Trump Picks Muslim American Expert to Lead Covid-19 Vaccine Effort
By Riaz Haq
CA
President Donald Trump has picked renowned Moroccan-born Muslim American immunologist Dr Moncef Slaoui to lead Operation Warp Speed, America's COVID-19 vaccine program. Trump has compared this vaccine effort with the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb in the 1940s.
Dr Slaoui is a highly recognized scientist and a successful leader who has delivered as GSK's head of vaccines. He appears to have more of a can-do entrepreneurial approach to solving problems. He has recently been running a life-sciences VC fund in Philadelphia.
Announcing the appointment, Trump described Slaoui as “one of the most respected men in the world in the production and, really, on the formulation of vaccines.”
Dr Slaoui is an ethnic Berber born in the Moroccan coastal city of Agadir which is famous for its beaches, according to Dr Juan Cole of University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Dr Cole has hailed Dr Slaoui's appointment in his blog post titled "I guess “Islam” doesn’t Hate us After All: Trump pins hopes for Vaccine on Muslim-American Slaoui".
Dr Slaoui is listed as an author of over 100 scientific papers. He worked for 30 years at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), and for a decade he headed its worldwide Research and Development Department. He also served for two years as chair of GSK Vaccines, notes Yahia Hatim at Morocco World News. Slaoui, a former professor of immunology at the University of Mons, Belgium, said that Operation Warp Speed will make available a few hundred million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine by the end of the year.
There are a large number of Muslim Americans on the frontlines of war against the novel coronavirus. Among them is Dr Syra Madad, Pakistani-American head of New York City’s Health and Hospitals System-wide Special Pathogens Program, who is featured in a 6-part Netflix documentary series "Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak".
Other notable names of Pakistani-American doctors engaged in the fight against Covid-19 are: Dr Saud Anwar in Connecticut, Dr Gul Zaidi in New York and Dr Umair Shah in Texas. Their work has received positive media coverage in recent weeks.
Dr Saud Anwar, a Connecticut pulmonologist and state senator, came up with a ventilator splitter to deal with the shortages of life-saving equipment. Dr Gul Zaidi, an acute-care pulmonologist in Long Island, was featured in a CBS 60 Minutes segment on how the doctors are dealing with unprecedented demands to save lives. Dr Umair Shah was interviewed about his work by ABC TV affiliate in Houston, Texas.
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