Saving Millions of Lives at Warp Speed with Dr. Matt Hepburn
On this week’s episode of The Adrenaline Zone, Sandy and Sandra are joined by former army doctor and infectious disease physician Matt Hepburn, who led the COVID-19 vaccine development effort with Operation Warp Speed. Matt opens their conversation by sharing how his parents instilled in him a sense of service to others and his country that led him to a career in military medicine, taking him from the ROTC in college to working across the US government. He speaks in detail about his work with DARPA and its philosophy of taking risks to encourage breakthrough innovations before discussing how Operation Warp Speed also balanced risk with a commitment to safety to make COVID vaccines available as soon as possible. Matt then discusses the challenge and rewards of bringing together different cultures of expertise from medicine and the military to work on the COVID response and his role as translator between those two worlds.
Next, Matt gives insight into the logistical challenges of distributing the COVID vaccines and explains that the team’s military elements were instrumental in this respect as they have great experience and skill in operational planning. Not only that, but he points out that military leadership teaches you to make decisions in the face of uncertainty and take action where others might hesitate, something that was crucial given the unpredictable development of the pandemic. Then Matt discusses the difficulty of effectively getting the vaccine message out to the public and how fear and sensationalism can distort perceptions—but he also sees the hope in this situation and the opportunity for people to take more responsibility for their own health. He also addresses what the future might look like with COVID and how the government is dealing with the new monkeypox outbreak while fighting against the public’s pandemic fatigue. And finally, Matt reflects on the importance of risk takers in the effort against COVID and his hope that such people are encouraged to keep going against criticism because society needs those who are willing to take a leap in the face of uncertainty.
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Transcript:
Dr. Sandra Magnus: It lies somewhere between the pit of your stomach, your racing heart, and your brain, somehow trying to keep it all together. It's an area we call The Adrenaline Zone.
I'm retired astronaut Dr. Sandra Magnus.
Sandy Winnefeld: And I'm retired Navy fighter pilot Admiral Sandy Winnefeld. We’re two adrenaline junkies who love spending time with people who are really passionate about pushing their boundaries as far as possible.
For the last two-and-a-half years, the COVID pandemic has had an outsized impact across the globe and is leaving a lasting mark on how we operate as a society, from how we work to how we travel to how parents raise their children.
Sandra Magnus: The fact that COVID seems to be enough under control that we can safely resume most of our pre-pandemic activities can obscure the fact that an amazing high-speed, high-tech effort led to the production of a vaccine at scale and in record time, and it saved millions of lives.
Sandy Winnefeld: Former Army doctor and infectious disease physician Matt Hepburn led the actual vaccine development effort within Operation Warp Speed, now known as the Countermeasures Acceleration Group. We caught up with Matt recently in the midst of the ongoing new battle with the monkey pox virus.
Sandra Magnus: Many thanks to our sponsor for this episode, Freedom Consulting Group. If you're looking for stimulating work in our national security intelligence sector, check them out at Freedomconsulting group.com.
Sandy Winnefeld: All right. So Matt, welcome to the Adrenaline Zone. We're delighted to have somebody on the show who's at the forefront of vaccine development for COVID and other nasty pathogens that might be out there.
Dr. Matthew Hepburn: So I am absolutely thrilled to be here. Good morning. I'm well-caffeinated and ready to dive in and tell you all about what I do. I love your show. I love the concept. I’ve got to tell you, you had me at Dr. Jon Scheyer. So as a lifelong deep basketball fan, certainly extraordinary interview, and really appreciate the diversity of folks you bring in. I really feel honored to be part of them. I see a lot of similarities, which I'm happy to highlight, and also some very unique things which I get the privilege to work on every day.
Sandra Magnus: Well, why don't we start at the beginning and tell us what brought you into military medicine in the first place, because that's really where it all started.
Dr. Matthew Hepburn: You know, I always wanted to be a physician. I always wanted to be in the military. My dad was an active duty Navy officer and nuke engineer and served active duty for a number of years and then became a reservist for a number more. My mom was a nurse. And they imbued in me that sense of service. It was service to others, service to your country. And for me, it's a best of both worlds that I made this choice a very long time ago and Army ROTC in college. But it's been an incredibly rewarding career because the mission or the purpose is to serve those that serve us. So I think we have a solemn obligation to protect those that are in harm's way, and to take care of their families as well. I think one of the best ways to do that is offer them world-class health care, but where I’ve really focused my career is this idea that when we say in harm's way, that can also be from infectious diseases.
