Operation Warp Speed: Negative and Positive Lessons for New Industrial Policy

How did OWS accelerate development of the COVID-19 vaccines?Thinking of OWS as a type of industrial policy, what lessons can be applied to other industrial policies?These are the questions this paper attempts to answer. OPERATION WARP SPEED OVERVIEWOperation Warp Speed combined financial support for the manufacture of vaccines through advance market commitments, investments in production capacity, and clinical trials, alongside FDA deregulation and a heightened focus on speed, all of which was coordinated and supported by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD).OWS invested more specifically in a portfolio of six vaccines distinguished by three different vaccine platforms (delivery mechanisms and technology).These were mRNA vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer, 3 viral vector vaccines from Janssen and Astra Zeneca, and protein vaccines OPERATION WARP SPEED NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE LESSONS FOR NEW INDUSTRIAL POLICYALEX TABARROKNovel vaccines typically take decades to develop.Operation Warp Speed (OWS) was an initiative by the U.S. government to accelerate the development, manufacture, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines.Prior to COVID, the shortest development time for a novel vaccine was for the mumps vaccine, which took a mere four years (Roos, 2023).On January 7, 2020, public health officials in China identified a novel coronavirus as the causative agent of the COVID-19 disease (CDC, 2023).On December 11, 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted the first Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for a COVID-19 vaccine in the United States (FDA, 2020)-a total development time of under one year.Perhaps even more remarkably, by the end of that year, more than five million U.S. residents had already been vaccinated. 1 It's difficult to say how long it would have taken a COVID vaccine to be produced without OWS, but there is little doubt that OWS accelerated the process and saved millions of lives and trillions of dollars worldwide.