Why Operation Warp Speed worked
On Friday January 3, 2020, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, phoned Alex Azar, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. With the words, “we have a problem in China,” Redfield broke to the secretary and those of us on his immediate staff news that was about to change the world. At the time, neither Redfield nor anyone else knew much about the characteristics of the virus that would become known formally as SARS-CoV-2, but he knew enough to sense that we needed to respond, and quickly. Thus began an odyssey of pandemic response actions, strategies and regulatory processes that would consume HHS, where I worked, along with much of the rest of the administration, until Inauguration Day 2021.