And so that was this call to action of the solemn obligation where I wanted to serve. I wanted to be a physician. But what really was a seminal moment in my career was right after 9/11. Everybody has their 9/11 stories, as we should, and we should never forget. My story was 911 soon after the anthrax letters. And with the anthrax letters, if you remember, again, the fear that was involved with those, but then there was a strong sense of purpose in the military medical community, and especially our research community to say, we can never let that happen again. And we need to make sure we have vaccines and treatments against anthrax but against all these other bad things that infectious diseases can cause.
Sandra Magnus: So you're an army physician and you talked about why it's important for the army to be at the cutting edge of that research, but how much do you work with the civilian side of the medical research community?
Dr. Matthew Hepburn: We do quite a bit. And it's something I'm certainly proud of. We can talk about a lot of examples of that. But I will start with a key point that you're going to hear me say a lot is that this threat of pandemics and outbreaks and infectious diseases is not going away. It can take different forms. It can sometimes be that bad people are engineering an infection. It can be that we have, like we saw with the COVID-19 pandemic, and we're seeing frequent outbreaks now. I think in the Department of Defense, we have a lot to offer, but we never take on this problem alone.
Throughout my career, I've had really the privilege to work across the United States government. I had a job after the H1N1 Pandemic in 2009, 2010, to work at the White House, and to work really across all the aspects of our government, the Health and Human Services and the CDC and the NIH, as well as the Department of Defense and many other departments and agencies, working together as a team to prepare for future pandemics and to deal with outbreaks. You have to humor me a little bit, but I make the analogy as if you think of our government as a basketball team, you don't win with one star player. You win with five great players and a good bench and a great coach and great attitude of everybody's in there for the team first. When our government does that, I think we are an incredible force of good and very powerful and compelling.
Sandy Winnefeld: So speaking of star players, you have the opportunity to work at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which has come up with a few things like stealth and those sorts of things. DARPA tries to be disruptive, but how do you draw the line between being disruptive and too risky, especially when it involves health?
Dr. Matthew Hepburn: I had the privilege of being at DARPA for six years. My DARPA leadership said, ‘Okay, Matt, we're recruiting you into DARPA, and we want you to take pandemics off the table.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ That’s the amazing part of getting to work there every day. So the mantra of DARPA is ‘Breakthrough innovation for national security’, the DARPA leadership had, I think, the prescience and does have the prescience to say that pandemics, outbreaks of biological threats are national security, one of our greatest national security threats and challenges.
But if we truly want to be breakthrough, you have to take risks. And I think that's, for The Adrenaline Zone and to the podcasts, I listen to this idea of we are going to do things that are not the norm, are not the standard, are not always the safe bets. DARPA performs this unique role in our government, to be that, to say,’Wwe're going to invest and partner with groups that are offering technology that's totally breakthrough, but that others wouldn't partner with.’ And you say, ‘Well, why wouldn't others partner with why. If it's great stuff, then why doesn't everybody just invest in it and we develop it?’ And it's because once you have an early technology breakthrough or you're trying something, you don't know if it's going to work. And most of the way that we fund research in our government, but also in our society, because it's the same thing in the private sector and philanthropy, is that most groups aren't willing to take the financial risk. They want to make a sure bet. And DARPA teaches you, you're not going to make a sure bet. You're going to do something that no one else would bet on. But you have to couple that not sure bet with as much research and background and as much thoroughness as you can. The magic of DARPA isn't just that high risk, early bet. It's also saying,’ Okay, if you're not where you need to be in a year or two years or three years, we're going to stop.’ So high risk, fail fast, and that's the winning combo.
Sandy Winnefeld: So Matt, I would imagine, though, that with a pandemic, the two major variables, to those of us who are novices, are transmissibility and lethality. And when both of those are starting to climb pretty high, that your tolerance for risk would also climb. Is there a balance there as well?
Dr. Matthew Hepburn: It's very counterintuitive, I think, to say this, but I really mean it. And that is that you can have the best of both worlds, that the idea of accelerating product development, as we did with Operation Warp Speed, but as we did in tons of DARPA programs, too, that created a lot of the foundation, that you can move very quickly and you can accelerate product development, and you can still maintain the absolute highest standards of manufacturing quality of the evaluation of product safety, of the regulatory approval. And to the point of risk and criticism, which I want to talk a lot about. Everything that we did at the beginning of Operation Warp Speed was criticized, all aspects, all angles.
