Gen. Gus Perna, a 39-year Army logistician, was weeks away from retirement and already in his retirement home when President Trump chose him in May to lead the nation’s COVID-19 vaccine production effort, dubbed Operation Warp Speed.
“It’s just a calling,” Perna said on a virtual discussion Tuesday hosted by the Heritage Foundation. “This is about saving American lives, and for me, it is a focused effort to do so.”
Perna noted how OWS has bankrolled six vaccine efforts and ramped up manufacturing capacity with infusions of billions of federal dollars in the hopes of realizing Trump’s goal for a safe and effective vaccine for hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. by the start of the year.
“We really are just at the brink of finally seeing the fruits of our labor,” he said. “We are going to be successful to this end.”
Trump alluded to Perna at the Nashville presidential debate Thursday, when he insisted to moderator Kristen Welker that his timeline for vaccine delivery was achievable, despite what some administration officials have said publicly.
“I don’t know that they’re counting on the military the way I do,” Trump told Welker.
“We have our generals lined up — one, in particular, that’s the head of logistics. And this is a very easy distribution for him,” Trump added at the debate. “He’s ready to go — as soon as we have the vaccine. And we expect to have 100 million vials — as soon as we have the vaccine, he’s ready to go.”
Perna said Tuesday that tens of millions of doses will be ready and awaiting Food and Drug Administration emergency authorization by December, and hundreds of millions of doses will be ready by early 2021.
“It’ll be a hot commodity,” he said.
All that manufacturing capacity, Perna explained, was built from scratch.
“We have actually added brick and mortar capacity, in other words, we have built facilities from the ground up to produce and fill vaccine,” he said. “We have garnered all the materials required to produce the six vaccines.”
Perna said the effort leveraged 12 uses of the Defense Production Act and that 12 more uses are pending that will prioritize government contracts and raw materials to the right commercial producers related to the government vaccine effort.
The Army logistician also shed light on what distribution nationwide would look like.
“There will not be this vision that some people have that there’ll be Army trucks driving through the streets delivering vaccine,” he said in response to a question from the Washington Examiner. “Commercial industry knows how to do this, and that’s how we’re going to do it.”
Perna said he chose the vaccine distributor McKesson to handle the logistics while the Defense Department will bring logistics expertise and program management. McKesson has distributed hundreds of millions of children’s vaccines in recent years.
Dr. Matt Hepburn, head of vaccine development for OWS, said on the call that safety will not be sacrificed in the interest of speed for the record-breaking manufacturing and development effort.
“[That’s] the beauty of bringing together the best of the Department of Defense and the Department of Health and Human Services,” he said. “Bringing the supply and logistics expertise of a globally deployed force and applying that to the critical supply chain issues and potentially critical shortages of vaccine manufacturing, critical equipment being delivered months earlier than it otherwise would, that has massively accelerated our vaccine manufacturing timelines.”
The 23-year Army doctor also insisted that safety will not be sacrificed.
“We are not cutting corners on safety. We are not cutting corners on the quality of the manufactured product, those will be done to the highest standard, and we are not cutting corners in terms of what would be expected from a regulatory authority,” he said of FDA approval. “We are going to meet those standards.”
Perna said it would be “shameful” for the government to distribute a vaccine that did not meet the FDA standards.
“We will make sure that we will follow science to that end,” he added.
“We will not distribute vaccines that are not determined to be safe and effective, and you can take my personal word for that,” he said. “What I think about every day when I come into work quite frankly, and just to personalize it for me, I think about my 84-year-old mother.”
