RED DAWN~ Biden Taps Vaccine Leader Dr. Matthew Hepburn
The U.S. government’s director for Covid-19 vaccine development was tapped by the White House to take on a role focused on preparing for future pandemics.
Dr. Hepburn filled many roles—including conducting research on vaccines, bringing together federal agencies to prepare for the next pandemic after H1N1, and investing in transformative technologies, from tests to treatments to vaccines, at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Dr. Hepburn had been training his whole life for the moment that COVID-19 arrived and spread across the world.
In early 2020, he joined the nascent Operation Warp Speed (OWS), the government’s partnership with the private sector to quickly develop vaccines and other countermeasures against COVID-19.
Serving as the OWS Director of COVID Vaccine Development, Dr. Hepburn led with a simple mission: find every barrier to quickly developing a safe and effective COVID vaccine, and find a way around it. Dr. Hepburn and an OWS team of logistical and technical experts employed key strategies such as funding a diverse portfolio of vaccines and investing simultaneously in vaccine development, trials, manufacturing, and distribution.
The results of this work speak for themselves—safe and effective vaccines against COVID-19 were developed extraordinarily quickly, shattering expert expectations and records due to the work of Dr. Hepburn and the OWS team.
Furthermore, Dr. Hepburn is far from slowing down after the successes of developing COVID-19 vaccines.
Instead, he is focused on what we can learn from this pandemic and the OWS experience through his current work as a special advisor at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he advises on medical countermeasure development for future biological events.
Dr. Hepburn served 23 years in the United States Army as an infectious diseases physician, retiring as a Colonel.
His final assignment was as a Program Manager at DARPA (2013-2019).
Concurrent with the first two years at DARPA, Dr. Hepburn also served on the research and development team at the newly Research, Development and Acquisitions Directorate at the Defense Health Agency.
From 2010-2013, he served as Director of Medical Preparedness on the White House National Security Staff.
Additional assignments have included Chief Medical Officer, Level 2 Treatment facility in Iraq (2009-2010), for which he earned a Bronze Star.
Prior to deployment, Dr. Hepburn was Clinical Research Director at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (2007-2009), leading domestic and international clinical research efforts on biodefense products.
This role entailed extensive service with the Cooperative Threat Reduction program in the republics of the former Soviet Union. Col. Hepburn was also an exchange officer to the United Kingdom (2005-2007) and internal medicine chief of residents at Brooke Army Medical Center (2000-2001) at Fort Sam Houston, Texas.
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