Inflation falls for eighth consecutive month

[Lightbringer]

What do you people think inflation is? Tell me exactly how you think it happens.

I'll tell you what I think, it's a supply and demand issue. That's it, that's all. How many of you think it's about monetary policy?

[Nomad]

and inflation started when Biden became president and jacked up fuel and transportation expenses.......before he let Putin invade Ukraine....which is the topic we are discussung......not your lies.....

Please show us exactly how Biden "jacked up fuel and transportation expenses".

I just explained to you that it takes a significant amount of time for the effects of domestic policies to manifest themselves and be felt by consumers.

If any Presidential actions/inactions or policies caused any effects whether negative or positive after Biden took office, those acts or policies would have occurred during the PREVIOUS administration.

It's a shame that you are either too fucking stupid or too fucking dishonest or some combination of the two, to acknowledge that.

But everybody knows what a fucking slimeball, Trumpsucker idiot you are, so....

So Operation Warpspeed was taking no action ffs, you're an imbecile! There is absolutely no way that Biden would have done that, he'd have just handed everything over to the CDC and FDA.

Trump's Operation Warpspeed might just as well have been called Operation Waited Too Long.

Had he done it several months earlier when it first became evident that we were facing a serious public health crisis, it almost certainly would have lessened the impact on the health of both the people and the economy.

From Scientific American...

Faced with the pandemic, Trump suppressed scientific data, delayed testing, mocked and blocked mask-wearing, and convened mass gatherings where social distancing was impossible. Despite the mounting threats of COVID-19 and global warming, he pulled the U.S. out of the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accord. He installed industry insiders in regulatory posts tasked with protecting Americans from environmental and occupational hazards; their regulatory rollbacks resulted in 22,000 excess deaths from such hazards in 2019 alone. He pushed through a $1.9 trillion tax cut for the wealthy, creating a budget hole that he then used to justify cutting food and housing assistance for the needy. He tried, but failed, to repeal the ACA, then bent every effort to undermine it, pushing up the number of uninsured Americans by 2.3 million.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...ublic-health1/

So fuck you, Trumpsucker retard.

[serendipity]

Please show us exactly how Biden "jacked up fuel and transportation expenses".

I just explained to you that it takes a significant amount of time for the effects of domestic policies to manifest themselves and be felt by consumers.

If any Presidential actions/inactions or policies caused any effects whether negative or positive after Biden took office, those acts or policies would have occurred during the PREVIOUS administration.

It's a shame that you are either too fucking stupid or too fucking dishonest or some combination of the two, to acknowledge that.

But everybody knows what a fucking slimeball, Trumpsucker idiot you are, so....



Trump's Operation Warpspeed might just as well have been called Operation Waited Too Long.

Had he done it several months earlier when it first became evident that we were facing a serious public health crisis, it almost certainly would have lessened the impact on the health of both the people and the economy.

From Scientific American...



So fuck you, Trumpsucker retard.

And now for the truth, a commodity you're not very familiar with.

Why Operation Warp Speed worked

America’s vaccine initiative was more than a miracle

Redfield, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, phoned Alex Azar, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. With the words, “we have a problem in China,” Redfield broke to the secretary and those of us on his immediate staff news that was about to change the world. At the time, neither Redfield nor anyone else knew much about the characteristics of the virus that would become known formally as SARS-CoV-2, but he knew enough to sense that we needed to respond, and quickly.

Thus...

On Friday January 3, 2020, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, phoned Alex Azar, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. With the words, “we have a problem in China,” Redfield broke to the secretary and those of us on his immediate staff news that was about to change the world. At the time, neither Redfield nor anyone else knew much about the characteristics of the virus that would become known formally as SARS-CoV-2, but he knew enough to sense that we needed to respond, and quickly.

Thus began an odyssey of pandemic response actions, strategies and regulatory processes that would consume HHS, where I worked, along with much of the rest of the administration, until Inauguration Day 2021. Only one of them, Operation Warp Speed, which delivered more safe and effective vaccines more quickly than almost all the world’s experts thought possible, has been universally acclaimed as a resounding success. This did not happen by accident.