And again, it was bulletin board material, I think, again, for the basketball analogy, when all the experts say it can't be done, that's what I love. But what we did, though, and I won't get too technical with you, but what we said at the very beginning is that we were going to run clinical trials to determine the safety and the effectiveness of vaccine. And we weren't going to run the trials in 3,000 people or in 6,000 people, but actually 30,000 volunteers. That is a massive clinical trial. That was just the first. That was for each vaccine we were going to do that.
And then we were going to continue in real time evaluating if the vaccine products were safe and effective. So that's not compromising safety in any way. That was a decision that we made. And similarly, the vaccines all, everything we did went through FDA approval. And, in my opinion, FDA really sets the world standard for ensuring the safety and quality of medical products. And so that was always part of it. And so then you say, well, that's impossible. How can you be safe? How can you do this and still be fast? It's clearly resources. We've talked about that already. I think it's energy and willpower, and, frankly, it's all the squishy stuff. When people come together and they rally around a goal and you have people that believe, I do want to keep coming back to this, no one believed we could do it. My leadership did. I did. We had a small handful of people. The companies didn't. The vaccine manufacturers, with a lot of work and patience and partnership, every time they say, Well, we can't do this. It takes six months. We're like, okay. We work the problem 24/7 until it took two weeks. And I can give you a thousand examples of that. But it's this part, again, of willing to challenge the status quo, not believe all the critics and the experts and making it happen.
Sandra Magnus: So really, the big, I think success factor here was the financial risk and the willingness of the community to be adaptable to new methodologies is how you guys are able to do that.
Dr. Matthew Hepburn: Leadership, leadership, leadership, and teams. I know the comment is made frequently: ‘No one goes this alone.’ You can take an individual risk as an individual, but you do that because of the mentorship, the training you've had. And the more team and focus and buy-in you have, the more successful you are to be. And so at DARPA is an example, the leadership, every program manager there was saying, ‘You're not pushing the envelope far enough. Where's the breakthrough?’ And you go back to the drawing board, and you would go through this iteration. It was extremely challenging because the DARPA leadership was like we're not going to settle for incremental. It was the same thing at Warp Speed. It was the leadership that made the huge difference. And then that just catalyzes this focus of energy that changes the world.
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Sandy Winnefeld: So speaking of Warp Speed, which for somebody who has been living on a different planet for the last three years, is the effort that was used to develop and distribute several COVID vaccines at scale and was very successful. What were the government agencies that were involved in and the different roles and responsibilities and how did you get them to work together?
Dr. Matthew Hepburn: You know, the pandemic happened, and I was working in the Department of Defense. And they said, look, ‘We've got this idea that we're going to bring together the best of the military and the best of health and human services and put a team together.’ When that happened, there was no guarantee that that would work as a team because they were incredibly different cultures, as I think everybody can certainly appreciate. But it is in that mixing of different expertise that was key to the success. And frankly, I had a unique opportunity to be, if you will, the translator between the two worlds, because I had worked very closely with the NIH and the CDC and the Health and Human Services in many previous roles, and I understood vaccine development from an immunology and scientific standpoint. But I also understood the military culture, and I understood military operational planning and military leadership. And that's what works. That was the magic. It was bringing together those two cultures.
But at the end of the day, what we had is we had a leadership team that got along. And one of my favorite quotes was from General Perna, who was the four-star general who was in charge of Army Materiel Command, who was brought over to be the Chief Operating Officer. And at the beginning, but also probably every week or two, he would say, ‘Look, guys, we're checking our egos at the door. Team first, it's not about you.’ Our combined culture had no tolerance for ego, frankly. It was all about the team.
Sandra Magnus: So you talked a little bit about the parallel development process and the technical challenges there. Can you talk a little bit about the logistical challenges? Because I remember hearing a little bit about that and the fact that the vaccines needed to have a certain temperature to maintain their efficacy and getting that across the country? I think that's a pretty fascinating story as well.
