NYC Harvard Club Book Promotion – “Warp Speed: Inside The Operation That Beat COVID, The Critics and The Odds”

[johnkarls]

.
I propose that we read “Warp Speed: Inside The Operation That Beat COVID, The Critics and The Odds” by Paul Mango (Republic Book Publishers 6/14/2022 – 175 pages sans notes & index – Hardcover $21.99 + shipping or $11.49 Kindle from Amazon.com).


**********
THE HARVARD CLUB OF NYC WILL CONDUCT AN IN-PERSON SEMINAR AT THE CLUB BY PAUL MANGO 7:00 – 8:00 pm EDT on 9/20/2022 WHICH TYPICALLY COMPRISES A 30-MINUTE PRESENTATION FOLLOWED BY 30 MINUTES OF Q&A – IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO PARTICIPATE AND ARE NOT A MEMBER OF THE CLUB, PLEASE LET ME KNOW ASAP BEFORE REGISTRATIONS ARE LIMITED TO MEMBERS ONLY.


**********
NYC Harvard Club Notice –

Whether you are a Republican or Democrat, it will go down in history as the U.S. Government’s greatest achievement since the Manhattan Project: the 14-month campaign to develop an anti-Covid vaccine. Nobody thought it could be done, “it would take years,” everybody said. Almost all other nations tried — and nobody came close.

When the United States came to the finish line standing alone, it arrived with not one but two vaccines, with a third on the way! That’s like inventing three different kinds of atomic bombs! Furthermore, the vaccines were supposed to be 50% effective. They turned out to be 95% effective. According to the progressive Commonwealth Fund, they prevented 2.2 million deaths and 17 million hospitalizations — avoiding an estimated 66+ million additional infections and nearly $900 billion in associated health costs.

How did the United States manage to achieve this miracle? It took inspired leadership, close cooperation between government and the private sector, and a strong spirit of collegiality and cooperation among all members of the task force. One of the principals leading the team was Paul Mango — West Point, Harvard Business School (Baker Scholar), head of the Worldwide Healthcare Practice at McKinsey, and former Deputy Chief of Staff at Health and Human Services.

The team under President Trump consisted of only eight people, drawn from business and government. Among them they possessed a deep understanding of the current state of vaccine development, manufacturing, and the logistics of getting hundreds of millions of doses to the entire nation in record time.

“Developing vaccines would be the easy part,” says Mango. “The much more uncertain part would be manufacturing them with quality at scale.” How many vaccines should they try to develop? (The answer was 100, then reduced to fourteen, then six.) How long should they produce and test each vaccine before deciding they had a winner? Could they produce that vaccine in sufficient quantities? How many should they produce and where should they deliver them? What areas of the country had sufficient medical facilities and supplies? The questions went on and on, a never-ending race against time — with the press and politicians pounding on the door every day, demanding answers. Then when the vaccines were tested, manufactured and delivered, another unexpected obstacle emerged: the lack of available doctors and nurses to do the injections.

Somehow it all got done, a tribute what can be accomplished when government sets the guidelines and steps out of the way, and lets private sector ingenuity do the job. There is much to be learned from this experience, and it takes an insider like Paul Mango to tell the story.

This program will be held in-person at the Club.

Mike Morris, Program Committee


**********
Book Description per Amazon.com (quoting from the book’s dust jacket)

A powerful story of how our nation’s leaders overcame the odds, saving the American people from the throes of a deadly pandemic. The prior record for vaccine development and distribution was approximately 4.5 years. Operation Warp Speed got the COVID-19 vaccine to the American people in less than 10 months. Operation Warp Speed did not happen by accident. It was the result of exceptional leadership, explicit strategy, and unprecedented teamwork.

Author Paul Mango, the foremost leader of Operation Warp Speed and the former deputy chief of US Health and Human Services, chronicles the challenges and real dangers of developing the vaccine. From the beginning, two lead scientists, Dr. Moncef Slaoui and Dr. Debra Birx, fought head to head on which vaccines had the greatest probability of success. Tensions grew as the Army Materiel Command and the Center for Disease Control debated on whether public health agencies or the private sector would take over vaccine distribution.

Mango details the largest hurdle for the Operation Warp Speed team: though Pfizer, the first distribution company to deliver the mRNA vaccine, sought aid from the Federal Government, they refused the government’s request to oversee safe manufacturing of the vaccine, eventually leading to a major scandal as Pfizer missed its contractual obligation to deliver 40 million doses by the end of 2020, the number of positive cases reaching a frightening peak all the while.

In this harrowing, behind-the-scenes account of the most successful public-private partnership since World War II, we learn how the nation’s biggest leaders accomplished the impossible. Through sheer will and exceptional commitment, a small group of leaders fulfilled its mission, making the United States the only country in the world which could offer a vaccine to any citizen by April 2021, scarcely 14 months after the genetic identification of the virus.


**********
Author Bio (quoting from the book’s dust jacket)

Paul Mango was the Deputy Chief of Staff for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from 2019-2021. During this time, he was instrumental in advancing a number of important policies regarding consumer empowerment in the health care sector.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, he also served as Secretary Azar’s formal liaison to Operation Warp Speed where he was involved in nearly all strategic, operational and financial aspects of the program, and facilitated its day-to-day activities among the Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Defense and the White House. He was also instrumental in rebuilding the Strategic National Stockpile in the early days of the pandemic.

Prior to his role as Deputy Chief of Staff, Paul served from 2018-2019 as the Chief of Staff at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He currently serves on six private health care company boards and advisory councils.

He received his B.S. in General Engineering from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1981, where he graduated as a Distinguished Cadet. He received his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1988 where he graduated as a Baker Scholar.

Paul is married to Dawn Rucker, a graduate of West Point’s class of 1982, and has five daughters. He lives with his wife in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.