60 Minutes - 3/6/2022: Platform 4, State of the Pandemic, Flying Blind

Episode Date: March 7, 2022

Head of the CDC Dr. Rochelle Walensky is cautiously optimistic that the U.S. may be entering a new phase of the pandemic and says “we have to be vigilant.” Scott Pelley reports from a getaway to and from the war in Ukraine. And legally blind Jacob Smith is shredding up the ski slopes. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. This is the main Polish station where five to ten trains a day escape Russia's war on Ukraine. Each arrival brings 2,000 women and children compressed into standing room only. We met the trains and heard the stories. The Russians are saying they're bombing only military bases. It's all a lie. They're bombing civilians. They're killing children. We mapped together the cases in purple. What is the current state of the pandemic? The director of the CDC showed us how they are tracking variants.

We sequence enough to be able to detect a new variant with 99% confidence. And are you getting any kind of a hint that there's some new variant of concern? No, not right now. I mean, we're tracking things, but there's nothing that appears to be, you know, the next Omicron. Three, two, one. Jacob Smith drops into the Big Cool R, a narrow, rock-walled 1,400-foot chute. That dot is him, making his way turn by turn. A wrong move can be catastrophic.

The run has a 50-degree slope, which means if you slip down the couloir, there's little chance you can stop yourself. We thought you should see this, because he cannot. Jacob is legally blind. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi.

I'm John Wertheim. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes. Millions of civilians are fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Today, a family was killed by Russian shelling. The deaths were reported by a New York Times photographer who tweeted an image that flashed around the world. A warning, the picture is graphic. Photographer Lindsay Adario tweeted, at least three members of a family of four were killed. It was the mother and son and daughter. At the time Adario was there, Ukrainian

soldiers were trying to save the father. Also tonight, a Pentagon official tells 60 Minutes that Russia's assault on the capital city, Kiev, is stalled because of fierce resistance and because the Russians are running short of food and fuel. They expected Kiev to capitulate in three to five days. This is day 11. Also, the U.S. is working on an exchange whereby Poland would donate Russian-built fighter jets to Ukraine, the kind the Ukrainians know how to fly, and the U.S. would replace Poland's jets with American planes. Today, the United Nations said one and a half million refugees have escaped. Many are on evacuation trains arriving in Poland.

The first stop is a rail station with 150 years of history. The tracks at Przemyśl bore inconceivable loss in the 20th century. Now, in the 21st, misery has arrived again, unscheduled, on Platform 4. At the end of 21 hours, after 450 miles of war, something that looked like hope shined atop an old engine, pulling families across the new border of the free world. This is the main Polish station where five to ten trains a day escape the war. On each, 2,000 women and children are compressed into standing room only. Before the doors can open, they reach for water lifted to the windows.

This train fled the Russian army closing in on the southern port city of Odessa. After a day and a night fearing that the train would be attacked, they descended into safety on platform number four. Thank you very much for organizing such a great help. Overcome with gratitude, Alessa told us this is our first time in Poland. We could see people waving and greeting us from their homes. It's wonderful. That was the greeting of Przemyśl, Poland, a town with a thousand years of history. It's had many masters, including Russia,

but today Przemyśl is eight miles from Ukraine's border, the first stop on the flight to freedom. They are in safe place. That's the main thing. Wojciech Bakun is the mayor. Do you know how many refugees have come to your town at this point? I think it's about 70, 80,000 maybe, maybe more. How many citizens do you have in this city? 60,000. So we need nearly double, double our city. But double is not a burden, not yet. Those who left behind homes, husbands, careers and schools are welcomed with soup, coffee, coats against the gloomy 30 degrees and free phone cards to connect with the trouble at home. On arrival, they're free to travel anywhere they want.

Some reach for family or friends already living outside Ukraine. But inside the Przyszczemysz station, opened in 1860, those with no destination fill every hall and room. They rest on all they have left in the world, a light load, but for the burden of memory. There were so many people, Mursana told us, so many children crying all the time. My family spent four nights in a bomb shelter. Everyone is so scared. What should the people of the world know about what's happening in Ukraine? The Russians are saying they're bombing only military bases. It's all a lie. They're bombing civilians.

They're killing children. Irina told us, we came from Kyiv. They're bombing civilians there. My son is in the military. He has kids, and they can't leave. That's the reason nearly all the refugees are women and children. Ukraine is not allowing men between the ages of 18 and 60 to leave the country. What did you see in Kyiv?

I can't talk about it. I'm sorry. and 60 to leave the country. What did you see in Kyiv? I can't talk about it. I'm sorry. And so she passed our question to her 15-year-old granddaughter, Nastya. We heard lots of explosions, rockets, and shelling. How did you get away? We took the first train available. It was full.

There was no place to move. They announced four times to lie on the floor and cover yourself. Then the train stopped and the lights went out. They warned us about gunfire. Ukraine has fought the Russians fiercely, and I wonder what you think of those who've been left behind, who are still fighting. Our people are very brave. We will win. Glory to Ukraine. But glory is likely to be measured not in victory, but in how long defeat can be delayed. This weekend, Russian troops attacked in the north, south, and east, and captured the largest nuclear power plant in Europe.

But what began as a blitz has mired into a siege. This miles-long column of Russian forces stalled for days outside the capital, Kiev. That city of three million has gone underground. There are no reliable counts of casualties. In Russia, Vladimir Putin led his people into a new dark age. Isolated like a pathogen, Russia was quarantined from transportation, business, and media. Friday, Putin made reporting on Ukraine a crime with a penalty of 15 years. Russia's last independent media closed. The result of the vote is... Thursday, at the United Nations, an ovation overwhelmed the reading of the writing on the wall. The result of...

