Zacinam pres kourove signaly slychat o celosevetove se plnicich skladech noveho antivirotika Peramivir. Zazracneho leciva proti nove, mega destruktivni vlne ptaci chripky, ktera je pry naspadnuti...?

29.03.2023
Cyber Storm Predicted at the 2023 World Economic Forum
https://securityintelligence.com/articles/cyber-storm-predicted-at-the-2023-world-economic-forum/?web_view=true

According to the Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2023, 93% of cybersecurity leaders and 86% of business leaders think a far-reaching, catastrophic cyber event is at least somewhat likely in the next two years. Additionally, 43% of organizational leaders think it is likely that a cyberattack will affect their organization severely in the next two years.

With cybersecurity concerns on everyone’s mind, the topic received top billing at the recent World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting 2023 in Davos, Switzerland. At the meeting, Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, emphasized the enormous amount of cyber insecurity around the world. He also predicted that 2023 will be a busy year in terms of cyberattacks. Other leaders echoed his sentiments and concerns throughout the meeting.

“There’s a gathering cyber storm,” Sadie Creese, a professor of cybersecurity at the University of Oxford, said during an interview at the meeting. “This storm is brewing, and it’s really hard to anticipate just how bad that will be.”

Leaders’ Response to Increasing Threats
In addition to the increase in attacks, leaders are concerned that world conditions make a serious cyber event more likely. Not surprisingly, world unrest is a top reason for the increased focus on cybersecurity. The majority of organizations (74%) reported that global geopolitical instability has influenced their cyber strategy “moderately” or “substantially”. Additionally, their biggest concerns regarding cyberattacks are business continuity (67%) and reputational damage (65%).

The report found that leaders plan to take quick action in response to the predicted increase in threats. The top response is to strengthen controls on third parties with access to their environments (73%), with controlling access to data coming in second at 66%. Half of the leaders also plan to re-evaluate the countries that they do business with. When you do business with an organization or government with lacking policies and security, you inherit their risk into your organization.

Fighting the Cyber Storm
Reducing the risk of a debilitating and global attack requires working together and creating a targeted plan. Jürgen Stock, the secretary-general of the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL), said in Davos that there needs to be extensive collaboration across countries and corporations.

“This is a global threat, and it calls for a global response and enhanced and coordinated action,” Stock said. “The key to winning the battle against cyber crime is, of course, to work together to make it a priority across the geopolitical fault lines.”

Additionally, organizations, jurisdictions and governments must proactively take precautions to reduce their own risk. According to the report, the threat is not just to governments or enterprises. Any company — even a small business — that handles consumer data is at risk. Larger organizations that do business with smaller companies should evaluate their partners’ cyber risk. If a vendor experiences business disruption, that affects partners’ ability to serve their customers as well.

Collaboration within organizations, especially structured interactions, is also crucial. The report found that 56% of security leaders meet with their board at least monthly. However, respondents felt that more needs to be done to close the gap between business and security teams.

Resilience, Not Just Security
Many leaders focus on security, meaning keeping their organization from becoming a victim of a cyberattack. However, cyberattacks are now a “when not if” event. In addition to reducing vulnerabilities, organizations and governments should ensure that they can quickly recover from an attack to get back to serving their customers or citizens.

“We need to accept that this is really about cyber resilience,” Creese shared at the meeting. “There is no such thing as a hundred percent security. It’s about resilience in the face of insecurity.”

GORG: Jasny, presne tak jsem to myslel. Jen trocha statistiky

RIVA: anketa asi proc ne, debata o tom ale ne tu :)

Dva radiační pásy vyplněné elektrony a nabitými částicemi obklopují Zemi. Vnitřní radiační pás je poměrně stabilní, avšak vnější pás se zvětšuje a smršťuje v průběhu času.
Radiační pásy mají vzhled jako dvě obrovské koblihy. Země se nachází v centru „díry“ v koblize.
Když vnitřní pás bobtná, tento region nebezpečného záření expanduje a zasahuje dráhy Mezinárodní kosmické stanice a mnoha dalších satelitů.
První důkazy radiačních pásů oznámil v roce 1958 James Van Allen na základě dat z detektorů kosmického záření na palubě první americké umělé družice Země vypuštěné NASA: Explorer 1. Družice byla dopravena na oběžnou dráhu kolem Země raketou Jupiter C z kosmodromu Cape Canaveral na Floridě dne 31. ledna 1958.
Vnější radiační pás byl objeven několik měsíců po vnitřním pásu na základě dat z umělých družic Explorer 4 a Pioneer 3; obě byly vypuštěny také v roce 1958.
Když byly radiační pásy objeveny, zjištěná radiace byla tak intenzivní, že si astronomové nejprve mysleli, že může jít o záznam nukleárních testů v tehdejším Sovětském svazu.
Kosmické sondy Van Allen Probe (start 30. 8. 2012) byly umístěny na velmi protáhlé eliptické dráhy – rovněž známé jako „přechodové dráhy ke dráze geostacionární“.
Dráhy sond Van Allen Probe jsou známé jako přechodové ke dráze geostacionární; jsou to stejné dráhy, které jsou používány k dopravě družic na geostacionární dráhu.
Částice, které „vypadávají“ z radiačních pásů, mohou ovlivňovat chemické složení a stavbu zemské atmosféry.
Materiál v radiačních pásech je tvořen nabitými částicemi – tato látka se označuje jako „plazma“, obklopuje Slunce a prostupuje velkou část vesmíru.
Magnetická pole jsou pro lidské oko neviditelná, avšak vytvářejí ve vesmíru „strukturu“, která řídí pohyb nabitých částic.
Van Allenovy radiační pásy jsou jednou částí zemského dynamického magnetického prostředí známého jako magnetosféra.
V průběhu period intenzivního kosmického počasí se může zvyšovat hustota a energie částic radiačních pásů a představovat nebezpečí pro kosmonauty, umělé družice, a dokonce to může ovlivňovat i pozemní technologie.
Některé částice v radiačních pásech se pohybují rychlostí blízkou rychlosti světla, která je zhruba 300 000 kilometrů za sekundu.
Lidská společnost spoléhá na více než 800 umělých družic prolétávajících radiačními pásy, například pro oblast komunikace a navigace.
Vnější radiační pás se rozprostírá typicky ve vzdálenosti 13 500 až 58 000 kilometrů nad zemským povrchem.
Oblast intenzivního záření uvnitř vnějšího pásu se nachází mezi 14 500 až 19 000 kilometrů nad zemským povrchem.
Čím více budeme chápat to, co se děje v radiačních pásech, tím lépe můžeme ochránit budoucí umělé družice a kosmické sondy, případně lodě s posádkou.
Magnetická pole Země nás chrání před slunečními bouřemi a nepřetržitým proudem slunečního větru...

Ukraine’s New Journalist Restrictions ‘Excessive,’ says RSF
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/14810

New restrictions on Ukrainian and international journalists’ access to more than 50 municipalities across Ukraine have drawn an angry reaction from media organizations.