Dr. Matthew Hepburn: I think you both know and understand these people, these professional military officers who do operational planning. They do logistics operational planning for a living, and General Perna led an entire team of mostly army, but some navy and air force, operational planners. And some of these people had great background in medical logistics. So vaccines and how to ship them and how to move medical products. But most of them didn't. Most of them came in and said, ‘Look, we just know how to organize the operation and we know how to move stuff from Point A to point B.’ But that type of operational planning, maybe I'm stating the obvious, is something that the military does best. What came out of it were two things that I think were just extraordinary.
Thing one is contingency planning. And, again, may seem obvious to most people, one of the things military does best that says, ‘Our plan is this. Here's plan B, here's plan C, here's Plan D, and here's Plan E, and then we're going to go back to plan A.’ And, you know, the classic quote is, is that ‘No plan survives first contact with the enemy.’ So the military tradition is that you're going to have to adjust, you're going to have to take the initiative. But this idea of planning for contingencies in May of 2021, Operation Warp Speed was announced, you had a whole bevy of military planners that had already planned the distribution.
The second point I'd make about military leadership and operational planning is this idea of making decisions in the face of uncertainty. I think there are risk takers and there are mavericks who are going to listen to the podcast and they totally get that. They're like, ‘Of course, you just decide. You go, go, go’, and all that other stuff. But a lot of people, especially in large organizations, are very hesitant. They need more information. ‘Well, we need more data. We're not going to make this decision. We're going to postpone this. We're going to postpone that.’ I think military leadership really teaches you, you've got to act. And you're going to act in limited information. You're going to have as much at the time, but you have to act.
Sandy Winnefeld: So Matt, let's rewind the tape just a little bit. In his book, The Premonition, which is about the early days before Warp Speed, Michael Lewis points out what seems like a host of perfectly normal human and bureaucratic tendencies that can actually stand in the way of taking action early on in a crisis. Did we learn anything from that, do you think? And if so, what would that be, do you think, in terms of what happened in the early days before people like you got involved?
Dr. Matthew Hepburn: Yeah. It speaks to this idea of decision making in the face of uncertainty. And it really hits at the core of what we'll call risk taking. And it's the idea that you're not sure what's going to happen next, but you're collecting information, you're forecasting and trying to predict. And do you make the decision to act or not? When we looked at the early days of COVID, and when we looked at previous crises, when we looked at the H1N1 influenza pandemic or Zika or Ebola, there is the similarity of ‘there's an outbreak, we don't know how bad it is, and what do you do next?’ And this idea of, ‘well, we're not sure how bad it is. And if we do stuff and it turns out to not be so bad and we spent a lot of money, then that may really hurt my government career. I can get fired or I may not get promoted.’ You see my bias here.
Sandy Winnefeld: Yeah. Sometimes a lot of people are out there on any given subject, saying, the sky is falling, the sky is falling. And sometimes it actually is. And very often it's not, and being able to tease out what the real threat is that needs to be really nipped in the bud.
Dr. Matthew Hepburn: We have to be careful of that. You can't motivate people by fear. You know, a lot of people said, ‘Well, why don't we prepare for pandemics and why don't we?’ Well, people don't want to prepare. And that's an issue that we're dealing with now. Like how do we prepare for the future, and even with the massive tragedy of COVID that we're still living with and we're struggling and the horribleness of it all, it's still hard to get people to prepare for the future. But it's hard to prepare them with fear saying, ‘Oh, the sky is falling,’ because I do think that's limited. So that's the hard part is how do you play your cards with effective messages? But I think the point of The Premonition, if there is a core point is this idea that if you're going to say, here's what we think's going to happen, it really does need to be grounded in as much evidence and expertise and everything that premonition is one part crystal ball, and it's just that intuition that something's bad, and one part, incredibly data driven and using advanced mathematics and everything else to tell us what's happening.
But the point is, we're never going to really know. And what I advocate for- in that book, we call ourselves the Wolverines and stuff like that, I can tell you that story. But what my fellow Wolverines advocate for and what we continue to advocate for is assume the worst case scenario and go big, go early. And then if we spent a bunch of money and it turned out to be nothing, then you can fire me, then I'll go do something else. With this go big, go early, prepare for the worst.
And that same philosophy, I think, can and should be applied to pandemics and outbreaks. But that's hard. It takes a risk taker mentality and a group of us, frankly, that are willing to do that and willing to say, ‘Okay, criticize me.’ It's this idea that it's about the mission, it's not about us, and that you have to take these risks early in the outbreak or else you're going to be too far behind.
