Leader of U.S. vaccine push says he‘ll quit if politics trumps science

Moncef Slaoui, the scientific head of Operation Warp Speed, spent 29 years making vaccines at GlaxoSmithKline

Science's COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Heising-Simons Foundation.

Moncef Slaoui

On a nice day in early May, Moncef Slaoui was sitting by his pool when he received a phone call that would dramatically change his life—converting him from a retired executive of a big pharmaceutical company to the scientific leader of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, a multibillion-dollar crash program to develop a vaccine in record time.

What do you think about staging a Manhattan Project to make a COVID-19 vaccine? asked the caller, a person Slaoui would only describe to ScienceInsider as a former congressman who once headed the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, biotech’s powerful trade group. (James Greenwood is the only person with that resume.) Could we make a vaccine in 10, 8, or even 6 months, or is it impossible? the caller pressed him. Slaoui, an immunologist who formerly headed vaccine development at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), gladly shared his thoughts. “I’m very passionate about preventing pandemics,” says Slaoui, who led a failed attempt to build a biopreparedness organization that explicitly aimed to rapidly make vaccines against emerging pathogens like SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

At the end of the call, the former congressman told Slaoui not to be surprised if somebody called from the Trump administration. “Honestly, I hung up and told my wife, ‘Oh shit,’” Slaoui says. “I was hesitant around the politics.”

About 1.5 weeks later, a “senior leader” from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) phoned and asked Slaoui to come to Washington, D.C. He made the trip from his home in Pennsylvania, meeting with the secretaries of HHS and defense, senior presidential adviser (and son-in-law) Jared Kushner, and a few others. “My No. 1 question was, ‘Is this going to be interfered with?’” Slaoui says. “Is this empowered 100%?” He says he got the answer he needed, and 4 days later, on 15 May he stood in the Rose Garden with President Donald Trump, who announced Slaoui as the scientific head of Operation Warp Speed.

To date, Warp Speed has invested more than $10 billion in eight vaccine candidates. Much of that money goes to “at-risk” purchasing of vaccines, which means the companies will produce hundreds of millions of doses that may wind up in the garbage if those candidates do not prove safe and effective. Three of the vaccines are now in large-scale efficacy trials, and interim looks at their data by independent safety and monitoring boards could reveal efficacy signals as early as October. If that happens, a vaccine could become quickly available through what’s known as an emergency use authorization (EUA), a regulatory pathway that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has for diagnostics, treatments, and vaccines.

Talking to ScienceInsider today, Slaoui insisted he won’t be swayed by political pressures to rush an unsafe or ineffective vaccine, and that science will carry the day—or he’ll quit.

Slaoui has given few interviews since taking the Warp Speed job and he has taken something of a beating in the media for his financial holdings in companies working on COVID-19 vaccines—he was on the board of Moderna and has since stepped down, but he retains his GlaxoSmithKline stock. And Warp Speed has been slammed for a lack of transparency on its decisions.