Donald Trump could plausibly win next year's Nobel Peace Prize -- and not just for brokering an end to the war in Gaza.
Two senior Senate Republicans, Bill Cassidy and John Barrasso, are arguing that President Trump deserves the award for his Operation Warp Speed, which they claim "stopped millions of Americans from dying and saved millions more globally."
This praise is warranted. But it actually understates Operation Warp Speed's impact. OWS was pivotal in saving not just American lives, but also the U.S. and world economy.
In fact, America's economic recovery outpaced virtually all of our peer nations, partly because Americans had the earliest and most widespread access to the vaccines. My new research shows that by accelerating the country's reopening, the vaccines and therapeutics generated about $930 billion in increased economic activity in their first year in addition to the $371 billion in value created by reducing excess mortality.
Under President Trump's leadership, federal agencies, private industry, and scientists came together to develop vaccines in record time -- years faster than many experts initially thought possible. The publicly available data from clinical trials shows that early vaccines from companies like Pfizer and Moderna were 95% effective at preventing infection from the initial strain of Covid-19.
Later, as new variants emerged, the vaccines' effectiveness at preventing infections declined -- but they still provided impressive protection against severe outcomes. The shots were about 50% effective at preventing infections from the Delta variant -- which became prevalent in the summer and fall of 2021 -- but 96% effective at preventing hospitalization and death.
Thanks to the vaccines, hundreds of thousands of Americans are alive today and were saved from excessively long shutdowns of the economy by state governments. My colleagues and I examined total excess mortality rates before, during, and after the pandemic -- partly to address the valid criticism about how hospitals categorized deaths from Covid-19 compared to other causes -- and found that Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics saved almost 100,000 American lives in just the first year they were widely available.
Operation Warp Speed didn't merely save lives, though. It also facilitated one of the fastest economic recoveries in U.S. history.
It's easy to forget now, but in August 2020, 8.4% of the American labor force was still unemployed -- almost double the 4.3% unemployment rate of the most recent jobs report. Tens of millions of consumers were either too scared to travel, shop, and spend, or couldn't due to excessive lockdowns, mask mandates, bans on gathering and indoor dining, and social distancing requirements.
As a University of Southern California study noted, "international and domestic airline travel fell by nearly 60%, indoor dining by 65% and in-store shopping by 43%" in the second quarter of 2020, and remained severely depressed throughout that summer, fall, and winter. Small businesses were failing or hanging on by a thread.
By accelerating the development of vaccines and treatments that eased people's fear of the virus and gave them the confidence to resume normal life, Operation Warp Speed enabled the U.S. economy to reopen and rebound far sooner than many expected. A 2021 Chicago Fed study found that every "percentage point increase in the vaccinated portion of the population translated to about 15,000 restaurant and lodging jobs" created per month.
Sadly, tens of millions of Americans remain skeptical of Operation Warp Speed and are still struggling to sift fact from fiction almost five years after the shots became available.
The confusion largely stems from the Biden administration's flawed communications strategy and coercive mandates -- which sought to mandate people into getting vaccinated, rather than convincing them it was in their own best interest. Predictably, this government overreach backfired, undermining trust in the public health establishment and the vaccines themselves.
But the Biden administration's failures and incompetence don't change the scientific and economic reality that Operation Warp Speed truly brought about great value by saving lives and jump-starting the economy. President Trump deserves enormous credit for spearheading it -- and is justifiably upset that his successor's incompetence has cast doubt on what would otherwise be unanimously recognized as the crowning achievement of the first Trump administration.
Indeed, it is hard to think of any public action outside of OWS that has generated as large a benefit so quickly. Unfortunately, the response of many in both political parties has been to treat the great innovators and industry that generated these enormous benefits as villains to be tamed.
Tomas J. Philipson is an economist at the University of Chicago and served as a member and acting chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, 2017–20.