Sandra Magnus: So for the COVID vaccine, in particular, you used an Emergency Use Authorization methodology to get the vaccines out. And so, for example, if there were a vaccine that teaches the body to build antibodies that essentially neutralize fentanyl, and I believe there's one in development, and of course, fentanyl is killing around 70,000 Americans per year, would it qualify for an Emergency Use Authorization? The pandemic was clearly huge magnitude, but going back to this sky is falling, where should the silver bullets be targeted? How do you determine where those areas of risk are valid?
Dr. Matthew Hepburn: Yeah. And it's going to bring me back to a previous point, too. To start with, the pandemic is awful and the opioid epidemic is awful. And it is awful beyond awful. We have a lot of health challenges in the United States and global health challenges. What I've been hopeful for is that we can take the lessons learned from this pandemic in developing products, getting products out there that are safe and effective, and address all these health problems, including the opioid epidemic, which is just personal anecdotal tragedies that you hear about, and they just make you cry.
There's two parts to your question. First is, can we get even better safe and effective treatments to prevent deaths from opioids? And the answer is ‘yes’, and we have current drugs, and we can make better drugs., and there's a lot of innovation in that space to see if you can prevent addiction in the first place and if you can prevent some of the worst effects of opioids. So if someone does overdose, they don't die. There's a lot to be done in the space, and there's a lot to be done in medical product development. The fundamental principles of medical product development, for what we did with Warp Speed.
I want to bring us back to the idea of an outbreak and infectious diseases. Sandy, this ties back to your previous comment about The Premonition is that in that book, Carter Mecher, who is a mentor of mine and a really good friend, and what he talks about all the time is that in the early stages of an outbreak, what we don't understand is how fast it's moving. Part of this is human psychology that we think linearly. We don't think exponentially and we apply a linear solution. We say, ‘Okay, we can wait a couple of weeks and see how it goes’, because we assume a linear progression. And outbreaks are exponential, especially in those early stages.
And there's a really good story in the book, and Carter used to always talk about it, of essentially, it's called ‘The Mann Gulch Fire’. And it's about firefighters who were overwhelmed by fire because it spread exponentially. And they were thinking linearly. And that's what we do. So the idea of an outbreak and acting early, and that's why I use the hurricane analogy, but even more so, if you act early, you can stop it. If you act late, it's out of control.
So the idea of an Emergency Use Authorization and all these tools that we apply to rapidly spreading infectious diseases is this hope that we can stop it before it becomes massive. And that's why, again, with Warp Speed, it was ‘We can't develop a vaccine in 12 years. We have to do this in a year.’ Now the future state that we imagine is developing vaccines in 100 days, or developing treatments in 100 days. And that sounds outrageous, and I got it, but developing a vaccine in a year sounded outrageous too. Sandy, back to your point of, imagine if we could have a whole next generation of products that would help us with preventing deaths with opioids, and we could develop those in 100 days or six months or something like that. We can change the landscape on all of these different health conditions.
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Sandy Winnefeld: So let's talk a little bit about public perception, Matt. We all know that there was a lot of politicization of the vaccine, and that there are risks of negative public perceptions, whether they're serious or wacky. You have serious medical professionals that are developing these vaccines. And then they get into this really crazy space that can inhibit not only people protecting themselves but people protecting other people. So how does that happen? And what do you do about it?
Dr. Matthew Hepburn: I think it's important that we talk about this in terms of complexity and in terms of, there are a lot of different people out there, and they view things a lot of different ways. And so we can't over generalize about- misunderstandings about vaccines are because of this or because of these people, because there's so many- there's a lot of different root causes of that. When I was in medical school, it was still the, ‘Okay, well, you come to your doctor, and your doctor says this. And you trust your doctor.’ And so then you are, and the word we used to use was compliant, compliant with medical therapy. And we're just in a different place right now. I think that, with how we communicate with each other in terms of social media, and how we communicate with each other as a society, like all of those factors play in. And what it leads to is - I think, sometimes unfortunately we incentivize the sensational so that the crazy or outlandish is rewarded and then becomes viral and that's what we're attracted to.
I think it's really, if you will, kind of an opportunity. The first is you have to understand people where they are. And if you were saying ‘What is the number one solution to this, Matt?’ The number one solution is that we have a public health system in the United States that's been chronically underfunded and not prioritized like it should. And where you see the best community engagement is primarily with these public health departments that are in the local communities and can communicate with them and work with community-based organizations. And that's a little bit of a cliche, but it's like that's the best thing that I've seen.
