Selective: U.S. Military's Involvement With COVID-19 Vaccine

Tracy Davenport

Health

29th September 2020

Selective: U.S. Military's Involvement With COVID-19 Vaccine

Operation Warp Speed's leaked documents have confused many (Getty Images).

The Claim

The U.S. military is massively involved with the COVID-19 vaccine.

News posted on

Emerging story

Operation Warp Speed is a government program introduced in the spring of 2020 as a response to the coronavirus pandemic. The goal of the program is to produce and deliver 300 million doses of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines with the initial doses available by January 2021. A newly obtained chart began being circulated on social media in late Septermber 2020 that shows military personnel outnumbering civilian scientists.

Misbar’s Analysis

Through our investigation, Misbar has found that the claim that military personnel vastly outnumber scientists in the development of the COVID-19 vaccine is selective.

The chart showing the government involvement has been obtained by the news organization STATnews.com, which is produced by Boston Globe Media. The chart, dated July 30, shows that roughly 60 military officials — including at least four generals — are involved in the leadership of Operation Warp Speed. According to STAT, many of the military officials on the chart have never worked in health care or vaccine development. Just 29 of the roughly 90 leaders on the chart are not employed by the Department of Defense.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services states on their website that they are partnering with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, and the Department of Defense (DoD) to accelerate production of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Obviously there are also many private partners and scientists immersed in the COVID-19 vaccine development. For example, multiple large pharmaceutical companies are working on the vaccine development project including AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and Merck. To understand the scale and the number of people involved in the effort, just one of the companies, Merck, was awarded $38 million by the U.S. government towards the COVID-19 vaccine pursuit. Globally, Science Business estimates at least 115 COVID-19 vaccines are being worked on.

While the leaked Operation Warp Speed flow chart shows the majority of named personnel are military officials without medical experience, tens of thousands of scientists are also working around the world and in the U.S. to fight the virus.