The development follows an order by the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) of new rules for war-time reporting issued on March 3. Under the new approach, local military commanders need to categorise their operational territory into: green zones (full access); yellow zones (supervised access); and red zones (no access).

Reporters Without Borders (RSF), an international organization which seeks to defend the right to have access to free and reliable information, issued a statement today that slams the new procedures and their impact on quality reporting of war-time events.

The RSF’s head for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Jeanne Cavelier, said: “This decision is completely incomprehensible. Journalists are denied access to certain areas on a discretionary decision, while one of the major issues since the start of the war has been the dissemination of reliable information obtained thanks to journalists being able to work freely.

“We call on the Ukrainian authorities to lift these undue restrictions immediately and to conduct a complete rethink with the aim of facilitating the work of journalists.”

In addition to highlighting the broader principle of freedom of information, RSF and local partners have today publicly pointed out various operational challenges from the new rules, including:

· Some areas currently being shelled are designated as green zones while other peaceful areas are designated as red zones;

· Incomplete lists of zone categorization in individual municipalities/regions;

· Inconsistent publication and release of zoning lists;

· Large cities such as Mykolayiv and Kherson – where dozens of journalists have been operating and living – being designated as yellow zones, and;

· The unforeseen impact on local Ukrainian journalists such as one “who wants to write about new children’s playgrounds [and] must now request accreditation in order to access the municipality where [s/he] is based.”

Let MH 370. Komu neni 10 asi pamatuje... zajimavy
Blackstone and Jacob Rothschild, beneficiaries of Malaysia Airlines flight disappearance ?, by Alfredo Jalife-Rahme
https://www.voltairenet.org/article183486.html

JFK a RFK, assassinations, duvody, dukazy a manipulace verejnym minenim. Jasny jak facka.
JFK and RFK: The Plots that Killed Them, The Patsies that Didn’t, by James Fetzer
https://www.voltairenet.org/article165721.html

Censorship by Facebook - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Facebook

On 2 November 2021, The BMJ published a piece by journalist Paul D. Thacker alleging there has been "poor practice" at Ventavia, one of the companies involved in the phase III evaluation trials of the Pfizer vaccine.[25][26] The BMJ sent an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg explaining that "from November 10, readers began reporting a variety of problems when trying to share our article. Some reported being unable to share it. Many others reported having their posts flagged with a warning about "Missing context ... Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people." Those trying to post the article were informed by Facebook that people who repeatedly share "false information" might have their posts moved lower in Facebook's News Feed. Group administrators where the article was shared received messages from Facebook informing them that such posts were "partly false." Readers were directed to a "fact check" performed by a Facebook contractor named Lead Stories.".[

The BMJ - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_BMJ
The BMJ is a weekly peer-reviewed medical trade journal, published by the trade union the British Medical Association (BMA). The BMJ has editorial freedom from the BMA.[1] It is one of the world's oldest general medical journals. Originally called the British Medical Journal, the title was officially shortened to BMJ in 1988, and then changed to The BMJ in 2014.[2] The journal is published by BMJ Publishing Group Ltd, a subsidiary of the British Medical Association (BMA). The editor-in-chief of The BMJ is Kamran Abbasi, who was appointed in January 2022.[3]

GORG:
Dioxins and the Ohio Train Derailment
https://tlavagabond.substack.com/p/dioxins-and-the-ohio-train-derailment

New chart reveals military’s vast involvement in Operation Warp Speed
https://www.statnews.com/2020/09/28/operation-warp-speed-vast-military-involvement/

WASHINGTON — When President Trump unveiled Operation Warp Speed in May, he declared that it was “unlike anything our country has seen since the Manhattan Project.”

The initiative — to accelerate the development of Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics — lacks the scale, and the degree of secrecy, of the effort to build the atomic bomb. But Operation Warp Speed is largely an abstraction in Washington, with little known about who works there other than its top leaders, or how it operates. Even pharmaceutical companies hoping to offer help or partnerships have labored to figure out who to contact.

Now, an organizational chart of the $10 billion initiative, obtained by STAT, reveals the fullest picture yet of Operation Warp Speed: a highly structured organization in which military personnel vastly outnumber civilian scientists.

The labyrinthine chart, dated July 30, shows that roughly 60 military officials — including at least four generals — are involved in the leadership of Operation Warp Speed, many of whom have never worked in health care or vaccine development. Just 29 of the roughly 90 leaders on the chart aren’t employed by the Department of Defense; most of them work for the Department of Health and Human Services and its subagencies.

Operation Warp Speed’s central goal is to develop, produce, and distribute 300 million doses of a coronavirus vaccine by January — and the military is intimately involved, according to Paul Mango, HHS’ deputy chief of staff for policy. It has already helped prop up more than two dozen vaccine manufacturing facilities — flying in equipment and raw materials from all over the world. It has also set up significant cybersecurity and physical security operations to ensure an eventual vaccine is guarded very closely from “state actors who don’t want us to be successful in this,” he said, adding that many of the Warp Speed discussions take place in protected rooms used to discuss classified information.

“This is a massive scientific and logistical undertaking,” said Mango. “We are weeks away, at most, a month or two away from having at least one safe and effective vaccine.”

Despite the military’s dominance, the chart also includes Nancy Messonnier, the director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases who was almost fired by Trump in February for warning the public about the growing Covid-19 pandemic. Public health and drug industry officials told STAT that Messonnier and Gen. Paul Ostrowski, her direct superior, serve as the initiative’s main contacts on all questions related to the distribution of an eventual vaccine. One public health official said that Ostrowksi, an expert on military acquisition, defers to Messonnier on matters of public health.

The military’s extensive involvement in the development and distribution of a vaccine is a departure from pandemics of the past, but it is fitting for Trump, who has gushed about his love for “my military” and “my generals.” While the military was tangentially involved in public health crises like the H1N1 pandemic of 2009, some public health leaders have raised concerns about what they see as their marginalization during the pandemic.

Related: The 8 most important leaders of Operation Warp Speed
One senior federal health official told STAT he was struck by the presence of soldiers in military uniforms walking around the health department’s headquarters in downtown Washington, and said that recently he has seen more than 100 officials in the corridors wearing “Desert Storm fatigues.”

“Military personnel won’t be familiar with the health resources available in a community,” said John Auerbach, CEO of Trust for America’s Health, a group closely aligned with public health departments. “They don’t know who the doctors are or where the community health centers are located or what resources they have. They don’t know where the pharmacies are. Public health people do know, that’s part of what they do.”

Operation Warp Speed chart

The July 30 Operation Warp Speed organizational chart obtained by STAT details about 90 of the officials involved in the initiative. Roughly 60 work for the Department of Defense.

Military officials, however, contend that the U.S. Army excels at complex challenges — like distributing vaccines that might need to be transported at subzero temperatures.

“You know the old joke about, ‘You and what army,’ right?” said Andrew Hunter, a Defense Department expert at a Washington think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They routinely do things that are more complex, even than this vaccine job, all the time.”

Mango told STAT the operation has kept some key personnel information under wraps out of concerns for the security of the entire vaccine supply chain, from the warehouses storing vaccines to the computer systems being used to coordinate the effort.