I did a recent trip to North Carolina. The state health officer there invited me and we talked about community engagement and vaccine hesitancy. And she said, ‘We're not going to be in an office; we're going to be in a church in Raleigh, North Carolina, and we're going to bring the local county health officers there who live in that zip code and live in that district and attend that church. And we're going to show you what community engagement means.’ It's an anecdote, but it was incredibly compelling in terms of the solution.
The final point, though, which I think is interesting is that if we're in a new era where people aren't going to just listen to their doctors and do whatever the doctor says, there's great opportunity there too.
Sandra Magnus: You know, it comes down, I think, to communication as what you said, and along those same lines, the pandemic is continuing, and it's not that it's gone away. It seems to be a little bit more transmissible, perhaps a little bit less lethal. I'm not sure that there's a general understanding in the public of what the current status is and where it's going. And is it going to settle out into a norm like the flu? So there's still, I think, a lot of confusion out there. What are your thoughts?
Dr. Matthew Hepburn: So one of the things that's been phenomenal during this pandemic has been our ability to figure out how many people are sick and have that reported - the number of cases in the United States, and every state and county, and that's reported. And what I'm frankly very proud of is that that's transparent and it's publicly available on a daily basis. And that's kind of how it should be. And that type of transparency there but also in the research. The research community has really stepped up and said, ‘We're going to do research where you accelerate it, and we're going to publish it and share it with the world as soon as we have validated really proven results.’ That gives me a lot of hope.
In spite of that, we don't know what's going to happen. That's the hard part, is that we're still in this phase of dealing with uncertainty in terms of what is the future direction of this pandemic and where is it going to go. And so the struggle now is this idea of: we do need to continue to be vigilant. And we have to prepare for the worst because we could take a turn for the worse. But yet, we also have to balance that with the need for us to come back together as a society and all those permutations and things that that implies. So it's hard to juxtapose those two things, because we need to still be at it. Where I think the solution is is to continue to vaccinate.
So what's truly extraordinary was developing vaccines in such a short time. What's extraordinary now is as the virus changes, and the virus keeps changing very rapidly and creating enormous problems for us, but we're developing vaccines, not against the original virus, but against all the different changes that that virus is making. And so it's hard to predict are the new vaccines better than the old ones and things like that. But the science is showing us that they probably offered. And the extraordinary thing that's happening is not only were we able to develop vaccines quickly. We've been able to pivot vaccines so that they're suitable for that future threat. And instead of taking 10 years to pivot, we're pivoting in months. And that gives me a lot of hope. So if you're looking for what's the one thing that we can do, no matter what the future threat entails, is to get vaccinated, where people are like, ‘Well, I've already got a couple of vaccines’, and I apologize about that. I wish we could give one shot and I wish it was good for life. But I think the reality is that, especially for high-risk groups, that we may need some cadence of frequent vaccinations to keep them safe. But I see that as a gift, frankly, that we have an option to keep them safe.
Sandy Winnefeld: So, Matt, as though you weren't busy enough. There's a new player on the scene, the viral threat scene, and that's monkeypox. I think there are a lot of misconceptions out there. Probably I have a few misconceptions. But tell me about that vaccine. Was it preexisting? Or was it something that was developed quickly? Where do you see the trajectory of that going?
Dr. Matthew Hepburn: I would first say that it really does speak to this idea of response. Now we have a new outbreak. And what we are at as a government right now is working really, really hard and working 24/7 to stop this. And there are of course critics who say, ‘Well, it's probably not that bad.’ It's a terrible infection to have, by the way. It is a terrible, terrible infection. They say ‘Well, not that many people have died.’ And I say ‘What a callous thing to say.’ You hear the criticism from everywhere. But we're not going to listen to the criticism. And we're going to be forward leaning and stop the outbreak. And our government is working very hard to do that.
We were fortunate that the vaccines that we have been working on for decades for smallpox should be also effective in preventing monkey pox as well. And because of that, we've had vaccines already developed. We've had vaccines that were stored and are ready to go. And now those vaccines are rolling out. The reason we're making the point is that was government investment over 20 years. And it also speaks to this idea of preparing for the future.
