Moncef Slaoui

On May 15, 2020, President Donald Trump officially announced Operation Warp Speed, a project to develop and deliver 300 million doses of a vaccine for the coronavirus disease 2019 by January 2021. Operation Warp Speed was managed by White House senior adviser Jared Kushner with the support of the United States Department of Defense and the United States Department of Health and Human Services.

To avoid a conflict of interest, Slaoui resigned from the board of the Massachusetts-based biotech firm Moderna, which had been developing a vaccine for the coronavirus. Slaoui faced criticism, particularly from Senator Elizabeth Warren, for continuing to have Moderna stock options worth over $10 million. On May 18, 2020, Sloaui resigned from the board of manufacturing firm Lonza, which Moderna had partnered with to develop a coronavirus vaccine. On May 19, after initially denying a conflict of interest, Slaoui divested his Moderna stock and donated the value it had gained from May 14 onwards to cancer research.

Slaoui, who called the time frame of 12 to 18 months "very aggressive" but "achievable", was named as the chief adviser of the project, working alongside chief operating officer and four-star general Gustave F. Perna. Other candidates for Slaoui's position reportedly included Elias Zerhouni and Arthur Levinson. President Trump described Slaoui as "one of the most respected men in the world in the production and, really, on the formulation of vaccines", while Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar praised him as "arguably the world’s most experienced and successful vaccine developer".

Slaoui left GSK on June 30, 2017. In September 2017, he joined European venture capital firm Medicxi.

Gettysburg College awarded Slaoui an honorary Doctor of Science in May 2017. In 2012, Slaoui was named as one of the "25 most influential people in biopharma today" by FierceBiotech. In 2016, Fortune ranked him among "The World's 50 Greatest Leaders" The Medicine Maker included Slaoui in its 2018 list of "World’s Top 100 Medicine Makers".

In 1988, after consulting SmithKline-RIT for three years, Slaoui joined the company as a vaccine researcher. In 2006, he was appointed head of research and development at GlaxoSmithKline, succeeding Tachi Yamada. In 2007, he announced plans to establish a neurosciences research group in Shanghai that would employ a thousand scientists and cost $100 million; it ceased operations in August 2017. In 2008, Slaoui led the $720 million acquisition of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, which folded in 2013. In 2012, he oversaw GSK's purchase of Human Genome Sciences for over $3 billion. The Slaoui Center for Vaccines Research in Rockville, Maryland—named after Slaoui and GSK's first research and development institute in the United States—was opened on December 14, 2016.

Slaoui spent thirty years working at GSK. During his time there, Slaoui oversaw the development of numerous vaccines, including Cervarix to prevent cervical cancer, Rotarix to prevent gastroenteritis in children, and an Ebola vaccine. He also spent 27 years researching on a malaria vaccine, Mosquirix, that was approved by the European Medicines Agency in 2015 and touted as the first in the world. In 2016, he discussed GSK's development of bioelectronic medicine.

Slaoui has also authored more than 100 research papers. In April 2013, he co-wrote a paper with several other GSK heads that introduced the term "electroceutical" to broadly encompass medical devices that use electrical, mechanical, or light stimulation to affect electrical signaling in relevant tissue types. In July 2013, he wrote an op-ed in the Huffington Post titled "It’s Time to Further Incentivize Medical Innovation", in which he outlined three recommendations to improve the effectiveness of the pharmaceutical industry.

Slaoui took postgraduate courses at Harvard Medical School and the Tufts University School of Medicine, although he did not complete his studies at either school due to work commitments. In 1998, he received an accelerated MBA from the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Slaoui graduated from Mohammed V High School in Casablanca. In 1976, Slaoui left Morocco at age 17 to study medicine in France but missed the registration deadline due to new registration procedures and his mother being ill. He enrolled at the Free University of Brussels, where he received a BS in biology and then a MS. During this time he was very politically active. In 1983, Slaoui earned a PhD in molecular biology and immunology from the Free University of Brussels. His thesis was titled Etude de la diversité et de la sélection des répertoires idiotypiques dans le système immunitaire. Slaoui's doctoral advisor was immunologist Jacques Urbain.

Moncef Mohamed Slaoui (born July 22, 1959) is a Moroccan-born Belgian-American researcher and former head of GlaxoSmithKline's vaccines department. He worked at the company for thirty years, retiring in 2017. On May 15, 2020, President Donald Trump announced that Slaoui would manage the U.S. government's development of a vaccine used to treat coronavirus disease in Operation Warp Speed.

Slaoui was born on July 22, 1959 in Agadir, Morocco. His father worked in the irrigation business, and died when Slaoui was a teenager, leaving his mother to single-handedly raise him and his four siblings.