Biden administration inhibiting ‘Operation Warp Speed’ for antivirals, former CDC director says

U.S. needs “enormous redundancy in trying to develop new platform antiviral therapeutic products,” but administration is shutting out the private sector, Dr. Robert Redfield says.

The Biden administration is throttling a necessary “Operation Warp Speed” for antiviral treatments for COVID-19 and other viruses, former CDC Director Robert Redfield told “Just the News, No Noise” in a wide-ranging interview.

The Trump administration delivered COVID-19 vaccines years faster than the National Institutes of Health predicted by enlisting the private sector and military — an approach President Biden has rejected, leaving the U.S. woefully unprepared for an even bigger pandemic, the retired U.S. Army virologist warned.

“NIH argued ‘Give us the $15 billion'” to make COVID vaccines and is now arguing it can do the same for antivirals with $2-3 billion, which is “one of the problems I have with the current administration,” Dr. Redfield said. “They don’t respect the private sector and the private sector’s ability to make an impact.”

In the fourth year of COVID, “we have one effective antiviral that most physicians would use,” Redfield said, referring to Pfizer’s Paxlovid, which he recommends taking for confirmed infections. “That’s terrible.”

He called for “enormous redundancy in trying to develop new platform antiviral therapeutic products,” which will then require a far more robust “manufacturing capability” than the U.S. now has. Redfield is a “strategic advisor” to Linear Therapies, whose platform technology can make an antiviral for “any RNA virus” within a couple months, he said.

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