Feature
Inside Operation Warp Speed’s $18 Billion Sprint for a Vaccine
It’s expensive, secretive, and—if the president stays out of the way—our best hope of getting out of this pandemic.
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.