Warp Speed: Inside the Operation That Beat COVID, the Critics, and the Odds

A powerful story of how our nation’s leaders overcame the odds, saving the American people from the throes of a deadly pandemic

The prior record for vaccine development and distribution was approximately four-and-a-half years. Operation Warp Speed got the COVID-19 vaccine to the American people in less than ten months. Operation Warp Speed did not happen by accident. It was the result of exceptional leadership, explicit strategy, and unprecedented teamwork.

Author Paul Mango, one of the key leaders of Operation Warp Speed and the former deputy chief of US Health and Human Services, chronicles the challenges of developing the vaccine. In this harrowing, behind-the-scenes account of the most successful public-private partnership since World War II, we learn how the nation’s biggest leaders accomplished the impossible. Through sheer will and commitment, a small group of leaders fulfilled its mission, making the United States the only country in the world which could offer a vaccine to any citizen by April 2021, scarcely fourteen months after the genetic identification of the virus.