The first Trump administration deserves fair praise for accelerating the development of these vaccines through Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership. But it was the private sector that prevailed and will be remembered.
In the United States, vaccines were delivered through an often ad hoc and chaotic system managed nominally by the government — but almost entirely run by private hospitals, clinics, pharmacies and district-run vaccination centers that relied on private-public partnerships. There was no federal system for scheduling the shots. Instead, countless different systems bloomed, many created by enterprising software companies, each seeking to simplify, but overall contributing to more chaos. Vaccine-hunting felt, at times, like a “Hunger Games” challenge, replete with illusory hopes and disappearing screens. In New York City, you stayed up late in order to pounce when the next tranche of appointments opened up. Then just as you clicked to claim a spot, it vanished — presumably to someone who had hit it a nanosecond before you had.
And remember the early days of testing? Public testing sites could take a couple of weeks to offer results. Anything quicker might require booking an appointment at a private facility, some of which charged hundreds of dollars. Other options arose, and soon the streets of major cities were lined with custom-outfitted vans and tents, the innovation of quick-thinking entrepreneurs who rushed in to meet a public need.
The collection and dissemination of facts during a pandemic is typically considered an essential public good and therefore best controlled through validated, state-endorsed channels. But it took three months for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to produce a national testing database. Rick Bright, the former head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, told me that the most important surveillance data “were generally reported by universities, such as Johns Hopkins, or the Covid Tracking Project, a private project coordinated by The Atlantic. The U.S. eventually adopted these dashboards, as did most news and media outlets, over any efforts that the government tried to produce.”
As for the responsibility to provide more than data at a moment of mass panic and obfuscation, many Americans looked to the government for answers. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, became for many a hero for shouldering the near-impossible task of dispensing information in the midst of a sandstorm of unknown unknowns. It was dangerous work. But as Zeynep Tufekci wrote here in June, “under questioning by a congressional subcommittee,” officials later “acknowledged that some key parts of the public health guidance their agencies promoted during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic were not backed up by solid science. What’s more, inconvenient information was kept from the public.”
