On May 15, 2020 the Trump Administration announced Operation Warpspeed, an initiative to expedite the development of a vaccine that would provide immunity against the Sars-Cov-2 coronavirus.
Via the CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security) Act, $10 billion in taxpayer funds were distributed to the largest pharmaceutical corporations; this was increased to $18 billion in August 2020 once candidates were announced.
The vaccines themselves were leveraged as a political weapon even before they were announced:
The funding from the program itself was put toward expansion of production and distribution of the vaccine candidates once approved.
The mRNA technology used for these vaccines had been experimented with for some time, but previous attempts- such as the vaccine candidates for Sars-Cov-1- had never gotten past animal trials.
Operation Warpspeed's other massive impact was a relinquishment of the vaccine development safety protocols that had been developed over decades:
Shortly after the Emergency Use Authorization of the vaccines by the FDA, almost all of those in the vaccine control group for the clinical studies ended up taking the vaccines, eroding the integrity of the study.
As per standard vaccine safety testing for emergency use, the clinical trials for the COVID-19 vaccine candidates from Pfizer and Moderna were scheduled to end late 2023/early 2024.
Suggested Reading
Sars-Cov-2 mRNA vaccine biodistribution data (rodent model), Pfizer report to Japanese government (PDF), FOI'd by Dr. Byram Bridle, June 2021
For reflection and discussion
Did the amount of money distributed in operation warpspeed increase the number of qualified professionals working on vaccine development?
What impact did the timing of the announcement of the successful vaccine candidates have politically?
In order to approve the vaccines for use in humans so quickly, what standard safety steps were bypassed?
Since taxpayers funded the development, manufacturing and distribution of the vaccines, is it fair that they should also have to pay for the vaccines themselves?
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Covid Injections
Like any organism, a virus seeks to survive. From an evolutionary perspective, the best way to do this is to become more infectious but less virulent. This is not to say that virii are conscious or determinant, but more future hosts make for better odds of survival.