Inside Operation Warp Speed’s $18 Billion Sprint for a Vaccine
On a late August day in an industrial corner of Baltimore that had been mostly silenced by the pandemic, a red-brick manufacturing plant was buzzing with activity. Deep in the building, in a zone called Area 3, the stainless steel shell of a bioreactor lay on its side, having just arrived from Massachusetts. Employees had begun the task of making the bioreactor operational. Within weeks it would be the center of a production line for coronavirus vaccines.
When the owner of the plant, Emergent BioSolutions Inc., ordered the bioreactor, one supplier said some critical parts wouldn’t arrive until November or December. And so Emergent enlisted the help of Operation Warp Speed, the federal government’s mission to accelerate development of a Covid-19 vaccine.
