me the opening to land a jab on his critics by extolling Trump’s decision to roll out a vaccine project that could put his critics to shame. Hate him with all the fervour at your disposal but his effort to speed up a vaccine against the virus should be applauded. In March, he was criticised for his refusal to slow down the spread of the pathogen by shutting down the country. However, many people forget that he banned flights from Europe as early as February.

Allow me to continue about the project that could clinch victory against Covid-19 — a coordinated American effort to take the coronavirus head on — Operation Warp Speed: OWS in short. The grand plan was to produce 300 million vaccines by January 2021. Though the number of vaccines produced under the project have hit just 20 million, the frontrunners — Moderna and Pfizer BioNTech, are both products of OWS. They are 95 per cent effective and are based on pioneering mRNA technology.

Warp sounded weird to me when I first read about it in detail some months ago, in May to be precise — a bit like warped. But it was about getting the jabs out in a flash — Star Trek speed. Time had to be crunched for a shot(s) at healing from Covid-19.

No one took OWS seriously when it was launched in March. The president’s critics, who hate the man to their marrow, have often called me a Trump acolyte for touting the project, which is unfair criticism.

The US quest for a vaccine began a with $456 million in funds for Johnson & Johnson’s (Janssen) jab. Critics of the plan then alleged the White House was hastily backing Big Pharma to further the president’s business interests.

Operation Warp Speed has since turned into a dream project that could end the pandemic whose origins remain unclear almost a year after it first appeared at a wet market in Wuhan, China. According to reports, $12 billion in vaccine-related contracts have since been awarded to bio-tech and pharma companies under OWS. With a total budget of $18 billion, the project could save humankind and revive the economy.

Normally, vaccines could take 5-10 years to develop. OWS has made it happen in less than 10 months. It has even beaten the estimates of Seth Berkely, CEO of Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, who I interviewed some months ago. Berkely had said it would take 18 months for a safe and efficacious vaccine to complete trials and be ready for mass production.

OWS is a private-government partnership bankrolled by the US government with military precision. In fact, the US military is in charge of distribution of the jabs.

Moderna received $2.5 billion in US government funds while Pfizer-BioNTech received $1.95 billion. Both could get US regulatory approval next week.

Meanwhile, the UK is vaccinating its citizens with the Pfizer vaccine this week. The US government has also backed the Oxford-AstraZeneca, Novavax and Sanofi-GSK vaccines. Trump seems to be having the last laugh even in defeat. Or is it a parting shot?

— allan@khaleejtimes.com