“The secretary has given us the order of being as transparent as we possibly can with one caveat: That we are not compromising anything that has to do with national security,” he said.

An HHS spokesperson declined to comment directly on the chart, citing precedent that the agency does not comment on leaked documents. But the spokesperson noted that at least 600 HHS officials are involved in Warp Speed. The majority of those employees are not captured by the chart obtained by STAT. Among the decision makers not included in the chart are Mango and HHS’ Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, Bob Kadlec. Mango told STAT that he and Kadlec personally sign off on every business agreement made by HHS for Operation Warp Speed.

Mango also added that the vast majority of scientists working on Operation Warp Speed work for the companies the effort is funding.

“There’s really not a need for anyone to place scores of scientists inside HHS or DOD to get this done,” Mango said. “Quite honestly, we are not conducting any science whatsoever inside the government to support Operation Warp Speed, none.”

He also defended the military’s involvement in the initiative, though he insisted that it is primarily supporting efforts led by public health officials at the CDC.

“There are quite honestly certain logistical elements of this that the CDC has never, ever been asked to do, and why not bring the best logisticians in the world into the equation?” Mango said.

Beyond obtaining the internal document from a federal official, STAT interviewed companies funded by Warp Speed and more than a dozen key officials who have worked closely with the organization’s leaders. The reporting sheds light on the high degree of organization and specialization within the organization, as well as the extreme demands the initiative is placing on the companies it funds.

Operation Warp Speed’s central goal is to develop, produce, and distribute 300 million doses of a coronavirus vaccine by January. The initiative has poured $10 billion into the clinical development and manufacturing of potential vaccine candidates, and it has stockpiled hundreds of thousands of doses of as-yet-unproven immunizations. Warp Speed has deals with six major drug companies hoping to develop Covid-19 vaccines and may seek more, the group’s chief adviser, Moncef Slaoui, told STAT earlier this month.

Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, approvingly called Operation Warp Speed a “talent show.”

“If you go through the organizational boxes of Operation Warp Speed, they’re very, very impressive,” Fauci told STAT in an interview Friday.

Tom Inglesby, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, with whom STAT shared the organizational chart, agreed that the initiative appears well-positioned to achieve its ambitious goals — and under a tight timeline.

“There is deep knowledge of science and on how to manage complex government operations,” said Inglesby. “It’s clearly operating in a challenging pandemic and political environment, and we won’t know if we have a safe and effective vaccine until the trials are finished. But it’s a highly competent group of people working to make it happen.”

Though HHS Secretary Alex Azar and Defense Secretary Mark Esper are at the top, the two key leaders are Slaoui, the formal civilian leader of the project, and Gen. Gustave Perna, the military lead who is the chief operating officer for Operation Warp Speed.

Under Slaoui are two major pillars, “Vaccine” and “Therapeutics.” Under Perna are three pillars, for “Plans, Ops and Analysis,” “Security and Assurance,” and “Supply, Production and [Distribution].”

But the complexity of the organization makes it difficult as an outsider to discern who is reporting directly to who, experts in business management who reviewed the chart told STAT.

“It’s confusing for sure,” said Robert Huckman, the chair of Harvard Business School’s health care initiative, who studies health care management and organization. Huckman added that the chart was more complex than most he’s seen. “It is more complex, but it’s a more complex endeavor, too … it may be that it simply reflects the complexity of what Operation Warp Speed is trying to do.”

“I can only imagine the headache that comes with trying to coordinate these different production processes,” said Raffaella Sadun, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School who studies CEO behavior.

Slaoui’s tenure thus far at Warp Speed has been marked by outside concerns over his personal financial stake in some of the companies he is now overseeing. Slaoui, who holds roughly $10 million in GSK stock, is not bound by federal ethics rules because he is employed by an outside contractor, not the federal government. Slaoui has agreed to donate any increase in the value of that stock, although that agreement hasn’t placated critics.

“The first person to be fired should be Dr. Slaoui,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said at a hearing last week. “The American people deserve to know that Covid-19 vaccine decisions are based on science, and not on personal greed.”

Related: Operation Warp Speed promised to do the impossible. How far has it come?
But Slaoui knows firsthand, perhaps better than anyone else, what it takes to dramatically speed up the search for a vaccine. He played a pivotal role in GSK’s sprint to develop an Ebola vaccine in 2015. The effort ultimately failed, but he is so well-regarded at GSK that the company named its vaccine research center after him in 2016.

Perna, meanwhile, is a four-star Army general who previously managed virtually all of the Army’s logistics. He was even inducted into the Army’s own logistics hall of fame. He most recently served as head of Army Materiel Command, a sprawling job that handles virtually all of the Army’s equipment. The organization’s slogan is: “If a Soldier shoots it, drives it, flies it, wears it, communicates with it, or eats it — AMC provides it.”

During his tenure, Perna constantly pushed the Army to move faster, and to be more ready to go to war at a moment’s notice.

Below Perna and Slaoui are a team of military and civilian experts like Ostrowski, a former special forces soldier who handles the supply and distribution of an eventual vaccine, and Matt Hepburn, the initiative’s go-to vaccine coordinator. Hepburn cut his teeth working on high-tech military projects, including an initiative that developed sensors that could be implanted into soldiers to detect certain illnesses before the men and women ever showed symptoms. Hepburn also has a reputation for driving even the most accomplished scientists to work harder than they’ve ever worked before.

“If Matt is still the Matt I know, he will be on these people with a foot on their neck, making them go go go,” said Geoffrey Ling, Hepburn’s former boss at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Related: Operation Warp Speed doesn’t have the transparency it needs
There are government outsiders deeply involved in the project, too. Larry Corey, one of the country’s leading AIDS researchers, describes himself as an “ex-officio” member of Warp Speed. Corey runs the Covid-19 prevention network, an assortment of existing HIV trial networks that now are running at least three of the Phase 3 Covid-19 clinical trials. While he’s not formally on the organizational chart, he takes part in thrice-weekly calls with Warp Speed. Corey, who is based in Seattle, is in constant cross-country coordination with one of the NIH’s top vaccine researchers, John Mascola, a formal member of the organization.

“We are sacrificing our time and energy on Operation Warp Speed. We have taken the pivot from everything else that we have done in our lives,” Corey said, regarding him and Mascola. Corey described waking up at 5 a.m. each day to get on calls with Warp Speed leaders at 5:30 a.m., and then enduring a deluge of conference calls until 6 p.m. When the day’s work is done, he turns to planning for the following day, which keeps him working until 11 p.m. He’s in bed by midnight.

“I don’t think his day is any different than my day,” Corey said of Mascola. Both, he was sure, are sleep-deprived.

Operation Warp Speed is much more than a splashy name for an initiative focused on doling out purchase orders. The benefits for companies who land a Warp Speed contract go far beyond just money, according to one of the companies with a contract.

SiO2 Materials Science, an Auburn, Ala.-based company that is making vials for the effort, used its status as an Operation Warp Speed grantee to force a vendor to cut production time from 75 days to just seven. It also leveraged its contract with Warp Speed to get its power turned on in the midst of a massive outage in just minutes — others had to wait days, according Lawrence Ganti, the company’s chief business officer. Operation Warp Speed also covered the costs of installing 32 new security cameras around the company’s facility after an assessment found the company’s physical security was lacking.

