Eric Topol is a cardiologist working in translational medicine, innovation, at Scripps Clinic in San Diego. He is an active commentator in healthcare. Here is his Twitter thread on Operation Warp Speed along with the vaccine development timeline.
“This will go down in history as one of science and medical research's greatest achievements. Perhaps the most impressive. I put together a preliminary timeline of some key milestones to show how several years of work were compressed into months.”
Dr. Topol has several additional notes:
- Moderna had a head-start, so why didn't their Phase 3 trial finish first? …they were requested to slow down enrollment to get better minority representation
- 3 scientists led the way Katalin Karikó, worked on a mRNA vaccine for ~30 years, was demoted from PennMedicine, losing her grants, went to Moderna; and the husband and wife team of Dr. Ugur Sahin and Dr. Özlem Türeci of BioNTech.
- It took 5 days from the sequence of #SARSCoV2 to Fauci's team to get the start on a vaccine, 62 days to get Phase 1 clinical trial started (That is simply incredible)
- Operation Warp Speed was the brainchild of Dr. Peter Marks of the FDA and was announced on May 15th
