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Lessons From the Vaccine Race

The rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines started with opening up the scientific process to share knowledge, as we wrote in last week’s newsletter. The other innovation that enabled the delivery of vaccines in less than a year was Operation Warp Speed (OWS), the federal government’s massive vaccine investment and coordination program.

Now widely hailed as a model for rapid response to crises, OWS deviated from the federal government’s normal modes of operation in order to work faster. This shift entailed “temporarily suspending or ignoring some of the usual administrative and scientific guardrails,” Amanda Arnold writes in her examination of OWS and its lessons for governance.

Arnold’s deep dive into how OWS functioned uncovers a nuanced portrait of federal efforts during the pandemic, in which speed sometimes came at the expense of accountability and transparency. Better understanding these tradeoffs provides actionable insights not only for future crises, she writes, but for dealing with problems in normal times as well.

RESEARCH TO BENEFIT SOCIETY

A Global Movement for Engaged Research

Angela Bednarek and Vivian Tseng explain how science funders can set bold new expectations for a research enterprise that works in dialogue with the rest of society.

THE ONGOING TRANSFORMATION

Demystifying the Federal Budget
How do budget proposals turn into policies? Matt Hourihan discusses the process and looks at what the numbers reveal about today’s science policy priorities.

Plus: Variability in judgments that should be uniform—what psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls “noise”—affects many kinds of decisions. A former IBM Research executive reflects on how his job candidate recommendations demonstrated a disconcerting level of noise, and what he did about it.

SCIENCE FICTION / REAL POLICY BOOK CLUB

Join Future Tense and Issues in Science and Technology on Wednesday, June 1, to discuss the real-world implications of All Systems Red by Martha Wells. The thought-provoking novel depicts a spacefaring future in which corporate exploratory missions rely heavily on security androids.

THE POLICIES BEHIND THE HEADLINES

Many US communities facing flood threats are seeking federal help to fund new infrastructure, but there is some debate about what approaches work best. In Issues, Thaddeus Miller, Mikhail Chester, and Tischa A. Muñoz-Erickson offered a guide to infrastructure in an age of unprecedented weather events. They argued that government at all levels should focus on developing and deploying infrastructure that provides technological, social, institutional, and ecological resilience.

KEEP UP WITH ISSUES

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Header image by Mathew Schwartz.

Issues in Science and Technology is a publication of Arizona State University and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.