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‘Bereft’: How Operation Warp Speed’s decisions left the world waiting for a vaccine
In a series of meetings in the fall of 2020, Trump administration officials convened to decide whether a pharmaceutical company they had helped fund and support would be able to deliver what it had promised — Covid-19 vaccine doses for the U.S. and the world.

More than 500,000 people worldwide had died from the virus and the administration was under increasing pressure to find a suitable source of inoculation — and quickly. But one of its top vaccine candidates, Maryland-based Novavax, was reporting data that indicated the company was struggling to find a way to consistently manufacture a high-quality shot. And it did not yet have tests that could determine the levels of purity within each tranche.

“It was a total mess,” one person with direct knowledge of Novavax’s production process said of the situation, expressing a view that at least two other people who attended the meetings shared. This account is based on the recollections of those people, along with five current and former senior officials, four of whom requested anonymity to disclose internal deliberations.