West Wing Reads

 

West Wing Reads

August 19, 2020

How the White House Prepared for a Pandemic

The Trump Administration “was well aware of the threat of a pandemic before the novel coronavirus emerged,” Joel Zinberg and Tomas Philipson write in The Wall Street Journal. In fact, a White House report produced last September laid the groundwork for President Trump’s historic push for a vaccine, now known as Operation Warp Speed.
 
“The report discussed how the lack of private market incentives had led to underinvestment in developing and using innovative technologies that can quickly produce vaccines for a new virus . . . When Covid-19 appeared a few months later, the administration expeditiously applied the report’s lessons on the value of public-private partnerships to speed vaccine innovation and production.”
 
Now, “new vaccines are being developed at previously unimaginable speed.

 

WSJ OPINION

The White House Prepared for a Pandemic

A September 2019 report laid the groundwork for Operation Warp Speed.

By Joel M. Zinberg and Tomas J. Philipson

Aug. 18, 2020 7:16 pm ET

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo launched the Democrats’ broadside against the Trump administration’s Covid-19 response. “Our current federal government is dysfunctional and incompetent,” he told virtual conventioneers Monday in a recorded speech. “It couldn’t fight off the virus. In fact, it didn’t even see it coming.”

In reality, the administration was well aware of the threat of a pandemic before the novel coronavirus emerged. We helped develop a September 2019 White House report, “Managing the Impact of Pandemic Influenza Through...

Harnessing the power of science to fight the coronavirus

by Kelvin Droegemeier 

 | August 19, 2020 12:00 AM

 

In the midst of the great losses and numerous challenges created by the coronavirus pandemic, science has been catapulted to the front lines in the fight against the “invisible enemy,” SARS-CoV-2.

Decades of scientific discovery and progress have equipped the nation’s scientists, engineers, and healthcare professionals with the knowledge, tools, and technologies needed to understand this novel virus. From years of scientific development, researchers can now identify therapeutic targets, anticipate spread, and rapidly develop innovative treatments for the associated COVID-19 disease.

Science is one of the strongest weapons that we have against this virus, which is why President Trump has enlisted our unrivaled research community in the fight. Since the start of the pandemic, the Trump administration has taken several actions to engage scientists in academia, industry, and government to understand and defeat this disease.

For example, Trump is working with Congress to enable federal agencies to direct billions of dollars in funding to support COVID-19 research aimed at providing life-saving interventions. This massive investment already is producing benefits, as exemplified by the early encouraging findings in patients enrolled in the National Institutes of Health Phase 3 clinical trials of Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine.

Trump also initiated Operation Warp Speed as part of a broader strategy to accelerate the development, manufacturing, and distribution of critically needed therapeutics and vaccines — all without compromising ethics, accountability, or safety. Led by the Department of Health and Human Services in partnership with the Department of Defense, Operation Warp Speed aims to deliver significant quantities of a safe, effective vaccine for COVID-19 in the next several months — a process that normally takes years to achieve.

Our ability to wield science against COVID-19 today is the result of generations of men and women whose pioneering work across every field of science paved the way for innovations that protect first responders, diagnose and heal the sick, and guide the decisions of public health policymakers. Rapid development of vaccines and promising therapeutics, such as remdesivir, are possible because thousands of scientific trailblazers in the fields of polio, malaria, and HIV advanced our basic knowledge about the immune system and the molecular biology of viruses. The knowledge and tools that emerged from the Human Genome Project two decades ago, for example, enabled scientists, to sequence the SARS-CoV2 genome fully in only a matter of hours.

Yet, these discoveries and innovations in the biological and health sciences represent just a fraction of how previous discoveries are guiding current response efforts. In a pandemic, supply chains are essential to providing essential goods and services, fueling innovation, and creating American jobs. Social science research on supply chains gives companies large and small the ability to serve people more effectively.

For example, this research reveals new ways to deliver products while reducing points of contact — which means fewer people getting sick. It also reveals new ways that humans can use dynamic route planning to identify and workaround risky hot spots — which means fewer disruptions to our economy.

Social science research also creates technologies that allow companies to better integrate their own production schedules with better knowledge of when other companies are reopening — which means more continuous employment for American workers.

Advances in high performance computing ensure that outputs from epidemiological models (which previously took days, if not weeks, to produce) are now enabling near-real-time decisions for creating and allocating resources such as ventilators. An emphasis on expanding access to high-speed broadband internet helps millions of people work, study, and utilize telemedicine from home. Atmospheric, earth, and ocean sciences research has aided understanding of the survivability of viruses within the environment, yielding important information for creating disinfection plans.

The Trump administration’s focus on science extends well beyond our shores to include the global community. Publishers worldwide voluntarily responded to a 16-nation call, led by the White House in March, to make all COVID-19-related scientific publications immediately accessible in a public repository. To leverage these and other research results, the White House joined industry, academic, and nonprofit leaders to release the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset — a collection of nearly 200,000 scholarly articles on the coronavirus that are machine-readable for data and text mining. Researchers around the world already have contributed extensive tools and insights, including numerous peer-reviewed publications, aimed at understanding the virus and its effects.

Just as the United States has united to confront every threat throughout our history, we will emerge from today’s crisis stronger and more resilient. The knowledge and technologies brought to bear in the fight against COVID-19 will serve as the new foundation for the nation’s response to whatever challenge may come next, giving us extraordinary innovations and discoveries that will provide the capabilities needed to maintain the health, safety, and security of our nation.

Kelvin Droegemeier is Trump’s science adviser and the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology.

 

“President Trump recently delivered on our recommendation to suspend the payroll tax . . . The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that Trump's tax deferral may put $100 billion worth of extra pay back in the pockets of U.S. workers through year-end,” Stephen Moore and Alfredo Ortiz write in RealClearMarkets.

 

 

“Chicago police officers have been retiring at double the normal rate recently, raising concerns that the number of new hires won’t keep pace with the number leaving,” Frank Main reports. “Who wants to stay in this environment? . . . The mayor doesn’t back us,” the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police President said. Read more in the Chicago Sun-Times.