Ex-UCI professor Peter Navarro on Operation Warp Speed

Editor’s Note: Peter Navarro, who taught economics at UCI from 1989 until 2016, has written books critical of U.S. trade policies with China. A fan of those books was Donald J. Trump, who tapped him as assistant to the president and director of the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy. What follows are excerpts from Navarro’s recent memoir: “In Trump Time; a Journal of America’s Plague Year,” published by All Seasons Press.

That I survived five long and tumultuous years at the president’s side is, in and of itself, an unlikely outcome. The Deadpool on Peter Navarro when I first entered the White House was that I was an ivory tower rube unschooled in the ways of the Washington swamp who would last less than a month and be the first to go. Yet somehow, despite a surfeit of powerful enemies, I outlasted all who were out to get me.

On Jan. 27, 2020, the Sit Room began a new chapter of its storied history as the War Room for many of the deliberations of the soon-to-be-formed White House Coronavirus Task Force.

The night before, the 45th president of the United States had assigned me a task he believed was essential to saving hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of American lives. Said the Boss, “I’m taking down all flights coming into the U.S. from China. It’ll rattle the markets and Biden and the Left will hit me hard. But this virus looks like it might be bad, and we need to do it. So get that Task Force behind me. Be tough. You’re my tough guy.”

Troubling smoke signals had come just four days earlier from satellite images of China’s Hubei province. Its major city, Wuhan, a rival in size to New York, had caught viral fire, and Wuhan’s crematoria were burning so many corpses that brown smoke was darkening the skies. More than 5 million Wuhanians fled the plague city, with many taking the virus along to spread to the rest of the world.

Initially, the Task Force rejected a flight ban. I penned a memo to the Task Force that would turn out to be one of the most consequential documents of the pandemic. I would rely on my Strategic Game Theory training while I was a student at Harvard to build POTUS’s case for the China travel ban.

What Strategic Game Theory enables you to do is to find the socalled dominant strategy based on the facts in evidence and the probabilities associated with possible outcomes. In this case, all you need is a greater than 1% chance that a pandemic will hit, and the president’s travel ban will be the dominant strategy. Here is how the memo presented the case:

Costs estimates range from zero in the Seasonal Flu/No Containment outcome to $3.8 trillion in the Pandemic/No Containment outcome… the costs of a No Containment/Pandemic scenario include the possible loss of as many as half a million American lives.

My memo had its intended effect. It hit the Task Force like a crisp Floyd Mayweather jab to quickly bloody some noses. That afternoon, the Task Force turned 180 degrees and provided a fullthroated endorsement of the president’s China travel ban.

Too bad I wasn’t able to see the Task Force’s change of heart. When I had gone to the Situation Room to attend the meeting, I had been informed by the receptionist that I was not on the list of participants. Not for the main conference room. Not even for the overflow room where the meeting was being telecast to the lower-echelon staff. That interception right at the door, particularly of an assistant to the president who normally has free run of the place, was highly unusual. (My banishment was revenge from a rival aide.)

But I still think I got the better end of the deal. With no seat at the Task Force table, I did not waste endless hours at daily meetings that were generally less interesting than watching grass grow. Instead, I used the time to draft a series of Action, Action, Action memos that I would unrelentingly pepper and pound the Task Force with.

Those missives often prodded the Task Force members to move on items they otherwise would not have. Sometimes the pen is mightier than a seat at the table.

The moral of this story … I learned when winning the China travel ban: in government, paper the hell out of opponents.

I turned out to be the “best pandemic fighter in the White House.” That was because, at least early on, other than President Trump, I was the only pandemic fighter there.

With my doctorate in economics, I was certainly an unlikely candidate to help lead the pandemic fight.

Starting on Saturday, Feb. 8, 2020, I began to work the problem. I did so with particular urgency, because, as The Coming far back as my 2006 book, China Wars, I had foreseen a deadly Chinese virus like this one coming at the United States.

The story of how President Trump delivered a suite of vaccines to the American people in a third of the time it had historically taken is a case that should be studied for decades at business and public policy schools.

My urgent recommendation was to “identify [four to five] U.S.-based companies with the experience, infrastructure, skilled labor and resources to most quickly develop a vaccine,” equally quickly find the $1 billion to $3 billion we would need for vaccine development, and “place developer contracts within the next one to two weeks.”

A follow-up memo on Feb. 19 revealed the “secret sauce” of the Trump vaccine strategy: We would embrace an innovative paradigm shift for vaccine development that would make a clean and abrupt break from the traditional sequential development approach. Instead, we would focus on a simultaneous approach geared toward mass production capabilities at the ready the very moment a vaccine was approved.

In the traditional sequential paradigm, vaccine development starts with the initial search for a possible vaccine candidate. A potential vaccine than moves through three distinct phases of clinical trials, starting with a test for safety. This Phase One of the trial is then followed by additional tests for “efficacy”; that is, does the vaccine actually work with a high enough degree of effectiveness to warrant further investment?

In this traditional paradigm, it is only after such clinical trials are successfully completed sequentially that pharmaceutical companies typically make the additional investments needed to mass-produce a vaccine. In economics, we call this slow-paced underinvestment during a pandemic a “market failure.”

The nature of this market failure should be obvious: the high risk that a vaccine may not work coupled with the large capital requirements associated with mass production virtually ensures that the private sector will move far too slowly.

It was that market failure insight that led the business-oriented Trump administration to turn the traditional sequential paradigm on its head. We did so by moving to a simultaneous development process. To wit: even as each of the companies in the vaccine horse race moved through clinical trials, we took all necessary steps to mass-produce every single one of the potentially safe and efficacious vaccines—without yet knowing which one or ones might work.

The second key economic principle driving this Trumpian strategy of simultaneity was equally straightforward: It was far cheaper relative to the costs of both the loss of human life and an extended economic lockdown to spend a few billion dollars up front to be ready to mass-produce every single vaccine candidate even if some of them didn’t pan out.

Clearly, the money we might be accused of “wasting” on vaccines that didn’t pan out would not be wasted at all. It would be some of the best-spent “insurance policy” money ever expended by the federal government.

“The moral of this story … I learned when winning the China travel ban: in government, paper the hell out of opponents.” —Peter Navarro