There is a vaccine shortage because Operation Warp Speed

[edhopper]

was a failure. This must be repeated and repeated.
The Trump Administration did nothing to ramp up vaccine manufacturing.
Biden has invoked the Defense Production Act to produce many of the materials Pfizer and Moderna need to make more.
That is why we will see things get better in April. This should have been done last Summer.
The failure of the Trump Administration should never be understated.

[dalton99a]

1. The real Operation Warp Speed that he worked on was January 6

[orangecrush]

2. Yup.

[gratuitous]

3. Things are already trending better

It's appalling how badly the Trump administration - top to bottom - botched its response to the pandemic, all because Trump's ego couldn't stand to be anything but the smartest man in any room. He couldn't/wouldn't take advice from public health professionals, couldn't/wouldn't concede that he didn't know more than everyone else, couldn't/wouldn't admit that he was in over his head. He wasted months in pointless squabbles about masks, hand washing, and distancing while millions of American got infected and hundreds of thousands of Americans died.

Now, in slightly more than three weeks, the Biden administration is getting people vaccinated, there is a coherent consistent plan going forward, and the president doesn't have to stoke his ego or cast about to blame someone else for any problems.

[2naSalit]

5. It was intentional.

[gratuitous]

7. I hesitate to say that that's the worst of it

Because everything Trump forced people to do was all so bad. The professionals who put their education and training on the back burner in service to Trump. The people who knew better but didn't or couldn't say anything against Trump. The lethal pointlessness of Trump's jihad against masks. The countermeasures were and are so accessible, so cheap, so do-able, but we wasted months while people got infected and died because Trump didn't come up with these ideas himself, and wouldn't get credit for it. There was minimal pushback from the media, and responsible opposing voices couldn't get any traction at all.

[Johnny2X2X]

4. Trump did as little as possible

Did what anyone would have done and let the FDA remove some restrictions to development of a vaccine, but in the end that was it. He had most of 2020, by 2021 everything should have been in place.

[DeminPennswoods]

6. This is not true at all

If not for this program, we might not even have a vaccine today. The federal government by guaranteeing contracts allowed the manufacturers to have production up and running. The truth is, no brand new manufacturing process and associated supply chain is going to be at optimum capacity in just a few months after being initially successful.

In a recent interview, Fauci was asked why the defense production act wasn't used to force other pharmaceutical companies to make the approved vaccines. Fauci said the reality is that it really couldn't be done for reasons he then described.

The Trump administration can certainly be blamed for not having a good enough, or any, plan for getting doses into arms, but that is entirely different from assessing the success of Operation Warp Speed, the effort to develop a vaccine. History will record that effort as comparable to mankind's most ambitious accomplishments.

[edhopper]

8. There are other materials neccessary

beyond the vaccine itself, including raw materials and paraphernalia. The Biden Admin is using the DPA for these, Trump did not.
And as we now know, they had no real plan to get people vaccinated beyond, give vaccines to the States. The main reason for OWS was to get people vaccinated, it was an utter failure at that.
And OWS had nothing to do with developing the vaccine. OWS was announced in May, after Pfizer and Moderna had already developed the vaccine.

[ProfessorGAC]

9. Only Sort Of, DP

Neither Pfizer nor Moderna were part of Warp Speed.
The failure was in the incorrect sense on the part of the maladministration that the approval of the vaccines meant "Mission Accomplished", when in fact that was when THEY'RE job began.
I agree with you on the start-up curve. In fact, both companies are a bit ahead on their production curve. They got ahead of forecast late last week. This level of production, given it's only 8 weeks in, is terrific. It is, as you said, a most ambitious accomplishment!
But, distribution & administration was a big bottleneck because there was no plan.
So, given the 2 candidates in distribution were not WS, and the other half of the plan was a disorganized free for all, I think we can call Warp Speed a failure, in preponderance.

[DeminPennswoods]

11. Pfizer wasn't but Moderna was

In fact, an NIH scientist helped to develop the formula for the replica "spike protein" that the vaccine targets. However, both companies were guaranteed government contracts, i.e, guaranteed money regardless of outcome.

FTR, J&J's vaccine is also part of Operation Warp Speed.

[Massacure]

12. Moderna was a part of Warp Speed

You are correct that Pfizer was not part of Warp Speed, but are incorrect about Moderna. Moderna was one of seven projects to receive government funding for vaccine development - University of Oxford in partnership with AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, International AIDS Vaccine Initiative in partnership with Merck (two projects), Moderna, Novavax, and a Sanofi / GlaxoSmithKline joint project.

Both of the Merck/IAVI projects have since been terminated and Sanofi/GlaxoSmithKline are currently reformulating their vaccine due to the low efficacy in elderly people during their Phase 2 trials.

Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca probably could have brought their vaccines to market without government funding, though I'm much less certain Moderna would have been able to privately raise more than a billion dollars to fund their research and clinic trials.

As for the vaccine distribution part of Operation Warp Speed - that was a hot mess.

[LizBeth]

10. The lost 20 million too. Well 20 million disappeared. Don't know that they are lost.