One notable proposal on the concluding day of the World Economic Forum at Davos Jan. 29 came from the panel on COVID-19. Richard Hatchett, the director of CEPI, proposed that the 8-12 month crash program for vaccines, Operation Warp Speed, while remarkable, should not be a one-and-done.
Instead, the real lesson should be that governments and basic science could get such efforts down to a three-month time scale if the crash programs were to be institutionalized; that is, if governments saw such activity as their normal course of business. Hatchett was the former director of BARDA, the U.S.’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.
