Operation Warp Speed is tasked with the goal of a COVID-19 vaccine by January.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar talked about a timeline for a COVID-19 vaccine.

Charged with this task was Operation Warp Speed, a newly-created program to tie together all major U.S.

However, how the operation functions, its budget, what power it has and what resources it controls have either not been determined or not been made public, a puzzlement to public health and vaccine policy experts.

The hope is that Operation Warp Speed will provide crucial coordination between government entities, create clear lines of responsibility and control, streamline funding and focus work, speeding the timeline.

A pharmacist gives Jennifer Haller, left, the first shot in the first-stage safety study clinical trial of a potential vaccine for COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus,, March 16, 2020, at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle.

"We just need to ensure that decisions are made thoughtfully and in an apolitical manner so as to not undermine the existing structures and expertise in place to keep vaccines safe," said Lois Privor-Dumm, policy director at the International Vaccine Access Center at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The creation of the project underscores the president's penchant for keeping a firm grip on the experts and bureaucrats coordinating his response, even as he has battled publicly with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Robert Redfield and others.

A week in, the operation made its first announcement — as much as $1.2 billion had been pledged to accelerate a possible vaccine developed at the University of Oxford in England and licensed by AstraZeneca. Azar called the contract “a major milestone in Operation Warp Speed’s work toward a safe, effective, widely available vaccine by 2021.”.

The agreement was with the United States' Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), one of the federal programs whose COVID-19 responsibilities now seem to be under the wing of the operation.

Whether the actual agreement was coordinated or organized through Warp Speed wasn’t clarified.

Operation Warp Speed does not appear to have its own media contact.

Neither has prior experience with public health crises.

Warp Speed has so far identified 14 COVID-19 vaccine possibilities.

A volunteer is injected with either an experimental COVID-19 vaccine or a comparison shot as part of the first human trials in the U.K.

How Warp Speed fits into those agencies usual distribution systems isn’t known.

Trump in his speech introducing Operation Warp Speed likened it to World War II's Manhattan Project, which brought together military, public and private organizations to create the atomic bomb.

When the project was announced last week, the vaccine development portion of the operation was to be overseen by Dr.

As of Friday he has transitioned out of that role and back to the FDA after helping to set up the initial infrastructure for Operation Warp Speed, FDA said. .

Historically, the public health face of a crisis of this magnitude would have been the CDC, but it has largely been sidelined in coronavirus.

lacks a plan to produce and fairly distribute a coronavirus vaccine when it becomes available

Both CDC and BARDA are part of the White House Task Force and now Warp Speed, but have not played as large a role as they have in previous public health crises such as the H1N1 influenza, Ebola and Zika

Also unanswered is how Operation Warp Speed will work with the at least two other large-scale public/private consortia created in the past three months to focus efforts on COVID-19 vaccine and treatments

“Any misstep risks eroding confidence in vaccines that could have lasting implications,” said Privor-Dumm at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health