Paul Mango’s recent book, Warp Speed: Inside the Operation That Beat COVID, the Critics, and the Odds, is a handbook for how to do government programs right. It shows how the Trump administration’s response to Covid — empower and support the private sector to make world-beating vaccines by de-risking private-sector investment — was the best in the world, even receiving praise from other countries. More than that, it marks a clear path forward out of the current Covid Omicron V2.0 morass.
Mango, who worked at HHS under Trump as deputy chief of staff and later as his liaison with Operation Warp Speed, is well-positioned to tell this story. Unlike its closest historical analogy, the Manhattan Project, OWS has been curiously undercovered. Indeed, the mainstream media were only lukewarm when the vaccines were first released, and the canonical books on Covid — such as Andy Slavitt’s predictably self-congratulatory Preventable, or Nightmare Scenario, by Damian Paletta and Yasmeen Abutaleb — spend little time on the unambiguously clear policy success of OWS and instead obsess over the much more cloudy questions of masking, lockdowns, and school closures.
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