Several weeks into a series of inadequate attempts to get out in front of the virus, two newly apparent characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 altered our perspective completely. First, the virus was spreading asymptomatically — someone who had no idea he was infected could easily infect others. Second, its clinical impact was asymmetric — it killed some within days and caused nothing but sniffles in others. This is when our imperative became clear: the only effective way to control this virus and its destructive impact on lives and the economy would be to develop and manufacture hundreds of millions of doses of safe and effective vaccines as quickly as possible.

At this point, the Trump administration — the Azar team in particular — had already begun evolving what would prove the world’s most innovative and effective response to the crisis: the record-time research, development, mass production, universal distribution and administration of a set of highly effective vaccines. Before the year was out, the public-private partnership we dubbed “Operation Warp Speed” was delivering two distinct Covid vaccines throughout the nation. An additional Warp Speed vaccine received approval and was in use by early 2021.

Operation Warp Speed was the most successful emergency vaccine development and deployment effort in history — and the most successful biomedical public-private partnership ever. To put its performance in perspective, think of when Roger Bannister ran the first four-minute mile. That was in 1954. Sixty-eight years later, the record is not much changed at three minutes, forty-three seconds. If we equate today’s record mile to the previous record for vaccine development, Warp Speed’s performance would be the equivalent of running the mile in forty-five seconds, an 80 percent improvement.

How do we measure the value of this speed? In lives? An August 2021 study by the National Institutes of Health asserts that the three Operation Warp Speed vaccines saved approximately 140,000 lives during their first six months alone, from December 2020 until May 2021. As of late May 2022, even after some waning protection of the initial doses, close to 90 percent of all Covid deaths were among the unvaccinated.

Or should it be measured in dollars? In summer 2021 University of Chicago economists and veterans of the Trump Council of Economic Advisors Casey B. Mulligan and Tomas J. Philipson estimated that “accelerating the arrival of the vaccines by six months was worth $1.8 trillion to the US economy — and more to the rest of the world.” Those dollars allowed thousands of stores, restaurants and small businesses to keep their doors open and, throughout the economy, translated to hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of jobs saved or restored.

Many have attributed Operation Warp Speed’s success to some sort of unnamed “miracle”; a deus ex machina arbitrarily introduced to unravel the mysteries of vaccine development, the vagaries of biological manufacturing and the logistical complexities of distribution. Others attribute it to little more than good luck. The core members of the Warp Speed team bristle at these suggestions of miracles and luck. They know that the project was not so much a scientific miracle as it was a meticulously designed initiative. Success was the result of a deliberate strategy, exacting execution, a superior team that worked together exceptionally well, a unique public-private partnership — and the remarkable leadership of a president and a cabinet secretary. It overcame media melodrama, outside political manipulation, internal squabbles and unprecedented logistical hurdles to produce unimaginable success in the middle of a pandemic that had all but paralyzed the entire world.

Some say we achieved success at the expense of safety. This could not be farther from the truth. The minimum number of enrollees in the Warp Speed clinical trials, per the FDA’s requirements, was half again larger than in normal vaccine trials. The interval from when the median trial participant received his second dose until the FDA would grant emergency use authorization was extended beyond that of previous trials. All other required steps and criteria were those of normal trials. Indeed, Peter Marks, who leads the FDA’s vaccine approval unit, restructured his team and its internal processes to work around the clock to accelerate the evaluations. So, while the process of evaluation was restructured, not a single standard of evaluation was compromised. In fact, the standards for approval were in many ways more stringent than in normal evaluations.

There were five simple keys to Operation Warp Speed’s success.