SiO2 received $143 million from Operation Warp Speed, a fraction of what larger companies have received, but the company still is required to provide monthly status reports to the government. The reports typically run up to 60 pages and are coupled with a four-hour meeting attended by multiple Warp Speed officials, according to Ganti. That’s in addition to biweekly “risk reports” and weekly site visits from the Army Corps of Engineers.

A second company funded by Warp Speed confirmed similar reporting requirements.

“Everybody has — or at least I had a stereotype of how the government operated. Nine-to-five, slow, kind of what you’d expect at the DMV … this is not that in any way,” said Ganti. “They seem to be working 24/7.”

The organizational chart also underscores which agencies are not as closely involved in the leadership of the effort: namely, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which took a leading role in coordinating vaccine distribution for other past pandemics, like the H1N1 pandemic of 2009. There are at least three staffers from each of the administration’s other major health agencies, like the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority or the National Institutes of Health.

Mango, the HHS deputy chief of staff, said the CDC has a more central role than the personnel chart implies. He personally interacts with Messonier multiple times a week, and there are frequent meetings between the DOD and CDC with 15-20 of her deputies, he said.

“What General Perna says at the start of every meeting, and he means it, is we are here for one reason, to support the CDC,” Mango said. “Anyone who is watching what is going on a daily basis would say the CDC is leading and the DOD is enabling and supporting.”

Chief Pentagon Spokesperson Jonathan Hoffman struck a similar tone.

“The Department of Defense has been clear in its role in Operation Warp Speed: We are providing the bandwidth of logistical expertise, including program management and contracting proficiency to this all-of-America effort,” he said in a statement. “The development and delivery of over 300 million vaccine doses harnesses public-private partnerships, academia, and industry – no one entity can do this alone.”

The Pentagon also declined to comment on the chart obtained by STAT, saying they do not comment on leaked documents.

The Food and Drug Administration is also largely absent from the organizational chart, though that is by design. Most FDA officials are barred from participating formally in Operation Warp Speed over concerns that their involvement would conflict with their mission to impartially review eventual vaccine applications. The one major exception is Janet Woodcock, who took a temporary leave as head of FDA’s drug center to lead the initiative’s efforts on therapeutics.

BARDA plays perhaps the most head-scratching role in Operation Warp Speed. The organization’s acting director, Gary Disbrow, a camera-shy bureaucrat who was catapulted into the job after the ouster of his boss, Rick Bright, is listed as co-leading the vaccine effort alongside Hepburn, and a number of other BARDA leaders are included in the chart.

But three sources told STAT that Disbrow, and BARDA more generally, are playing a marginal role in Warp Speed. “BARDA has been largely sidelined in all of this,” one pharmaceutical industry source told STAT.

Ganti of SiO2, however, told STAT that the company deals primarily with BARDA for all of its Warp Speed-related questions. Mango also told STAT BARDA officials meet with Warp Speed officials daily “to make sure contracts are moving along.”

BARDA also appears to be fronting a large chunk of the funding for the Warp Speed initiative, alongside the Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defense.

Operation Warp Speed doesn't have the transparency it needs
https://www.statnews.com/2020/07/16/moncef-slaoui-operation-warp-speed/

The Scary New Contracting Model That Isn’t Scary or New - Nextgov
https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2018/03/otas-scary-new-contracting-model-isnt-scary-or-new/146964/

MARCH 26, 2018
“Other Transaction Authorities” might seem like a risky new acquisition method, but it’s been around longer than the Federal Acquisition Regulation.
PROCUREMENT
INNOVATION
HOMELAND SECURITY
This is part of a series about other transaction authority. Read the role of consortia and what agencies are buying.

There is a new and scary but potentially game-changing acquisition model catching fire across government. The thing is, it doesn’t have to be scary and is not really all that new.

Long lead times and complex, overwrought requirements have made acquisition one of the main impediments to successful information technology procurements in the federal government, resulting in no shortage of handwringing over the rules included in the Federal Acquisition Regulation that govern most transactions. But there is another way, if program managers, contracting officials and agency lawyers are willing to take a chance.

Before there was a FAR, there were “other transaction authorities,” also known by the shorthand OTAs or OTs. This contracting method outside the usual federal process is not widely used and even less understood. But that’s beginning to change.

“Is there anything here to be worried about? No,” Douglas Maughan, director of the Homeland Security Department's Science and Technology Directorate’s Cyber Security Division, told Nextgov. “Even though it’s been around for a fairly lengthy period of time, it’s just not been used very much. So, people are afraid of it because they haven’t seen how it’s worked.”

‘Or Other Transactions…’

When NASA was founded in 1958, Paul Dembling, then-general counsel for the agency’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, wrote a section into the Space Act describing the agency’s acquisition authority.

The legislation allowed NASA “to enter into and perform such contracts, leases, cooperative agreements or other transactions as may be necessary in the conduct of its work.”

“This was 1958 and NASA was a big deal,” said Ralph Nash, a government procurement law expert and founder of the Government Contracts Program at George Washington University’s National Law Center, where he is a former dean of graduate studies and professor emeritus.

“We were in a space race with the Russians and President [John] Kennedy said we would get to the moon in this decade,” he explained. “This was there to give them full flexibility.”

Three decades later—well after the establishment of the FAR—that same language was used to grant the Defense Department similar authorities.

Congress gave Defense contracting officials the tool in 1989 with the express goal of helping non-traditional—or at least not frequent—contractors to research new technologies alongside the department.

By 1994, that authority had been broadened beyond research to include prototyping and then updated again in 2017 to enable contracts to move into production after successful prototypes.

Over that time, several departments have been granted other transaction authorities, including Defense, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security and Transportation. Under these departments, five component agencies have also been given explicit OT authority: the Federal Aviation Administration, Transportation Security Administration, National Institutes of Health, Domestic Nuclear Detection Office and Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E.

“Under these authorities, agencies may develop agreements that are not required to follow a standard format or include terms and conditions that are typically required when using traditional mechanisms,” according to a Government Accountability Office definition.

The Wild West of Procurement?

Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate awarded its first OT contract for cybersecurity in February 2016 after launching its Silicon Valley Innovation program.

The directorate started the Silicon Valley program to “reach out to…non-traditional performers—the perfect example of what a startup is,” Maughan explained. “What we’re trying to do in the Silicon Valley program is, in partnership with components as well as critical infrastructure providers, we’re looking for early-stage companies that have technology that we could use to bring capability to our components or first responders or the private sector.”

That sparked the first broad agency announcement call in December 2015 seeking interesting applications of the internet of things to support first responders and secure critical infrastructure.

Those calls have continued, with S&T awarding 37 OT contracts in 2017. In total, the directorate has worked with 25 companies through the Silicon Valley program.

While the primary focus for OTs is on research and development, not all agencies are using them for that express purpose. For instance, TSA and NASA use them for other services, such as airport security, education and outreach, according to GAO.