One of our dreams is that if you take viruses and you put the viruses in different families, like smallpox, and monkeypox would be in the same virus family. And if you say, ‘Imagine if we could have a vaccine and a treatment that would be common to a whole family of viruses,’ and you work your way and say, ‘look, we've got a vaccine and treatments that are on the shelf.’ And we may not have a billion doses of everything on the shelf, but we're going to have them on the shelf. And we're going to be able to flip the switch and make 10 million or a billion doses really, really, really fast. Imagine how prepared we could be for the future. What we're campaigning now is saying, ‘You know, we need to invest and monkeypox is a really good example. Because we had invested in smallpox, we now have a vaccine that we can readily deploy.’
Sandra Magnus: So as a follow-up to that, do you think some of the lessons learned from the Warp Speed project are going to inform some of this positioning for the future and these plans that you're hatching?
Dr. Matthew Hepburn: I do, I do, I do, but it's also the hard part. So the people call the phrase ‘pandemic fatigue’, and I don't know what that means. But they’re sort of like, ‘Okay, well, we had the pandemic. We kind of don't even want to think about it anymore.’ But also, in terms of our government, we have other priorities, too. We have a huge number of challenges in the 21st century. The hard part is, there's not an unlimited amount of resources, and resources is clearly money, but it's also just energy and priorities. And so we have to balance this with a lot of the other things that are also priorities for our government to do.
It's tough to be able to galvanize that energy and to say, ‘We've learned all these lessons from Operation Warp Speed and from the pandemic response.’ And lessons learned is what we did well and what we didn't do well, because we need to do better next time. I want to go back to a fundamental lesson and theme is that we’ve got to have people in our government that are willing to take risks, and risk being financial. Safety of a product is never a risk, but willing to say, ‘We're going to get a lot of criticism, and everybody's going to tell us it can't be done, and that's exactly the space that we're going to be in.’ And we as a government can't discourage that behavior. And it's not just the government, but in our society in general.
Sandy Winnefeld: So Matt, this has really been a fascinating conversation, talking to a person who was at the conjunction of technology, global cooperation, logistics, industry, political will, money - the center of the storm. Is there anything else that you would want our listeners to know that was involved in your participation in this effort and how it all worked going forward?
Dr. Matthew Hepburn: Yeah. I would say, it was really hard. It's almost harder now. Probably everybody on your show says this, and says, when you've had a success, you look back and say, ‘Well, of course, it was a success, and I knew it.’ And you remember this fondly and things like that. And that just wasn't the case. I mean, we were 24/7 for, you know, almost probably an 18-month time period. And it was really difficult to make decisions and to face the criticism and to drive this forward. But the risk takers are the ones that make that calculation, but they're willing to make that leap. And I think that's almost like an American - it's not unique to America because we see it all over the world - but it's something that I think we have that element in our society that are willing to take that leap. And what I would say is, I want those people in our government. And I want those people at DARPA, and I want military leadership to encourage that decision making in the face of uncertainty. I want to encourage the entrepreneurs. They have this crazy new idea for a technology that everybody says isn't going to work. I want them to be very steadfast and resilient against that criticism and to drive that lifesaving technology, because that's where change ultimately happens.
Sandy Winnefeld: Well, Matt, thanks so much for spending time with our listeners today. So many of our guests are doing sort of sports things or fun things or other interesting things. You're doing life and death things. So we really appreciate the effort you and your team have put in over the last two-and-a-half years or so, and we wish you every bit of success moving forward because it's terribly important for our society and our health to get this right. So thanks. Really appreciate it.
Sandra Magnus: Yeah, and Matt, I do hope somebody is writing the story of Warp Speed into a book or something because I know there's so many stories embedded in how the logistics worked and fits and starts with the vaccine development and long meetings. I can't wait to read about it in more detail.
Dr. Matthew Hepburn: Well, thank you both so much. I love The Adrenaline Zone. I'm still kind of pinching myself that I got to be part of this today. So, really appreciated the conversation.
Sandra Magnus: That was infectious disease physician and former vaccine lead for Operation Warp Speed, Dr. Matt Hepburn. I'm Sandra Magnus.
Sandy Winnefeld: And I'm Sandy Winnefeld. Thanks again to Freedom Consulting Group for sponsoring this episode. Do work that matters. Check them out at freedomconsultinggroup.com.
Sandra Magnus: And check us out on social media, including a short video of our interview with Matt on TikTok. Our handle is very simple, @theadrenalinezone.
Sandy Winnefeld: See you next week.