First, both vaccines that reached the population before the end of 2020 — from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna — took advantage of the mRNA genetic techniques that had been under development for more than a decade but hadn’t previously been applied to vaccines. Nonetheless, the OWS team had confidence in their potential and made substantial investments in their ultimate success. The advancements represented by the mRNA technology platform enabled vaccine design to be finished in days, not months or years as in the past.

The second key was performing simultaneously tasks that are typically performed sequentially: reserving, equipping and activating factories to fill massive orders of vaccine doses, vials and injection supplies; developing and making specialized packaging; lining up shippers like FedEx and UPS before they were actually needed; setting up tens of thousands of neighborhood sites for administering the shots at familiar places like CVS or Walgreens before the clinical trials revealed whether any vaccine would be safe and effective. The federal government assumed the financial risk associated with this in ways that would have been prohibitive for companies like Moderna.

The third key involved selecting vaccine candidates for investment in ways that spread scientific risk as a venture capitalist might distribute financial risk, over a variety of technologies and companies. We understood that some might fail, but we needed only one to be successful. Some did fail, but the successes delivered spectacular returns.

The fourth key required designing a governance structure that bypassed the slow grind of bureaucratic decision-making. We created a board which included only the essential players from HHS, the Department of Defense and the White House; it reported directly to the president. Decisions on vaccine-candidate selection, resources and distribution strategies were made in hours and days rather than weeks and months.

The fifth and final key was a leadership philosophy comprising three fundamental beliefs. First, OWS delegated key tasks to those who possessed the most knowledge and experience rather than to those with the loftiest titles. This included bringing in private-sector experts to help where the government lacked the talent. Second, we understood that the impact of collaboration and teamwork would far exceed that derived from individual talent. Debating differences of opinion was encouraged, but undermining the integrity of teamwork was not tolerated. Third, the project rigorously prevented the federal government from engaging in activities the private sector could perform better. This last guideline allowed for a unique public-private partnership: the government provided resources, clarity of objective, regulatory context and coordination for success. The private sector brought in its ingenuity and innovative spirit. The result delivered more vaccines to America and the world in less time than at any point in the history of biomedicine. The federal government enabled success; America’s private sector delivered it.

Again, Warp Speed was not so much a scientific miracle as a deliberate, strategically sound, meticulously designed initiative. Its leaders faced a broad spectrum of obstacles and challenges from within and without. It never really eliminated these obstacles and threats to its success, many of which persisted until the end. Rather, it overcame them with its impressive array of ingenuity, hard work, perseverance, principle and resilience.

https://thespectator.com/topic/why-o...-speed-worked/

[Nomad]

And now for the truth, a commodity you're not very familiar with.

Why Operation Warp Speed worked

Gee, I wonder why the author of that article Paul Mango, is bloviating so hard about how supposedly great OWS was...



I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that he was a member of the Trump administration HHS and was one of the key players behind it.

No, of course not.

At any rate, you're completely ignoring my point which was, AS I SAID...

Trump sat on his thumb and fucked around for nearly half a year before he was finally forced to get off his fat ass and do something.

Now lying Trumpsucker assholes like you blame President Biden for Trump's fallout.

But guess what... NOBODY'S BUYING YOUR BULLSHIT!!!

[PostmodernProphet]

Please show us exactly how Biden "jacked up fuel and transportation expenses".

I see no reason to link his January executive order for you again......you know what it is, you've read it and you know what happened to oil prices the week following......its all been shown to you before......

[Nomad]

I see no reason to link his January executive order for you again......you know what it is, you've read it and you know what happened to oil prices the week following......its all been shown to you before......

Translation: ^^^ "I've got nothing so I'll just do a little tap dance like I always do".

Yawn.

[serendipity]

There is no doubt in my mind that Biden would have been incapable of doing this.

How an Idea from Tuck Helped Launch Operation Warp Speed

The United States’ effort to provide COVID-19 vaccines to the world was one of the greatest government achievements in modern history. Tuck Professor Ron Adner’s ecosystem strategy framework contributed to its creation.

