Pennsylvania native plays key role in Operation Warp Speed, planning vaccine distribution
Kim StrongThe life-changing call for Lt. Col. Matthew Yiengst came on a beautiful day in late spring.
He was asked to be chief of plans for Operation Warp Speed, the small team of people tasked with an unprecedented order: Get an effective COVID-19 vaccine to more than 300 million Americans - and fast.
Like many others across the nation this spring, Yiengst, a native of New Oxford, Pennsylvania, was doing his office work outside when the call came.
At that time, the pandemic had just begun to alter lives around the globe, and in the months ahead, it would lead to more than 268,000 deaths in this country alone and nearly 1.5 million deaths worldwide.
"My selection to Operation Warp Speed was an honor," Yiengst said in an interview Monday. "When I got it, it was like ... I’m gonna take this shot."
As chief of plans, Yiengst is the strategy guy.
He and his team are figuring out how vaccines will move safely from private pharmaceutical manufacturers into the shoulders of millions of adults and children. The strategies involve the transport of the vaccines, the storage, and the training of vaccinators in large cities and small towns as vastly different as Philadelphia and Edinboro, Pennsylvania.
"My biggest challenges are making sure that we can keep the vaccine safe and that it can be protected all the way through the supply chain," he said. "It's leveraging the DOD (Department of Defense) network of supply and logistics to distribute a vaccine. ... So when the CDC opens the network, we can go and deliver those 300 million doses to the public."
Planning and rehearsing are his team's objectives. They conduct "tabletop exercises," full rehearsals that use realistic scenarios to try to find gaps - or shortcomings - in their plans.
"We're about to do it here in the next couple weeks," he said, talking about the initial stages of distributing the vaccine.
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Yiengst feels the weight and significance of his current mission.
"It’s a big deal, and it’s something I’m truly honored to be a part of. From the bottom of my heart, it’s something I feel passionate about," he said. "My parents are older."
The Operation Warp Speed team is only 102 people, carefully chosen from across the vast network of civilian and military personnel in the Department of Defense, according to Lisa Simunaci, public affairs specialist for Operation Warp Speed.
Outside their team but deeply involved in the project are scientists at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), who Yiengst called "some of the brightest minds in science."
Yiengst, who leads a team of three strategists for Warp Speed, had been working for the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center in Washington, D.C., when he was asked to join the vaccine task force. There, he had written a five-year strategy and worked on a complete reorganization of the center.
A 1991 graduate of New Oxford High School, he served as an Army aviator for a decade in Afghanistan and Iraq before getting into strategy and planning. He also received his master's in public administration from the Harvard Kennedy School.
He now works for Gen. Gustave F. Perna, a four-star general and chief operating officer for Warp Speed. Perna co-leads Warp Speed with Moncef Slaoui, a retired vaccine developer and drug company executive.
In regular calls, Yiengst and Perna check in with states and other jurisdictions for the "microplans," built off of Warp Speed's country-wide plan. Yiengst's home state of Pennsylvania was on the agenda for a Monday call with the general.
He's working in Washington, D.C., out of the headquarters for Health and Human Services, not far from his hometown of New Oxford, but he still didn't go home for Thanksgiving. Yiengst didn't want to take his family - his wife and four children - to visit his parents, trying to protect all of them from the spread of the virus.
His parents are retired teachers. His father, Greg Yiengst, coached him at New Oxford on the cross country team, a sport that gave him a taste of the value of teamwork.
"Running cross country is an individual event, but it’s a team sport, and I’ll never forget the fact that you do your part for the team. And that’s one of the things that led me to first join the Army and eventually stay in the Army," he said. "It’s teams that make a difference. The first team I was ever on was in New Oxford."
At 17, he enlisted in the Army Reserves during Operation Desert Shield, sitting at his kitchen table across from his mother, who was crying, he said. Three decades later, he's preparing for his next role, as a full colonel, when his mission with Warp Speed is complete.
His parents are proud of his accomplishments, and they tell him so.
But in the next sentence, they ask what everyone else wants to know: When will we get the vaccine?
When that day comes, he'll feel like his job has been done.
He said: "When anyone can walk into a pharmacy and get a vaccine, that’s when I’ll feel like we’re there."
Kim Strong can be reached at kstrong@gannett.com.