The only vaccine candidate that wasn’t fully Slaoui’s choice was AstraZeneca’s. Oxford University, which had a crack vaccine team at its Jenner Institute for Vaccine Research, had already begun a clinical trial for a vaccine it was developing; AstraZeneca was its distribution and manufacturing partner. And the press was already calling the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine a winner. That made Azar think about Birx’s demand for a non-mRNA vaccine, so he put Kadlec and Marks in charge of negotiating a deal. On May 21, Operation Warp Speed gave AstraZeneca $1.2 billion in exchange for 300 million doses, so long as its vaccine got FDA approval. That came out to about $4 a dose. (The company insisted that it would not make a profit from the vaccine.)
When Azar called Trump to tell him about the deal, Trump was furious. “Boris Johnson is going to kill me,” he said, according to someone who was in the room.
A few days earlier, Moderna announced that its vaccine had generated neutralizing antibodies in eight volunteers. It was a tiny sample, and there was still plenty of skepticism. Nevertheless, Moderna’s stock, which had sold for less than $30 a share back in April, shot up to $80. That evening, the company announced another stock sale. This time, it was able to raise more than $1.3 billion to help jump-start its manufacturing capabilities. In total, Moderna received about $10 billion from the federal government.
Each company got its own bespoke deal from Slaoui. Sanofi, which was collaborating with GSK, got $2.1 billion for 100 million doses. Johnson & Johnson got $1 billion for 100 million doses.
As for Pfizer, with 2019 revenue of nearly $52 billion, it didn’t need or want to be part of Warp Speed. It feared that partnering with the government would slow it down. Inside Pfizer, the quest to develop a vaccine with its partner BioNTech was labeled Project Light Speed. “You can have any resources you need, but you need to succeed,” the company’s CEO, Albert Bourla, told his vaccine team. “And by the way,” he added, “my expectations on timeline are far faster than anything you think is actually possible, and you have no excuse not to deliver, because any resource you ask for, you’re going to get.”
But there was one thing Pfizer needed that only Warp Speed could supply: a guaranteed market. Even mighty Pfizer couldn’t risk shareholders’ wrath by making a huge investment that didn’t pay off. Slaoui took care of that in July, making a deal to pay the company $1.95 billion for 100 million doses. Although Pfizer insists it was not thinking about profits when it began its vaccine work, this deal nonetheless set the price of a dose at close to $20. Moderna’s US price ended up being set around $16.
Where was Warp Speed’s money coming from? Lacking their own congressionally mandated funds, the team had to scramble. They pulled $10 billion from the CARES Act, which was there thanks to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who had added extra money to the Strategic National Stockpile in order to create a slush fund. They also pulled money from the hospital fund established by the CARES Act. “Thank God for Steven,” Azar told a colleague.
By late May, Slaoui held a virtual meeting with the companies to discuss the next step: the phase three clinical trials. “We are preparing to run what may turn out to be the largest and fastest field efficacy trials…in history,” Slaoui wrote in the invitation to the meeting. The trials would require finding, preparing, vaccinating, and monitoring 120,000 people over six months—or more if Novavax and Sanofi got through their phase two trials. It was important that the group be diverse, given the disproportionate effect of COVID-19 on communities of color.
In normal circumstances, phase three trials take years. Slaoui wanted them done in a matter of months. In addition to dramatically speeding up the process, Operation Warp Speed had to find and equip all the clinical trial sites with hard-to-obtain personal protective equipment so that everyone involved in the trials would be safe.
“We basically have to go from an early adolescent company to a full adult company, skipping all of late adolescence,” Moderna’s Juan Andres later told Harvard Business School. Every minute mattered. “I think it would be very difficult to claim that the vaccines would have been developed in this time frame without not just the money but the coordinating role that Warp Speed played,” says Noubar Afeyan, the CEO of Flagship Pioneering, which helped found Moderna. “General Perna and Moncef Slaoui brought a level of expertise and experience and logistical capability and, I’d say, a soft hard touch. A velvet stick, such that people had to behave.”
Joe Nocera, Bethany McLean
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