On March 31, 2020, Alex Azar D’88, then the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), was on the phone with the CEO of Johnson & Johnson. Twenty days earlier, the World Health Organization had declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, and an HHS division had hoped J&J would develop a vaccine for the virus.

The proposed contract was business-as-usual for a partnership between the public sector and Big Pharma, where the government would give the company funds to get started (in this case, a 500-million-dollar grant), and J&J would invest the same amount from its own coffers. J&J’s goal was to start phase 1 clinical trials in September, with no guarantees about final pricing or quantities. But for Azar, who had been the president of Eli Lilly U.S. and had previously served as the Deputy Secretary of HHS in the George W. Bush Administration, the deal with J&J lacked the accountability and urgency demanded by the critical global health crisis. “The standard process made us too reactive,” Azar said. “To manage the crisis we had to shift to think about the ecosystem proactively, and that was the genesis of Operation Warp Speed.”

The next day, Azar spoke with members of his leadership team and expressed his frustration with the tentative, lumbering progression towards a solution. The country needed a vaccine as soon as possible; it could not be limited by the traditional processes that led to decade-long lags between drug discovery and distribution. Congress had just passed a two-trillion-dollar COVID-19 relief package and Azar knew that getting the country up and running again would justify an unprecedented investment. He told his team to imagine what was possible if money were no object. “What could physically happen if we put the full weight of the U.S. government behind this?” he asked. Their answer became Operation Warp Speed, an innovative reconfiguration of the entire ecosystem necessary to develop, manufacture, distribute, and administer an effective vaccine.

“To manage the crisis we had to shift to think about the ecosystem proactively, and that was the genesis of Operation Warp Speed.”

Secretary Azar visited Tuck this past February to discuss the strategy behind Operation Warp Speed in a fireside chat with Professor Ron Adner. Why? Because a key foundation for the way in which Azar and his senior leadership team approached creating this new ecosystem was anchored in Adner’s approach to ecosystem strategy. Adner, the Nathaniel D’1906 and Martha E. Leverone Memorial Professor of Business Administration at Tuck, is the author of the critically acclaimed book The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See That Other Miss, which lays out his novel framework for innovation ecosystems. In it, he defines an ecosystem as “the structure through which partners interact to deliver a value proposition to the end consumer,” and he shows how the difference between great innovations that succeed and great innovations that fail comes down to looking beyond your own firm and execution tasks and expanding your strategy to account for the co-innovators and partners who must come together for your innovation to deliver on its promise.

Adner developed and wrote The Wide Lens at Tuck, where he has taught in the MBA program and for Tuck Executive Education since 2008. His relationship with Azar began long before the pandemic. Azar first invited Adner to Eli Lilly in 2016 to help with the ecosystem strategy for an important product launch. When Azar became the leader of HHS, he again called on Adner to educate his senior leadership team. Adner first visited HHS in the summer of 2018, where he spoke at a leadership retreat and ran breakout sessions for senior members to apply his ecosystem strategy to key initiatives. “At that point,” Azar recalled, “it was about policy transformation, regulatory change, how you think about public policy as an innovation, and how you take the negatives in the adoption chain and convert them into being at least neutral.” By the time Adner went back to HHS in January of 2020, this work had influenced the FDA approach to vaping, the NIH approach to translational science, and the Surgeon General’s approach to the opioid crisis — all problems that crossed boundaries between consumers, public health, and the private sector. “I embedded Ron’s Wide Lens strategy as our way of thinking at HHS from day one,” Azar said, “and it was definitely on our minds as we formed a plan for the COVID-19 vaccine.”

