Moncef Slaoui was thanked by the Trump administration in May for directing a Manhattan-style effort to reduce the time it takes to develop a coronavirus vaccine and produce hundreds of millions of doses for the American people.
Well-known immunologist and vice president of vaccines division GlaxoSmithKline Plc is a little-known in the pharmaceutical world. He took the position of chief scientific adviser to Operation Warp Speed with two conditions: “Total empowerment, and no intervention.”
Slaoui, 61, sees the rapid development of several vaccines and the manufacture of millions of doses as an unprecedented success. However, a slow and turbulent spread has frightened millions of Americans and sworn Biden’s administration to speed up pace. Slaoui said he is upset that he failed to get more shots than his arms.
“A vaccine is useless if it keeps on a shelf,” he said.
Speaking to Bloomberg following his retirement earlier this month as an adviser to the U.S. pandemic response to Biden’s administration request, Slaoui thought of a proposed broken health care system that he is responsible for the difficulties in administering doses.
His comments have been edited for clarity and legibility:
Moncef Slaoui: 100 million doses in 100 days is well below our plans. By that time, 100 million people had been vaccinated. That means two doses. At least in terms of manufacturing and supply, in fact 200 million doses will be delivered by the end of March or mid-April. So, if the goal is to use only half of them, that is the goal. I hope that goal has been achieved, and far beyond.
Bloomberg: Why is the gap between vaccine doses spread and doses so widely given? Out of 39.8 doses delivered in the U.S., only 19.8 million views have been delivered so far, according to the Bloomberg Vaccine Detector.
Slaoui: Having lived in Europe and now the US, it is clear that the health systems are so different, as opposed to. The issue in the US is that the system is so fragmented, that there are so many health providers, so many health insurers, so many systems, so many jurisdictions, and so many people move more between them than there are. people moving around in Europe. It is very difficult to deliver a meaningful message to people, and it is difficult to move everyone in the health care system immediately to do something.
It was the way we went about it, and it was clearly a problem, to say, in that we cannot align all of these systems until we work through them, to empower them. We were part of an administration that had a worldview based on less centralization.
Bloomberg: Why did the Trump administration’s approach to working across the states fail?
Slaoui: What has surprised me, in fact, is that we have gone to health administration officials in many authorities and states. We spent two or three hours with them in person and countless hours on calls. We explained, we are going to have vaccines. There will be a limited number of doses. There will be a prioritization process, and we are going to distribute doses to each state according to the population. And then every state and health system has to tell us where to put them.
Every week, a health system in New York or California would say, send 200 doses to this zip code, 300 to that other one, and 500 or so miles to this hospital, and so on. How is it possible that the health system would say so precisely that they want 200 here, 500 there, 700 here, and then when we add them with 99.9% accuracy, it turns a- can’t they even vaccinate people?
These places were supposed to be ready for vaccination, and in reality, we have not been told, we do not have the facilities to do so. So that remains a puzzle for me.
Bloomberg: What could Operation Warp Speed do differently to achieve its goal of dispensing 20 million doses by the end of 2020?
Slaoui: I do not neglect that this has been, for the most part, below our target. That we lost it. In terms of finding, developing, and manufacturing vaccines, we have gone faster than ever. But a vaccine is useless if it stays on the shelf. Clearly it must end in people’s arms.
He might have found a hundred stadiums where people could come and get the vaccine. Or use 200,000 army personnel to come and vaccinate people in tents. Maybe that’s the way you do it. Our approach in our plan is that as soon as we get past Stage 1a, that limited population, let’s go into the pharmacies. 90% of Americans own a pharmacy within 10 miles. As we reach those numbers, which are happening now, the vaccination rate is going up. At the moment, we are reaching a million people every day, and we will continue to grow based on the previous plan.
Slaoui: Pfizer gets anything they asked for. We used DPA 18 different times to speed up manufacturing. With the DPA comes the opportunity to get premium access to the products you need. As a result, the government has much clearer visibility on what Pfizer is doing with these products. It is obligatory to use those results obtained through DPA for the manufacture of vaccines for the US And that in fact creates a lot more clarity around Pfizer plants than before.
Bloomberg: Anthony Fauci said he felt “something” released now that he was no longer working for the Trump administration. How do you reflect on your time working for the White House?
Slaoui: On the day I was interviewed to take the job, I put forward two conditions: full empowerment and no intervention. I remember saying, “I don’t know the bureaucracy, I don’t know how this world works and I’m not going to learn how it works. I’m just going to focus on the goal and run with it. ” And they said, “Perfect, that’s what we want.”
When the President said, “Do you think you can have this data before Election Day? ”I always said, Mr. President, there is no way you know. Whoever tells you that it is possible does not know what they are talking about. And whoever tells you it’s not possible, they don’t know who they’re talking about. If there was an intervention, I would raise my hand and retire.
I know Tony well, I respect him, and I have sympathy for him. I would say to the system, see if you let science do what it has to do.