Broadening OTs beyond research seems to increase their use accordingly. GAO reports that while most agencies do fewer than 75 OT transactions a year, TSA and NASA conducted 640 and 3,220, respectively, in 2014 alone.

Many in government have been reluctant to use their OT authorities precisely because of the lack of regulations governing their use. Since the contracts exist outside of the Federal Acquisition Regulation, they can be written with far less stringent requirements. But that also means there are fewer protections along the way to avoid a catastrophic contracting failure—one that could land a government official in front of a congressional committee.

But just because there aren’t as many regulations doesn’t mean there isn’t oversight, Maughan said.

“It depends on your definition of oversight,” he said. “Even though it’s not FAR-based, we still have to do procurement documentation, we have to do a source-selection plan that says what are the criteria by which we’re going to evaluate proposals. For the most part, it’s the same as a traditional FAR-based contract, it’s just that the vehicle you’re using is not a FAR-based vehicle.”

Despite appearances, “It’s not the wild, wild west,” Maughan added. “You still have to make sure the government is making the decisions on what gets awarded. Even still, we have a contracting officer—who’s called an ‘other transaction authority officer’—so you’re still doing the same kinds of things with the contracting folks as part of the team.”

Funding Failure

The reluctance to use OTs is based on “fear of giving people a lot of discretion,” said Nash, the procurement law expert. “If you’re in a government agency and you’ve got an inspector general and you’ve got congressional oversight … there’s a tendency to be pretty cautious about how you do business.”

That said, “It’s the same oversight you have over any other transaction where you’re giving a company money,” Nash said. “The problem is, if you have a lot of discretion, you take away a lot of the rules, but you still have basic ethics problems. If you gave an OT to your father without telling anybody else about it, you’d have the same ethical violation you’d have with a contract or a grant.”

The other major roadblock is the fear of funding projects that don't pan out, Nash said.

“People have a hard time understanding that when you fund research, over half the time you’re funding failure,” Nash said. “You do not get 100 percent payout from research; and you shouldn’t expect it.” If you were to see a 100 percent success rate in funding research, that would just mean you weren't looking far enough into the future.

“There’s nothing wrong with failure,” Nash said.

Homeland Security’s Maughan agreed. “We have a lot of successes we can talk about with return on investment, but even the failures” have some return, he said. He cited a program to downsize a Defense Department radar system to fit on smaller drones used by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The company awarded a contract ultimately failed to produce a working prototype, but everyone involved still consider it a successful venture.

The company was able to get funding to move their research forward and CBP learned what is feasible for the size of drones they use. “They were still really happy about being part of the program,” Maughan said. “We helped them move the technology down the roadmap toward a smaller device and that will help them in some of their DOD missions.”

“I think there’s still some return on investment," he added. "Our investment was less than $400,000 with them, so I think it falls into the category of: If you’re going to fail, fail quickly."

Had the office used a traditional contracting method for this project, it likely would have taken six to 12 months just to make an award, let alone discover that the idea would not work. Under the Science and Technology Directorate's OT authority, the time from application to award can be as short as 60 to 90 days.

Is It Worth It?

Overall, Maughan said he would recommend using OT contracts when appropriate but advised contracting officers to pick the right spots.

“It’s not a solution for every case,” he said. “If you’re trying to get startups with new innovation, then an OT might be good for you as an organization. There’s a little bit of risk working with a startup company—if you’re really just looking for a solutions provider and you’re not willing to take some risk, then an OT might not be for you.”

“It’s not the answer for all things,” he added.

Nash agreed and offered some advice to agencies interested in getting in on OTs.

“Let’s say you find a company out there that’s never done business with the government and that has some fascinating technology. You go to them and you say, ‘How could we sponsor you to do this? And we’ll give you all the money.’ Well, they may say, ‘The only way we’ll deal with you is this, this, this and this,’” Nash said. “We’re talking about intellectual property issues; we’re talking about accounting issues. And a normal contracting office might be pretty darn uncomfortable when they hear that because that’s not their norm.”

“You’ve got accounting problems. You want to make sure the company spends the money for what you gave them the money,” which can be particularly difficult, as one advantage of an OT contract is the company does not have to abide by government accounting standards. “But you need to make sure they have some systems.

“You need to worry about intellectual property—who’s going to have rights to it. And that would mean that if they said, ‘We’ll only do it if you take zero rights,’ that would be a problem. You might do it but you certainly would know that that’s a flashpoint that you would worry about. And then, of course, you’ve got to worry about audit rights because the government always wants to be able to audit and the contractor might not want to be audited.”

But these issues wouldn’t be news to a contracting officer who has spent any amount of time working in government, Nash said.

“The problem, I think, is, will your contracting office be willing to step outside of its normal FAR logic and really make it wide open?”

Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act
https://aspr.hhs.gov/legal/PREPact/Pages/default.aspx

The Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP Act) authorizes the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (Secretary) to issue a PREP Act declaration. The declaration provides immunity from liability (except for willful misconduct) for claims:

of loss caused, arising out of, relating to, or resulting from administration or use of countermeasures to diseases, threats and conditions
determined by the Secretary to constitute a present, or credible risk of a future public health emergency
to entities and individuals involved in the development, manufacture, testing, distribution, administration, and use of such countermeasures

Advanced Technology International (ATI) - ATI | Advanced Technology International
https://web.archive.org/web/20220301220542/https://www.ati.org/

REDUCING BARRIERS TO ENTRY
BENEFITS TO INDUSTRY & ACADEMIA
We help non-traditional contractors – including small businesses, start-ups, and academia – get involved in government contracting. In fact, non-traditional contractors account for about 75 percent of ATI’s consortia membership, and they receive about 60 percent of awards. The government benefits by getting access to emerging technologies, and these non-traditional contractors benefit from:

Funding
Exposure
Networking
Experience
Future connections

Other Transaction Agreements (OTA) – ATI | Advanced Technology International
https://web.archive.org/web/20210401134551/https://www.ati.org/ota/

ATI has extensive experience and expertise in the Other Transaction consortium business model.
Other Transaction Agreements (OTA), relieve some of the contractual burdens typically placed on contractors working for federal clients, making it possible for non-traditional contractors – small and emerging companies – to participate in technology development.

The Other Transaction (OT) consortium model is an “enterprise partnership” between the government and technology providers in a specific domain. The OT consortium model relieves some of the contractual burdens typically placed on contractors working for federal clients.

We have extensive experience and expertise in OTA collaboration management. Our successful application of the OTA consortium model has played a major role in the growth of its popularity, and we remain the industry leader in this area.

Other Transaction Authority (OTA) | AiDA
https://aida.mitre.org/ota/

What is an “Other Transaction”
Other Transactions (OTs) are procurement instruments other than contracts, grants, or cooperative agreements enabling flexible business arrangements to acquire research and development to support technology advancement or to quickly develop a prototype. Many laws and regulations governing federal contracts do not apply to OTs (i.e., Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and the Competition in Contracting Act (CICA)), however, the Procurement Integrity Act applies and competitive practices are applicable. OTs may be protested to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, and GAO has limited jurisdiction to review OT decisions. GAO ruled on proper use of an OT in these cases: GAO B-416061 and GAO B-416752.

