Nearly eight months into a global pandemic, the United States government is continuing to show that it cares more about capitalism than the safety of its citizens by spending billions of dollars to rush the development of a vaccine for the coronavirus.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 175,000 Americans have died as a result of contracting COVID-19. Meanwhile, in Wuhan, China where the earliest cases of the virus originated, residents are enjoying their slow return to normalcy. 

Despite the continued increase of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the U.S., the government seems to be focusing more of its time and resources on the development of a vaccine than preventing the spread of the virus.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense have teamed up in an unprecedented effort to develop an effective vaccine in months versus the typical timeline for the development of a vaccine that could span over the course of multiple years.

This collaborative effort called Operation Warp Speed aims to produce and deliver 300 million doses of safe and effective vaccines with the initial doses available by January 2021, as part of a broader strategy to accelerate the development, manufacturing and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics. 

The drastic reduction in time that would normally be spent studying the side effects of a developing vaccine is reason enough for the average American to be wary of the vaccine upon its release in January. That is, if it is even actually released.

    Since its inception in May, Operation Warp Speed has clearly served as a money maker for private pharmaceutical companies and does not have the general population’s best interest in mind.

A key component to Operation Warp Speed is the collaboration of the federal government and privately owned companies for the development of the candidate vaccines through transactions of millions and in some cases, billions of dollars.

 Even more alarming is that Dr. Moncef Slaoui, chief advisor for Operation Warp Speed, is a former pharmaceutical executive working under a contract that deems him exempt from federal disclosure rules that would require him to list his outside positions, stock holdings and other potential conflicts of interest. Meaning he could easily allocate funds to companies that he is invested in without any repercussions. 

In addition to the operation’s questionable leadership it has some obviously concerning protocols.

  Due to the rushed nature of the vaccine development, Operation Warp Speed is progressing through extreme multitasking, aligning its protocols for production efficiency with protocols concerning safety demonstration. Essentially, several phases of development are happening simultaneously.

As a result, the developing vaccine candidates are being mass produced before their side effects are fully observed and understood. So what happens if a candidate vaccine is proved harmful after it has been mass produced? 

This and other questions have been left unanswered by Operation Warp Speed leadership.

One of the biggest unanswered questions about Operation Warp Speed is how the vaccine will be distributed to Americans and what it will cost them.

 According to the fact sheet created by the Department of Health and Human Services, “The Administration is committed to providing free or low-cost COVID-19 countermeasures to the American people as fast as possible. Any vaccine or therapeutic doses purchased with US taxpayer dollars will be given to the American people at no cost.”

 This provides basically no real answer for Americans who are worried about the affordability of the vaccine upon its release.

The American people are continuing to suffer the consequences of a drastic underreaction from the U.S. federal government in response to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Instead of taking the pandemic seriously from the beginning, the government has turned to spending billions of dollars that go directly to private corporations, offering no concrete results, that will put American lives in danger.