Don't call it Operation Warp Speed 2 (unless you want the White House to correct you)

The scoop on 'Project NextGen,' the new vaccine accelerator

According to DALL-E, this is a “Star Trek the Next Generation ship that looks like a vaccine”

The White House is launching “Project NextGen,” a $5 billion-plus initiative to speed up new coronavirus vaccines and treatments, we scooped at The Washington Post on Monday.

The program is going to pursue three big targets:

— Vaccines that provide protection against all coronaviruses, including variants of SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses like MERS.

— Vaccines that produce mucosal immunity, which could reduce risk of transmission and infection. (You may have heard of these as “nasal vaccines,” but officials say that other vaccines could provide similar benefits.)

— Longer-lasting monoclonal antibodies, after prior treatments were quickly rendered ineffective by the evolving virus, leaving immunocompromised Americans at risk.

Three ambitious goals that sound great …

… but face some very big questions, with no immediate answers.

Here's a paywall-free link to read the story at The Post, and below I’ll run through some of the questions that I’ve received since our scoop published.

Is Project NextGen just Operation Warp Speed 2.0? The new program absolutely evokes the old one, with the same vision of using government power and funding to create market incentives and expedite private-sector production.

But the two programs are different in scope and ambition. Operation Warp Speed in 2020 was tackling a known virus, amid early evidence of promising vaccine candidates. Project NextGen is trying to head off future variants of SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses, with bets on largely unproven technologies.

Operation Warp Speed also was budgeted at $18 billion (and the officials running it felt they had a blank check). In this later stage of the pandemic, the Biden administration had to cast around to scrounge up less than one-third of those funds, and officials are facing far more scrutiny over how they spend it.

Who’s running Project NextGen? The initiative has been driven by White House coronavirus coordinator Ashish Jha, who has been stumping for next-generation covid vaccines and treatments over the past year. (It was a frequent topic in his interviews with me and many other reporters.)

But Project NextGen doesn’t have a director yet; Jha is set to leave office next month as the White House covid team winds down, we scooped; and other key health officials like Tony Fauci and David Kessler recently left the administration. The director of Operation Warp Speed, former pharma executive Moncef Slaoui, put a real stamp on that initiative, and I’m curious to see if the mission of Project NextGen evolves based on how the new program is staffed and organized.

What does success look like? The science is not easy and largely unproven. For instance, nasal vaccines show promise, and experts believe they and other new vaccines may provide significant protection by stimulating what’s known as mucosal immunity, which is different from the benefits conferred by the antibodies and immune response in your bloodstream.

But what works in a lab may not work in the real world. Mike Osterholm, the University of Minnesota infectious-disease expert who’s been an outside adviser to Biden officials, challenged me in a call on Monday night to think of a nasal vaccine that’s been proven effective at scale. (I couldn’t think of one off the top of my head.) Osterholm also pointed out that many Americans have been infected repeatedly by SARS-CoV-2 — and that hasn’t seemed to produce any long-lasting mucosal immunity for them.

Project NextGen also faces different success metrics than Operation Warp Speed. As one person closely familiar with both initiatives told me: we knew Operation Warp Speed would lead to effective vaccines — we just didn’t know how effective. With Project NextGen, and its far-reaching ambitions of using new technologies to fight still-TBD viruses, there’s a lot we don’t know.

How did the White House find money after saying they had none left? If you missed it, there’s been an epic fight on Capitol Hill over funding the covid response. Republicans insisted that the White House had leftover money from billions of dollars in previous covid aid packages … and Biden officials countered that they were out of those funds and forced to make hard trade-offs.

Then the administration found $5 billion at HHS for Project NextGen.

In interviews on Monday, Biden officials insisted that the funding they freed up for Project NextGen was newly available and couldn’t have been secured before. But there may be pain to pay on Capitol Hill; some GOP staffers on Monday said Project NextGen’s $5 billion proves Republicans were right to be skeptical.

Why didn’t they just call it Operation Warp Speed 2.0? People know the branding. Former president Donald Trump has, on occasion, touted the earlier program he nominally oversaw. And in a world where vaccine uptake has been increasingly politicized, there may have been some benefit in suggesting Republican and Democratic administrations had common cause.

But the Biden administration was very eager to move on from the "Warp Speed" branding when they took office in 2021, preemptively nixing the name.¹ They had no real interest in bringing it back for their own initiative.

In an interview Monday, Jha also said that the “different times and different goals” called for a different name that evoked a next-generation mission.

Did they intentionally make another Star Trek reference? Officials three years ago ripped the “Warp Speed” branding from that science-fiction series — thanks to a suggestion by FDA official and Star Trek fan Peter Marks. Now a new team has picked a name, “NextGen,” with a real connection to the show too.

I don’t believe the new name was an intentional Star Trek homage, but I’ll tweet out if I learn otherwise. (Regardless, it’s safe to say Project NextGen and Operation Warp Speed are both ambitious Enterprises.)

1. Unfortunately, the Biden team didn’t really have a replacement name picked out, which led to some confusion and officials vaguely referring to “The Operation” for months.