ZELIKOW: Well, politics are always in play when you're developing health decisions for hundreds of millions of people, and politics were in play here too. You know, hallelujah, we're saved, like, right before the election in 2020. Back in 2020, there were all kinds of questions over whether then-President Trump was rushing to get a vaccine, rushing to get good news out there and announce it. KELLY: What about the politics of it? I remember interviewing the chief scientific adviser to Operation Warp Speed, Moncef Slaoui. I think we have the best account of the origins of Warp Speed that's available in print right now, and we kind of explain what it is about it that actually worked and also what about it really didn't work. Actually, President Trump, himself, had almost nothing to do with it. My read is that you all concluded whatever other mistakes the Trump administration made during the pandemic, Operation Warp Speed - getting a vaccine - this was a success. This was the Trump administration program to develop a vaccine - and fast - as the name suggests. KELLY: The report runs hundreds of pages, so we're not going to be able to get at every choice and every decision that officials and leaders were grappling with, but I want to focus on one of them, which was Operation Warp Speed, because you all spent a lot of time on this. And I think anyone reading this report will just say to themselves, oh, I think I understand this now. I think the reason we wrote the report was so that people would actually have a better idea of what you really need to do in an emergency like this. The problem was in knowing what to do and being ready to do it.

PHILIP ZELIKOW: The key to this crisis and the key to what went wrong was we weren't really ready to meet an emergency. I spoke with him today about the report's key findings. Philip Zelikow is the group's director and the former executive director of the 9/11 Commission. The closest we have is a report out today by the nonpartisan COVID Crisis Group.

After previous national emergencies, Congress has created independent commissions to investigate, issue a report on lessons learned - the 9/11 Commission, for example. Two weeks ago, President Biden officially ended the national emergency that was declared during the pandemic. The United States is moving on from COVID - at least, the federal government is.

Operation warp speed