Can Operation Warp Speed Serve as a Model for Accelerating Innovations Beyond Covid Vaccines?
Operation Warp Speed (OWS) was a roughly $18 billion program undertaken by the US government to accelerate the development, production, and administration of vaccines in the heat of the COVID-19 pandemic. The success of the program in shortening the typical development cycle by an order of magnitude—using a completely new delivery technology (mRNA) no less—has led to calls for using programs modeled after OWS for other innovations that would potentially have great social value.
The various elements of the OWS we detail can be synthesized into two maxims concerning spending to avert an existential crisis: spend prodigiously, leaving no stone unturned; spend effectively, cutting red tape. The rollout of vaccines under OWS experienced fewer hiccups than therapeutics and diagnostics rolled out outside of the program, suggesting the maxims have some merit. However, the large OWS budget was spent with fewer checks and balances traditionally in place to minimize waste, fraud, and abuse, suggesting that the OWS model for accelerating innovation involves risks and thus presents a tradeoff. The strongest cases for the OWS model are emergencies checking three boxes—scale, speed, and spillovers. These three boxes are obviously checked by wars, pandemics, global warming, and other existential crises.
In cases in which some but not all boxes are checked, such as Alzheimer’s, devastating as this endemic disease is, it may not be necessary to abandon traditional markets and legislative processes to incentivize innovation. Still, there may be scope for improving incentives by adopting elements of OWS that do not require relaxing checks and balances—such as encouraging multiple shots on goal, even some long shots, or reallocating some funding from push to pull.