When an unexpected pandemic struck, he knew how to lead and manage the effort to get a vaccine out in record time, at tremendous personal financial cost.
Today I participated in the FREOPP Freedom and Progress conference in Washington, D.C. I was in a debate about trade, video of which I hope will be available at some point in the future. But I wanted to do a quick post about the lunch session right now.
The speaker was Alex Azar, secretary of health and human services in the first Trump administration, from 2018 to 2021. He was previously general counsel of the department and then deputy secretary under George W. Bush. As secretary in 2020 and 2021, he was part of Operation Warp Speed, the public-private partnership to develop a Covid vaccine.
The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity’s president, Avik Roy, pointed out that before being secretary, Azar was president of the U.S. division of Eli Lilly. Naturally, when he became secretary, he had to sell his Eli Lilly stock.
“I think I got rid of everything at $62 a share,” Azar said. At the closing bell today, Eli Lilly was trading at $727.53. “If I had just gone hunting and fishing for the last seven years, life would have been really good,” he joked.
Azar sacrificed that windfall to make life better for millions of others. When he took the job, he didn’t know Covid was coming. But because of the record time in which the Covid vaccine was developed, the economy reopened faster and fewer people died than would have otherwise.
Azar said a Chinese researcher had published the genetic sequence of the Covid virus on January 10, 2020. “On January 13, the NIH and the NIAID had actually developed a candidate vaccine,” he said. “Eight weeks later we were in the human clinic, in human arms,” which was faster than ever before for vaccine development. . . . We had some of the largest vaccine clinical trials in human history,” Azar said, with 30,000 people participating.
By the time Operation Warp Speed was launched in May 2020, Azar said there were 100 candidate vaccines. At that point, the challenge was in moving faster with resources and approval processes to get the vaccine to the public.
“Commonwealth Fund, which is no friend of the Trump administration, said that Operation Warp Speed saved three million American lives and I think over 12 million lives around the world,” Azar said. “The International Monetary Fund said that for every 24 hours that a vaccine came sooner, it saved $26 billion,” which Azar said happened to be roughly the entire cost of Operation Warp Speed. “So literally in one day, we achieved the repayment of what we spent.”
Azar wasn’t the only one who made personal financial sacrifices. The scientific director of Operation Warp Speed was Moncef Slaoui. “He had been on the board of a little company called Moderna,” Azar said, and he too had to sell his holdings to work for the government. “That man probably sacrificed a billion dollars to serve his country.”
Azar said Slaoui was paid a dollar in nominal salary for working on Operation Warp Speed. In exchange, he got “nothing but abuse” from the public, Azar said. “And I can assure you Moncef was not doing it for political reasons.”
Later on, conversation turned to the job of secretary of health and human services in general. “It’s really one of the largest-scale management-executive jobs on earth,” Azar said. “At various points, it’s three times the size of the Defense Department, a third of the U.S. government, 85,000 employees, and God knows how many contractors. You’re running the world’s largest insurance companies, the world’s largest biomedical research institutions, the regulator of one-fourth of every consumer dollar spent in the United States, the world’s largest epidemiological organizations — massive, massive leadership challenge.”
The government made a lot of mistakes during the pandemic, and Azar is no doubt responsible for some of them. But it comes down to this: In the first Trump administration, that massive leadership challenge was answered by a man with extensive knowledge of how the government worked and how the private sector worked, who, when an unexpected pandemic struck, knew how to lead and manage the effort to get a vaccine out in record time, at tremendous personal financial cost. In the second Trump administration, the nominee for that same position is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.