That plan, which was dubbed Operation Warp Speed, began to take shape during April of 2020. With his deep experience in both the pharmaceutical industry and government, Azar was intimately aware of the capabilities each brought to the endeavor, as well as the adoption constraints that would slow down critical collaboration. “Secretary Azar was in a unique position to think through the complexity of this ecosystem,” said Adner. He knew the government needed Big Pharma’s drug development and manufacturing skills, but he also knew about the resources available from across the executive branch, such as the Departments of Defense, Agriculture, Energy, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs, which could turbocharge the operation. Azar and his team dove into the details of what each participant would need to have in place in order to engage and went about creating the conditions that brought them on board productively. “Starting with a strategy that considers the ecosystem challenges in advance, rather than one that is surprised as each new piece arrives, is the difference between an ambitious vision and an actual achievement,” said Adner. “What this team accomplished was absolutely extraordinary!”

Read more: https://www.tuck.dartmouth.edu/news/...ion-warp-speed

[Nomad]

Too bad Trump wasted the three months prior to April 2020 sitting on his ass denying that there even was a pandemic.

I wonder how many of the people who ended up dying, did so because Trump had convinced them that the pandemic was "fake news"...

[BartenderElite]

Too bad Trump wasted the three months prior to April 2020 sitting on his ass denying that there even was a pandemic.

I wonder how many of the people who ended up dying, did so because Trump had convinced them that the pandemic was "fake news"...

"It will just disappear...like a miracle"

[Walt]

no one is....we are blaming Carter for the inflation of 1977-1980.......

So you are saying Nixon's blame for the 1970's inflation magically stops when Carter took office? The 1970's inflation is the fault of Nixon, and his compliant Fed Chairman Burns. Carter's hard working Fed Chairman Volcker ended the inflation. Those are just the facts.

I think it is safe to say that ending the inflation cost Carter reelection. It may well cost Biden reelection. Do you think trump would have been willing to fight inflation like that?

[Walt]

What do you people think inflation is? Tell me exactly how you think it happens.

I'll tell you what I think, it's a supply and demand issue. That's it, that's all. How many of you think it's about monetary policy?

"Too much money chasing too few goods" is a good definition of inflation, which does sound like standard supply and demand issues, but with an interesting twist. The goods are usually consumed, but the money is not usually consumed. Money can be almost infinitely reused.

So the amount of money being spent in primarily a velocity issue. If one dollar is spent, and respent every week, it is $52 a year to the economy. If one dollar is buried in the backyard, it is $0 a year to the economy.

That means that inflation, and deflation, are primarily velocity issues, with some money supply, and goods, and services supply issues thrown in.

[Walt]

So Operation Warpspeed was taking no action ffs, you're an imbecile! There is absolutely no way that Biden would have done that, he'd have just handed everything over to the CDC and FDA.

America has one of the best medical research sectors in the world, and yet almost all the vaccines come from Europe? And then trump's distribution system lost over half the vaccines? And what do you say to the other people on the alt right who claim the vaccines are killing people? Wouldn't you be arguing trump is to blame for those deaths?

One point that you did get right was that trump tried to disconnect the medical researchers from the scientists in the CDC and FDA. he decided it was more important to have them talking to political appointees, who were mostly Creationists. That may have been the first problem.

Then we have trump's refusal to put his political reputation on the line. Where are the pictures of him getting the shot?

Finally, the complete failure of a distribution network can only be blamed on trump's habit of hiring the worst.

[PostmodernProphet]

I think I can make PMP jump at the snap of my fingers by denying something everyone knows and then, when he refuses to do what I want I can pretend it never happened. No one will know what I've done

there are perhaps some folks here stupid enough to believe that....you, for one........

[PostmodernProphet]

So you are saying Nixon's blame for the 1970's inflation magically stops when Carter took office? The 1970's inflation is the fault of Nixon, and his compliant Fed Chairman Burns. Carter's hard working Fed Chairman Volcker ended the inflation. Those are just the facts.

close but no.....I'm saying that Nixon's inflation ended years before Carter got elected and I'm saying you're too stupid to read the graph that shows that....

[Walt]

close but no.....I'm saying that Nixon's inflation ended years before Carter got elected and I'm saying you're too stupid to read the graph that shows that....

So 6% inflation is the end of inflation when a Republican is President, but severe inflation when a Democrat is President? Good to know.