The development of this vaccine in less than a year since the outbreak of the virus is nearly miraculous. Indeed, last spring many thought it would take several years to develop a vaccine, get it approved by the FDA and distributed to the population.
What would've happened to small businesses, already ravaged by lockdowns and reduced customer traffic, if they had to go through all that again for the next several years? Indeed, they are going through it in California.
What would've happened to families already on the edge, emotionally, psychologically and financially, if they had to endure the loss of income and freedom of movement for several more years?
What would've happened to the educational development of our children had they been forced to spend another couple of years on pedagogically inadequate zoom lessons?
To what do we owe this near-miracle?
Surely President Trump and Vice-President Pence deserve a lot of credit, though they won't get it, for their role in establishing Operation Warp Speed, as does the head of that operation, Moncef Slaoui, whose expertise, Dan Henninger notes in a column at the Wall Street Journal, grew out of three decades of work with GlaxoSmithKline.
Henninger goes on to note that,
[T]hey created a public-private partnership that actually worked, in large part by busting through the bureaucratic sludge that normally slows anything.But though these men deserve our gratitude and admiration the real heroes of the story are the hundreds, or even thousands, of scientists and technicians who labored tirelessly in a pharmaceutical version of the Manhattan Project to bring us a vaccine that will, if all goes well, save hundreds of thousands of lives in the U.S. and millions of lives worldwide.
As Henninger notes, these people deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, but they won't get it. The Nobel prizes have become too politicized, and Big Pharma, like Trump, has become so demonized that such recognition of our debt to them by the Nobel committee is unimaginable.
The truth remains, nevertheless, that as hated as they are by the left, many of those haters will owe their health and even their lives to Donald Trump, Mike Pence and the pharmaceutical companies whose brilliant employees gave us the gift of a drug that may allow us all to return to some facsimile of normalcy over the next few months.
In conclusion Henninger says this:
The intellectual, technical and organizational firepower of thousands of men and women employed by pharma is what made these savior vaccines happen in 10 months rather than years. They won’t ask for anyone’s gratitude, but they deserve it.Yes, they do.