OTs are a mechanism to access innovative research and development, especially from *non-traditional contractors who may be challenged by requirements of traditional contracts, grants, or cooperative research and development agreements. OTs can be used with traditional contractors when statutory requirements are met. OTs provide flexibility that allows for increased speed, flexibility, and accessibility for research and prototyping activities than permitted under statutes and regulations that apply to traditional FAR-based contracts. OT agreements may be fixed-price, expenditure based, or hybrid.

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R45521

OTs have the potential to provide significant benefits to DOD, including
 attracting nontraditional contractors with promising technological capabilities to work with DOD,
 establishing a mechanism to pool resources with other entities to facilitate development of, and
obtain, state-of-the-art dual-use technologies, and
 offering a unique mechanism for DOD to invest in, and influence the direction of, technology
development

...

A number of analysts and officials have raised concerns that if DOD uses OTs in ways not intended by
Congress—or is perceived to abuse the authority—Congress could clamp down on the authority. Generally, DOD
lacks authoritative data that can be used to measure and evaluate the use of other transaction authorities.

...

Issues for Congress
How Far Should OT Authority Extend?

...

Given the benefits
and risks associated with OTs, questions for Congress include the following:
1. To what extent and in what circumstances do the potential benefits of OTs in
terms of cost, schedule, and added capabilities outweigh concerns over potential
fraud, waste, abuse, diminished oversight, and other public policy objectives?
2. Should OT authorities be extended further, curtailed, or maintained?

Medical Countermeasures | USA Public Health Security
https://www.medicalcountermeasures.gov/newsroom/2020/pfizer/

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense (DoD) today announced an agreement with U.S.-based Pfizer Inc.

Medical Countermeasures | USA Public Health Security
https://www.medicalcountermeasures.gov/newsroom/2020/pfizer-1/

About Operation Warp Speed:

OWS is a partnership among components of the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense, engaging with private firms and other federal agencies, and coordinating among existing HHS-wide efforts to accelerate the development, manufacturing, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics.

Military’s Role in Vaccine to Be Strictly Behind the Scenes - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/26/us/politics/coronavirus-vaccine-military-trump.html?

Scores of Defense Department employees are laced through the government offices involved in the effort, making up a large portion of the federal personnel devoted to the effort. Those numbers have led some current and former officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to privately grumble that the military’s role in Operation Warp Speed was too large for a task that is, at its core, a public health campaign.

“I was surprised when Trump talked about the Department of Defense disseminating any vaccine,” said Dr. Marcus Plescia, the chief medical officer for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, which has been deeply involved in the planning process for the vaccines. “There is not any role for the military there. And if there were, we would be up in arms about it because we are advocates for the states.”

Concerns about conspiracy theories surrounding the vaccines are even more reason to keep the military out of sight, Dr. Plescia said.
“There has been a lot of concern around vaccine hesitancy, and having a bunch of troops around would not be very helpful,” he said.



https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/how-a-secretive-pentagon-agency-seeded-the-ground-for-a-rapid-coronavirus-cure/2020/07/30/ad1853c4-c778-11ea-a9d3-74640f25b953_story.html

July 31, 2020 at 3:22 a.m. GMT+2
The scientists were working through the night over a weekend in February in their Vancouver offices, running a blood sample from an early American covid-19 survivor through a credit card-sized device made up of 200,000 tiny chambers, hoping to help save the world.

Their mission was part of a program under the Pentagon’s secretive technology research agency. The goal: to find a way to produce antibodies for any virus in the world within 60 days of collecting a blood sample from a survivor.

Established years before the current pandemic, the program was halfway done when the first case of the novel coronavirus arrived in the United States early this year. But everyone involved in the effort by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) knew their time had come ahead of schedule.

The four teams participating in the program abandoned their plans and began sprinting, separately, toward the development of an antibody for covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

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“We have been thinking about and preparing for this for a long time, and it’s almost a bit surreal,” said Amy Jenkins, manager of DARPA’s antibody program, which is known as the Pandemic Prevention Platform, or P3. “We are very hopeful that we will at least be able to have an impact on this outbreak. We want to make a difference.”

In that program and others, DARPA has quietly been seeding the ground for the United States to produce a rapid cure for a pathogen like covid-19 for years.

The U.S. government’s response to the pandemic has been impugned as slow and haphazard, with flawed test kits, limited contact tracing, insufficient protective gear, late encouragement of masks and at times baffling messages from President Trump.

But DARPA’s story is a counterexample of U.S. government foresight, one that began more than a decade ago with the aim of finding super-fast ways to protect American troops if they were to confront a deadly new virus in the field.

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If it weren’t for DARPA’s investments over the past decade and earlier, largely outside the glare of Washington’s partisan politics, the American race toward a vaccine and antibody therapy to stop the coronavirus most likely wouldn’t be moving as quickly as it is today.

“Being at DARPA at this time ... is exciting in some ways because we get to see the research work that was funded that was done ten to fifteen years ago now really starting to pay off,” acting director Peter Highnam said in a discussion with reporters on Thursday.

The first company in the United States to enter clinical trials with a vaccine for the virus was funded by DARPA. So was the second company. And the P3 program has already led to the world’s first study in humans of a potential covid-19 antibody treatment. If successful, antibody treatments would offer up to three months of immunity against covid-19. Unlike vaccines, they could also help heal people already infected with the virus.

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Some of the vaccines and antibodies linked to DARPA could be ready later this year, which would mark one of the speediest responses to a global pandemic in the history of medicine. Experts say it normally takes four to 10 years to devise, test and produce a vaccine for a new pathogen. Antibodies, which the body creates to combat a virus, have taken years to discover, let alone produce.

The race for a coronavirus vaccine could lead to this generation’s Sputnik moment

DARPA is far from exclusively responsible for the fast pace. Other countries, including China, where the virus originated, are also moving quickly toward a cure. So are firms unaffiliated with DARPA.

Still, the Pentagon agency played a significant role in advancing the science that is making the quick pace possible and setting a North Star for researchers.

“I think their role is very important,” said James E. Crowe Jr., director of the vaccine center at Vanderbilt University, one of the four participants in the P3 program. “The reason is they have catalyzed more rapid progression than otherwise would have happened. And the reason they accomplished it was they were willing to state . . . grand challenges.”

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Crowe said he and his colleagues laughed when DARPA put out its request in 2017 for a system that could produce a human-ready antibody from a convalescent blood sample in 60 days.

“Somehow, in setting that aspirational goal, after the first brainstem reaction of, ‘That’s ridiculous,’ the next step is, ‘Well, how close could we get?’ ” Crowe said. “Then, you start buying in to the belief that it could be possible.”

'Ringing people's doorbells'
Established in 1958 in response to the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, DARPA was created by President Dwight D. Eisenhower out of a sense of urgency.

Washington could have sent the first satellite to space, but Moscow got there first — and it wasn’t because the United States lacked the science. The American government simply didn’t move fast enough.

DARPA was the answer to that problem.

