Operation Warp Speed Chief Adviser Moncef Slaoui Resigns

Operation Warp Speed (OWS)’s chief adviser Moncef Slaoui submitted his resignation Tuesday but said he will stay on in that role for 30 days after Jan. 21 to support the incoming administration.

Before assuming his lead role as OWS science adviser last May, Slaoui was with GlaxoSmithKline’s vaccines department for 30 years and later served on Moderna’s board (DID, May 18, 2020). He resigned from Moderna’s board to take up the OWS role and was pressured to sell his company stock to avoid a potential conflict of interest.

The resignation, which was requested by the incoming Biden administration, paves the way for a new team to handle the government’s COVID-19 vaccines and treatments initiative. Slaoui said it is not clear what form the OWS program will now take. HHS, a key component of OWS alongside the Department of Defense, also declined to elaborate on the initiative’s future.

Last month, President-elect Biden nominated California’s Attorney General Xavier Becerra to serve as HHS Secretary, pending Senate confirmation, and picked Rochelle Walensky as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (DID, Dec. 9, 2020). They will replace current OWS members Secretary Alex Azar and Robert Redfield, respectively.

Whether via OWS or not, Becerra and Walensky will be spearheading the new administration’s COVID-19 pandemic strategy. Specifically, they will oversee the continued rollout of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines now being distributed nationwide and of future vaccines from Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, the two potentially next in line to get the FDA’s blessing.

After launching inoculations in December, OWS fell far short of the government’s goal of vaccinating 20 million people by the end of 2020. As of early yesterday morning, the CDC’s COVID-19 vaccine tracker estimated almost 10.3 million people had received their first dose while almost 29.4 million doses had been distributed. ― Jason Scott