“Oh, and he got the vaccines approved.”
It wasn’t Trump. It wasn’t Fauci. The guy behind Operation Warp Speed was Alex Azar. You can read about it here:
“Alex Azar’s Story of the Genesis of Operation Warp Speed”
Fauci was just a cog in the Warp Speed machine, he didn’t design it or control it. In a September 2020 interview he revealed that he’s a fan of traditional vaccines. Maybe he will join forces with the FR mRNA haters in denouncing “the Clot $hots”.
“Why Anthony Fauci is happy being the ‘skunk’ on the Coronavirus Task Force”
https://www.science.org/content/article/why-anthony-fauci-happy-being-skunk-coronavirus-task-force
Q: Operation Warp Speed wanted vaccines that could be mass produced quickly. But what do you think of its portfolio? The obvious missing component is the inactivated virus vaccine. That’s moved very far with Chinese-made vaccines and now Europe is investing big time in it.
A: In a perfect world, you would want to get all those platforms going. A decision was made regarding the broad effort. I wasn’t the primary person in making that decision. I was and am responsible only for the NIH component of that multifaceted effort. We do the research, and we say, “These are the things we need to do.” A decision was made that they were going to have an overarching process involving multiple agencies of the federal government. It wasn’t completely in my hands. The one thing that I’m glad happened, because we were pushing for that, was to get a broader portfolio, a wide range of vaccine platforms including the more traditional one of recombinant proteins with an adjuvant.
Q: Most COVID-19 vaccines being tested in the United States only contain versions of the viral surface protein, spike. The inactivated virus vaccines have all the viral proteins. What do you think about broadening to include more viral components?
A: You know, it’s an interesting psychodynamic, saying we are in this catastrophic outbreak and we’ve got to move as quickly as we possibly can. We’re relying on the companies that come forth and say, “We’re willing to make an investment in this approach.” There was an emphasis on needing to do something about it right now, right away, because that’s the only thing you have, as opposed to approaches with other diseases where there was less of an emergency nature to the process. Other antigens besides the spike likely will be pursued in the second generation of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.
Q: The EUA situation raises an interesting problem. The way convalescent plasma was approved for an EUA combined with the EUA of hydroxychloroquine is tied together with confidence in the vaccine dropping.
A: I understand the need for and importance of EUAs, but I have long been of the opinion that the gold standard of determining conclusively if an intervention is safe and effective is conducting a randomized controlled clinical trial. An EUA is based on the principle that the benefit outweighs the risk in a situation where there is a reason to believe that the intervention may be effective. I am all for that—this can get life-saving interventions out quickly for people who need it. But this should only be done in a situation that doesn’t interfere with the process of ultimately proving whether that intervention is truly safe and effective. For convalescent plasma, an EUA was issued, and I hope that when the clinical trials are completed, we get a definitive answer.
The Azar and Fauci articles were extremely interesting and informative. Thanks for posting.
It was all a sham. The British Medical Journal was one of the first highly respected sources to expose it. Here’s one of their articles, from the associate editor of the esteemed publication:
Covid-19 vaccine trials cannot tell us if they will save lives
https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/covid-19-vaccine-trials-cannot-tell-us-if-they-will-save-lives/
None of the current trials are designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospitalizations, intensive care use, or deaths.
Vaccines are being hailed as the solution to the covid-19 pandemic, but the vaccine trials currently underway are not designed to tell us if they will save lives, reports Peter Doshi, Associate Editor at The BMJ today.
Several covid-19 vaccine trials are now in their most advanced (phase 3) stage, but what will it mean exactly when a vaccine is declared “effective”?
Many may assume that successful phase 3 studies will mean we have a proven way of keeping people from getting very sick and dying from covid-19. And a robust way to interrupt viral transmission.
Yet the current phase 3 trials are not actually set up to prove either, says Doshi.
“None of the trials currently underway are designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospitalisations, intensive care use, or deaths. Nor are the vaccines being studied to determine whether they can interrupt transmission of the virus,” he writes.
Thanks. Interesting piece about Alex Azar, would like to get more details. Further down into the piece he touches on the problems with getting bioreactors to deliver the exact proteins you want at scale, and that the mRNA platform is a way to get the body to be your own in-situ bioreactor. I’m guessing that this last bit will not be reassuring to the Vax Covidian contingent, but it’s a good analogy for this layperson.
But Azar seems to have forgotten or overlooked asking Malone for his advice. Wonder if that’s how Malone got his nose all out of joint at the beginning there?
And Fauci is always talking through his hat, which isn’t news. But he does come close to discussing the “why” of using only the S protein in the first generation of vaccines. I always figured that at least one of the reasons was that the guys who were developing these had heard of SARS-COV-1 and the ADE problems with the whole-virus vax that had been started from that, and decided they would like to avoid that whole problem. He kinda sneaks up on that, but then backs away, and alludes to getting some other antigens for the next generation of vaccines.