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The nimble military science research agency wouldn’t invent things itself. Rather, its officials would look across the American scientific landscape — to universities, military labs and defense contractors — and channel emerging technologies into risky mega-endeavors to prevent another Sputnik. The agency’s pie-in-the-sky projects would have a high risk of failure, but if successful, would transform the U.S. military and possibly society, too.

Over the years, DARPA-funded projects have created the building blocks of GPS, the first computer mouse and the protocols that underpin the modern Internet. The agency pioneered stealth technology that made American fighter jets all but invisible to enemy radar. And it advanced a bevy of new weaponry, including drones.

How the audacious Pentagon agency that invented the Internet is now trying to save it

In the years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a series of anthrax incidents, combined with overseas intelligence about potential biological threats, heightened fears of bioterrorism and drove DARPA to invest in faster ways to respond, including technology to accelerate vaccine development, spot emerging viruses and speed up pharmaceutical manufacturing.

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A decade ago, a brainy Air Force doctor named Dan Wattendorf helped push rapid pandemic response further to the top of DARPA’s priority list.

Regularly citing the 1918 flu pandemic, the DARPA program manager saw how a novel pathogen, whether from another species or an enemy’s lab, could cripple the American military in the field.

“If we need to deploy someone in harm’s way and it’s a new virus, you don’t have time to wait for a new vaccine,” Wattendorf said. “That could be a decade.”

Wattendorf had ideas for a solution. In 2010, he took to a conference room at DARPA headquarters in Northern Virginia with notes scribbled on his hand to make a pitch.

At the time, the Obama administration was emphasizing the need to step up pandemic response capabilities in the wake of the H1N1 outbreak, and DARPA was increasingly focusing on biology — an emphasis that would lead to the agency’s first biotechnology office in 2014.

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In the conference room, Wattendorf outlined his ideas to agency higher-ups. Regina E. Dugan, the DARPA director at the time, ribbed him for the writing on his hand before greenlighting his proposal.

The result was a program called ADEPT, which invested $291 million from 2011 to 2019 in an array of technologies — including a credit card-sized device for rapid antibody discovery developed by the Vancouver-based firm AbCellera — that, taken together, could significantly reduce the timelines for vaccines and antibodies.

“It may turn out to be the most important program from my time at the agency,” said Dugan, who ran DARPA from 2009 to 2012.

Chief among Wattendorf’s targets for the program: delivering vaccines and antibodies by implanting their genetic code.

Traditional vaccines inject what’s known as an antigen — usually a piece of live or deactivated virus that is sufficient to provoke the immune system into a protective response. Antigens are typically manufactured in a long process that involves growing live virus in chicken eggs in bioreactors.

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Wattendorf hoped to short-circuit it. He wanted to inject genetic code that would prompt the human body to create the antigen in its own cells, cutting out the manufacturing process. The immune system would recognize the antigen in the cells and launch a protective response.

By 2010, scientists had tested the idea using DNA with mixed results. Wattendorf wanted to try its single-stranded sibling RNA.

If successful, RNA could be used to develop both vaccines and antibodies, shortening development timelines from years to days before clinical trials, he thought. It also offered a one-size-fits-all approach; in the future, scientists would need only the genetic code of a virus to create a vaccine.

At the time, many considered it a fool’s errand. Being so ephemeral, RNA is unstable in the environment and highly susceptible to degradation. It was unclear how to get it into a human cell. Over at the National Institutes of Health, where Wattendorf previously worked, research into DNA vaccines was presenting enough hurdles. Few wanted to take the risk of trying RNA, too.

“Skeptics cited the lack of evidence that it would work, and Dan cited the lack of evidence that it wouldn’t,” Dugan recalled. “That’s very typical of a DARPA program.”

By 2019, a project DARPA funded at the Massachusetts-based company Moderna demonstrated in a Phase 1 clinical trial that RNA could indeed deliver an antibody to humans and provide protection against the mosquito-borne virus chikungunya. It was an affirmation of Wattendorf’s bet that came after years of DARPA funding the effort.

Today, RNA vaccines, although still experimental, are among the fastest-moving candidates in the race to stop covid-19. In March, Moderna was the first company in the United States to enter Phase 1 trials with a covid-1 vaccine using RNA. The company injected its first test into a human 66 days after receiving the virus’s genetic code. Phase 2 trials began in May, and Phase 3 began on July 27, making it possible that the vaccine could be available by the end of the year.

In addition to Moderna, two other pharmaceutical companies — Pfizer and CureVac — are pursuing RNA vaccines, as is a small laboratory at Imperial College in London and the People’s Liberation Army Academy of Military Sciences in China. CureVac was also funded by DARPA.

RNA experiments leap to the front in coronavirus vaccine race. Will they work?

“Is an RNA vaccine going to potentially be made available at scale?” Wattendorf said. “We are seeing very well that could happen. It demonstrates the role DARPA can play in creating these capabilities.”

Wattendorf also continued DARPA investments in vaccines delivered using DNA.

Inovio Pharmaceuticals, funded by DARPA, entered Phase 1 trials for its DNA-delivered covid-19 vaccine in April, making it the second company to enter trials in the United States. The Pennsylvania-based firm, which began trials 80 days after receiving the virus’s genetic code, is looking to begin its Phase 2 and 3 trials this summer, pending regulatory approval.

DARPA also funded other technologies for rapid vaccine development, including companies that manufacture vaccines by growing proteins in tobacco-like plants, as well as a “self-assembling vaccine” platform at Massachusetts General Hospital. Mass General’s vaccine center used the platform to develop a more traditional covid-19 vaccine that entered animal testing in early July.

“DARPA comes off as a visionary organization that was ringing people’s doorbells and saying you have to prepare for this,” said Mark C. Poznansky, director of the Mass General Vaccine and Immunotherapy Center. “Some people would say we have enough to worry about without that.”

'The more aspirational dream'
From the start, Wattendorf and the DARPA team knew that fast vaccines on their own wouldn’t solve the threat that infectious diseases posed to American troops.

It can take weeks for a vaccine to give a person protection, and even then, follow-up booster shots are sometimes needed.

Instead of forcing the body to produce antibodies using a vaccine, why not just inject the best antibody directly? The DARPA team began to pursue that aim in parallel. Wattendorf called the rapid delivery of an antibody using RNA “the more aspirational dream.”

The idea was to take the blood of a virus survivor and quickly identify the best antibody out of thousands in the bloodstream. Then, the genetic code of that antibody could be injected into troops to give them temporary protection against the virus immediately. Protection could range from a few weeks to a few months — enough time for a deployment.

In a pandemic, DARPA envisioned using such antibodies as a “firebreak” — an obstacle that slows the rapid spread of a conflagration.

For example, if one person in a nursing home tests positive, the antibody could be given to all the other residents to prevent the spread of the illness.

Critically, unlike vaccines, antibodies can also treat those who have already fallen ill.

DARPA had funded the development of rapid antibody technologies for years. Then, around 2016, DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar wanted to weave them together into a production line and test it.

“Very few interesting problems just have a miracle, single-threaded solution,” Prabhakar said.

