Fauci’s Boss Praises Trump Administration for Vaccine Development: ‘Breathtaking’ That it Got ‘Done in 11 Months’
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National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins credited the Trump administration in a Sunday for overseeing the development of a Covid-19 vaccine at a “breathtaking” pace.
Collins said in a weekend interview with Axios that he gave “a great deal of credit” for Operation Warp Speed to Alex Azar, President Donald Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Service, and called it “an effort that many of us were not initially convinced was going to be necessary.” He also said it was “thought about as a Manhattan Project,” the United States’ effort to develop nuclear weapons during World War II.
“Those words were used sometimes to describe what needed to happen in order to get all parts of the government together in an unprecedented way to test up to six vaccines in rigorous trials … so that if any of those trials happen to work, you would already have doses ready to go into arms,” Collins said.
Collins oversees Dr. Anthony Fauci in his role as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, despite Collins’ lower public profile. Fauci’s commentary on the Trump administration’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic has vacillated wildly, with Fauci telling reporters at his first press conference under the Biden administration the federal government was “certainly … not starting from scratch” when it came to distributing the vaccine. He walked that assertion back in an interview this month, saying the “actual plan of getting the vaccine doses into people’s arms … was not a well-coordinated plan.”
Collins cited Dr. Moncef Slaoui’s leadership of Operation Warp Speed as another reason to credit the previous administration. A former GlaxoSmithKline researcher, Slaoui guided the program as it sank billions into initiatives encouraging the development of vaccines by Pfizer, Moderna, and other companies.
“That effort and the recruitment of Dr. Moncef Slaoui was an incredibly important step forward that the administration deserves credit for, because that did motivate a lot of actions, a lot of coordination,” he said.
