Operation Warp Speed as a “Moonshot”: Some Public Policy Lessons

Abstract

This article presents Operation Warp Speed (OWS), a federal government project launched by the Trump administration in May 2020 to develop a vaccine against COVID-19. In contrast with the often incoherent and sometimes reckless behaviour of President Trump during the pandemic, OWS was a focussed and largely successful initiative to support vaccine research, manufacture, and delivery. It contributed to the discovery and early deployment of several vaccines within a year and paved the way for a comparatively effective vaccination campaign in the United States in 2021, which later met popular resistance along partisan lines. The article examines OWS as a public-private partnership to achieve a “moonshot”, drawing on Mariana Mazzucato’s work on Mission Economics which calls for more pro-active government action to tackle major economic, environmental, and social challenges. The article then qualifies the success of OWS as a moonshot, pointing to the competitive market elements built into the project which also helped ensure its success. Finally, this research strives to examine OWS and the US vaccination rollout using complexity analysis, to give some perspective to the emergence of vaccine resistance behaviour as of spring 2021.