The result was the Pandemic Prevention Platform, which Prabhakar signed off on before leaving DARPA in January 2017. The goal of the four-year $96 million program was to develop an antibody for any virus within 60 days of receiving the blood sample of a survivor.

When covid-19 arrived in the United States, the program’s participants — AbCellera, Vanderbilt University, Duke University and AstraZeneca — had already done test runs with various viruses to see where they could cut time on their quest to hit the 60-day goal.

As they pivoted to tackle covid-19, Jenkins, the DARPA program manager, knew the participants wouldn’t meet the 60-day timeline but thought some could come close to 90 days, and potentially help end the global pandemic.

Some of the participants obtained a blood sample in February from one of the first American covid-19 patients to return from China. But the sample wasn’t great; the patient had recovered fairly recently and therefore didn’t have a sufficiently mature immune response from which to draw good antibodies.

At AbCellera, chief executive Carl Hansen forged ahead with the sample anyway.

On Feb. 28, AbCellera’s employees began working round-the-clock over a weekend in their Vancouver offices, ultimately finding 550 unique antibodies using their tiny device.

Hansen contacted the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and came to an agreement, announced March 13, whereby Lilly would manufacture the best antibody and take it into clinical trials.

But first they had to decide which antibody was the winner.

Daniel Skovronsky, Lilly’s chief scientific officer, said the pharmaceutical company threw the normal years-long process out the window and immediately began scaling up to make the top 100 antibodies to save time, even though only one would proceed.

The company worked with AbCellera, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and academic researchers to conduct experiments on the antibody candidates. By late April, they had to pick which, if any, should proceed to the last and most expensive stage of scale-up.

The best candidate, they determined, was antibody No. 555.

“This was a tough decision,” Skovronsky said. “There were mixed views.”

The first patient was dosed on May 29, 91 days after AbCellera received the blood sample. It became the world’s first study of a potential covid-19 antibody treatment in humans, according to Lilly. The national registry of clinical trials indicates that Phase 2 is expected to be completed in August.

At Vanderbilt, Crowe wanted a better sample than the initial one obtained in February. By mid-March, his team found two people in the United States who had been infected 50 days earlier in China.

After screening the samples, his team narrowed their list to the 30 best antibodies and then interacted with companies interested in producing them.

IDBiologics Inc., a Nashville-based biotechnology start-up that Crowe co-founded, will begin human trials with one of the antibodies in August, he said, with possible availability in the United States under emergency use early next year if all goes well.

After licensing six antibodies from Vanderbilt and screening their own in house, AstraZeneca picked two antibodies to take into clinical trials this summer as a pair, said Mene Pangalos, executive vice president for biopharmaceutical research and development.

The global pharmaceutical industry can produce billions of vaccine doses, but it lacks the capacity to manufacture antibodies at such a large scale. At least initially, the antibodies won’t be delivered using RNA, although Duke University plans to manufacture an RNA version of its antibody, meeting the original DARPA vision for the program.

Wattendorf, who has left DARPA and now works at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said that looking back 10 years, the agency was trying to solve the problem of speed to protect American forces.

“These things were funded to be fast,” Wattendorf said. “They were not actually funded to be global scale.”

Other DARPA efforts did take aim at the scale question. The agency, for example, funded technology to produce vaccines using plants instead of chicken eggs — an approach that has the benefit of easy mass scale-up. One of the firms DARPA funded, Quebec City-based Medicago, began Phase 1 clinical trials in mid July with a covid-19 vaccine produced in a tobacco-like plant and plans to enter Phase 2 and 3 trials in October.

Mass production and its costs are now a problem that governments the world over are looking to solve, all while watching the results of the fastest-moving clinical trials.

“While we’re all hoping our therapies work, at the end of the day, we all hope somebody’s therapy works,” Pangalos said. “Because we all want to get back to some semblance of reality.”

Officials clarify military role in coronavirus vaccination amid wariness
https://rollcall.com/2020/11/05/officials-clarify-military-role-in-coronavirus-vaccination-amid-wariness/

Officials’ recent comments reflect growing concerns that conflicting messages and deep distrust could jeopardize a vaccine’s success
U.S. Army General Gustave Perna says the U.S. military is helping Operation Warp Speed with things like planning, logistics, augmentation and program support. (Chip Somodevilla/AFP via Getty Images file photo/Pool)

By Emily Kopp
Posted November 5, 2020 at 6:30am
President Donald Trump has often touted the role of the military in distributing a COVID-19 vaccine, but health officials close to the process who are concerned about public distrust are taking pains to say the federal government won’t actually be handling vaccines.

The president said at the final presidential debate that the distribution of a vaccine would be swift because he’s “counting on the military.”

“We have our generals lined up, one in particular that’s the head of logistics. … He’s ready to go,” Trump said Oct. 22.

But Paul Mango, a spokesman for Operation Warp Speed, the federal effort to develop vaccines, clarified the next day: “It is extremely unlikely that anyone from the government will touch a vaccine, whether that’s loading a truck, unloading a truck, moving dry ice or actually injecting the vaccine prior to Americans getting it.”

Mango said the Defense Department would oversee logistics from a distance. Operation Warp Speed is led by the departments of Defense and Health and Human Services.

“I know what the president means because [Operation Warp Speed leader Gen. Gustave Perna] has briefed him several times on this, and that is we have the best logisticians in the United States at the Department of Defense,” he said. “Every logistical detail you could think of: needles, syringes, swabs, bandages, dry ice, trucks, U.S. marshals guiding those trucks, planes, flying in equipment, getting vaccines out.”

Perna clarified at an Oct. 27 event that the military is helping with things like planning, logistics, augmentation and program support.

“There will not be this vision that some people have that there’ll be Army trucks driving through the streets delivering vaccine,” he said, adding that is not “feasible or the right way to do it.”

Public confusion
Even if federal troops do not end up handling vaccines, National Guard units operating under control of a governor may do so in many states, which could lead to public confusion.

A review by CQ Roll Call of 16 states’ COVID-19 vaccination plans indicates that at least nine expect to incorporate state National Guard units under governors’ control. The draft proposals indicate plans for those units to provide backup transportation and security. At least one state, Maryland, signaled intentions to use its National Guard Medical Service Corps to administer shots.

Sandra Quinn, a University of Maryland health equity professor who studies racial differences in flu vaccination rates, said the public is unlikely to make a clear distinction between state-deployed National Guard and Trump’s invocation of “the military.”

Two Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee have called for a hearing on the military’s role in Operation Warp Speed. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Mazie K. Hirono of Hawaii wrote that the organizational structure of Operation Warp Speed, dominated by members of the military, is a “stark departure” from prior public health crises.

A Defense Department spokesperson told CQ Roll Call there is sufficient U.S. commercial transportation capacity so “there should be no need for a large commitment of DOD units or personnel” in distribution. Any DOD support in distribution beyond planning would be an exception, such as if military air assets were needed to deliver vaccines to a remote location, according to the agency.

Federal officials’ careful comments in recent days on the military’s role reflect growing concerns that even with a safe and effective vaccine, conflicting messages and deep distrust could jeopardize its success.

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