_________
Operation Warp Speed 2.0 Is Happening. Right Now. While You're Reading This.
Brought to you, as always, by Pfizer.
By Katy Talento | June 26, 2026
Right now - as in, at the very moment of publication - a group of economists and pharma-friendly policy types are sitting down to lunch, bankrolled by Pfizer (I was told privately), in Washington, D.C. to discuss a draft Executive Order (EO) that would hand the pharmaceutical industry everything it has ever wanted and then some. [Editor's note: Only private corporations can sign Executive Orders.]
I was invited to this lunch.
I sent my deepest regrets. I'm writing this instead.
The event is hosted by Unleash Prosperity Now, the think tank founded by Steve Forbes. The featured guests are Steve Moore (former presidential economic advisor) and Tomas Philipson (former Acting Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, and apparently the academic health economist behind this draft EO).
Now you might be wondering why any of us should care what a roomful of think-tankers, Pharma bros and ex-Trump advisors say to each other over lunch on Pfizer's dime.
The very real concern is that these aren’t cranks shouting into the void. The powerful people who show up in rooms like this are serious players with strong ties to senior officials at the White House, at HHS, and the president himself.
And those ties aren't just hypothetical. A draft cooked up by outsiders becomes real policy when someone on the inside thinks it has merit, picks it up and runs with it. One day it's being passed around a salon luncheon. The next, it's got the president's signature on it.
I know, because I have my own version of that story. It's how price transparency came to be. Pointing out this method isn't a knock on anyone. It's how good policy gets made, too. The difference is what's getting pushed. That one was a populist issue, despised by industry interests, that polled at 90 percent with voters. This one is a wish list for Big Pharma and Well-Connected Biotech. Paid for by Pfizer.
It's billed as "an intimate salon luncheon" to discuss "the extraordinary economic promise of curing cancer" and "modernizing the FDA so that regulatory pathways keep pace with today's scientific realities." Who could be against curing cancer or keeping up with science? I know this language.
I've spoken this language. I know the free-marketeering policy that it is code for - which I very often have agreed with over the past couple decades in conservative policymaking. But the Shakespearean flaw of laissez-faire economics is its knee-jerk defense of private industry interests in health care - even when, as in the case of the past decade or so, that industry has become increasingly indefensible.
So I read what's actually being proposed. Then I read it again, because I couldn't believe my eyes.
And then I wrote 34 ranting comments in the margins.
The metadata of the draft EO lists Tomas as its author, which of course doesn't mean he doesn't have other collaborators. I worked alongside Tomas in the first Trump White House. He's committed, credentialed, and about as laissez-faire as they come - a University of Chicago health economist who made his bones arguing for policies just like those in the draft EO - less and less FDA as the key to more and more Pharma products.
The draft EO was attached to the invitation to this lunch as the actual subject matter to be discussed. It has a name: Advancing Cost-Cutting Treatments and Diagnostics for Old-Age Populations through "Operation Warp Speed 2.0."
Where to Even Begin
Before we get into the substance, the name alone will doom this proposal with public opinion.
The president gets booed at his own rallies, by his most diehard supporters, when he brings up Operation Warp Speed. There is no constituency in the United States - not Republican, not Democrat, not MAHA, not libertarian, not the guy who got the shot or the guy who didn't - who is enthusiastic about resurrecting that program. Operation Warp Speed and all it delivered to the world is one of the most politically radioactive policy episodes of the last decade, and whoever suggested that branding either doesn't read the news or wants the president's polling to crater.
But the name is obviously just the first of many tone-deaf self-owns in this document. Let's go section by section.
The Founding Myth
The EO’s opening premise is that medical innovation is the key to controlling the federal debt. If we just cure cancer and Alzheimer's, the argument goes, we won't have to cut Medicare - we'll have a healthier population that doesn’t need as much of it.
This sounds good. And if we actually cured Alzheimer's, cancer, and the other diseases consuming Medicare's budget, it would be true. But pharmaceutical innovation and disease elimination are not the same thing.
We have had unfathomable medical innovation over the past century. More drugs, more devices, more diagnostics, more interventions than any previous civilization could have imagined. And what do we have to show for it on a population level? We are chronically sicker, fatter, more mentally ill, and more infertile than any previous generation in human history. The extinction-level chronic disease crisis that is actually bankrupting Medicare is not a failure of pharmaceutical innovation. It is the predictable outcome of dehumanized, unbiological lives - of industrial poisons masquerading as food, sedentary routines disconnected from nature, epidemic sleep deprivation, chemical exposures, and severed social bonds.
Medical innovation is not the answer to these problems. It is, at best, an increasingly expensive way to manage their consequences while the causes go unaddressed. Even if you concede that some drugs are keeping people with significant disease alive a little longer - which may be true - that would only perversely drive costs up, as these expensive new therapies generally manage or extend decline during the most expensive end-of-life years, but don’t cure.
And the dirty little secret is that “innovation” has become the industry’s word for obscene launch prices.
When a drug company insists that a new therapy deserves a $400,000 annual price tag, they justify it by saying - there was R&D involved, there were trials, there was a regulatory process. What they are not telling you is how much of that R&D was publicly funded, how taxpayers will be footing the bill for these products used by Medicare beneficiaries, and yet, how completely the profit is privatized once the product hits the market.
Please go to substack to continue reading.
________
It doesn't matter. Pfizer will not stop. There is just too god damn much money involved:
The CDC is the front sales office for Pfizer:
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.