One hundred forty-one nations condemned the invasion. Four joined Russia, North Korea, Belarus, Eritrea, and Syria, what could fairly be called the Alliance of Despots. The United States and NATO allies rushed anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine, while at the same time, the alliance said it would not fight on the ground or in the air. That is not to say there aren't at least a few fresh troops on the way. At the Polish border, we found Ukrainians living outside the country who were headed home to join the fight. This man told us, we're going back because our country is in danger. What do you intend to do there?

We will defend our land and our families. Can you defeat the Russians? Yaroslav told us, we simply want to live in peace. We don't want anyone to tell us how to live. Also returning was a man named Sergei, who is not the type to part with more words than he has to. Why are you headed back to Ukraine? We have a war.

Why do you feel that you have to go back to Ukraine? If not me, who else? I wish you all the luck in the world now listen to his two parting words slava ukraine glory to ukraine is a special insult to Russia. The Soviets once banned the phrase and so made it immortal. It's the parting shot in the never-give-in selfies of the Ukrainian president. Tough men of few words are being inspired by a leader who was once Ukraine's top comedian. But this past week, Volodymyr Zelensky turned out to be more Churchill than Chaplin. I am really so, so proud that we have this kind of president, that he didn't leave us, he's staying with his people, he's fighting there.

When we met Olga Bylos, she'd been waiting two days for her parents to bring her 14-year-old daughter to Poland. It's so encouraging, and it gives you, like, you know, inner strength, and I'm so happy. You're proud to be Ukrainian. I am proud. I am proud to be Ukrainian, of course. Ukraine is about the size of Texas, with some of the richest soil on Earth and 44 million people, but it has never known peace

for long. These families are descendants of misery. In 1933, more than three million Ukrainians died in a famine engineered by Stalin. Then five million were murdered by Nazis. The Polish compassion we saw on the platforms may grow from shared experience. No one really notices anymore, but outside the station, we saw a modest memorial to a monstrous crime. It recalls when many thousands of Poles were packed into freight cars at the station on the order of Stalin and shipped to Siberia. Maybe empathy is why so many Poles took time off to volunteer. Ilyash and Daniel Diedroff are brothers. In my experience, refugees from war are almost never welcome in neighboring countries.

And I wonder why Poland is doing this. We are first to help, and we welcome our Ukrainian brothers. And when I am praying to God, I am grateful to God, and I thank God for giving me the opportunity to help these people. This disaster becomes to be not only a disaster in Ukraine, it becomes to be a disaster of European cities because all these refugees, they need shelters, they need medical care and many different things. So, thanks God, Polish nation support now the Ukrainian nation.

Chris Butra is a firefighter taking sick leave. He helps load supplies onto the trains heading back to Ukraine. And when they're going back, we put them medical, we put them everything what we have, put them to the train because they don't have in shops, they don't have, and sometimes they don't have even pound because the bombs come and they don't have nothing. So the trains go back with food and supplies, medical supplies? Everything, everything. Everything, including these Ukrainian men headed to the train platform, who, like the ones we met at the border, are going home to fight. Late last week, the European Union granted refugees blanket permission to settle in

any of the 27 EU nations for up to three years. Those crowding Przemyśl are already moving on to shelters in cities farther down the line. Mayor Wojciech Bakun told us Poland is making room for another historic catastrophe. What happens to the people who have nowhere to go? We prepare a lot of places. I think in Poland we have about 2 million places where every person can stay for a long time,

not for a few days, for a long time, for months, or if he or she needs, for years. Two million is half the refugees the United Nations predicts. Four million would make this Europe's worst humanitarian disaster since World War II. In an exodus without timetables, how long Ukrainians will have to endure isn't known. Theirs is a future they cannot see. Only one thing is certain.

On Platform 4, another train is coming. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast, chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s,

including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck. Available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Now, Dr. John LaPook on assignment for 60 minutes. In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Biden struck a cautiously optimistic note about the COVID-19 pandemic as it enters its third year. The White House followed up with a detailed strategy for the pandemic's next phase, including vaccinating here and abroad, testing, antiviral treatments, improving the quality of indoor air, expanding the nation's capacity to track and treat new variants, and supporting

people with long-term consequences of COVID. The Centers for Disease Control has also issued new guidelines suggesting most Americans can take off their masks. We set out in the wake of the State of the Union to assess the state of the pandemic with some of the country's foremost researchers, both at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. That's where virologist Paul Dupre alerted 60 Minutes last year about the dangers of coronavirus variants

well before Delta and Omicron battered the United States. It's been about one year since we last spoke for 60 Minutes. Is the pandemic over? The pandemic is not over, but we're in a very different place today than we were one year ago. How so? There have been multiply more variants, but we're moving in a direction where there are not as many people who are in hospital because of the disease. And we've got many more people vaccinated.

And we understand a lot about first shots, second shots, and now boosters. So it's a totally different landscape. Dupre, born in Northern Ireland, is head of the Centre for Vaccine Research at the University of Pittsburgh, and he's hopeful the virus will continue to mutate into a milder form. Is it possible that the coronaviruses that now cause the common cold long ago began as fiercely, as dangerous, as deadly as SARS-CoV-2 and that over time it became weaker and weaker. Now we have the common cold.

Oh, I would say it's more than possible. I would say it's very likely. But we just have to wait and see where the virus ends up. And that's just good science. Scientists follow the virus, keep a close eye on it, and we understand how that virus changes over time and where it will go. Keeping a close eye on the virus at the Centers for Disease Control is Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the former chief of infectious diseases at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital.

She was tapped by President Biden to lead an agency struggling to communicate effectively with the public. This past week, Dr. Walensky took us behind the scenes at the agency that's been fighting infectious diseases since it was formed in the 1940s to combat malaria. So here we are in our genomic sequencing lab. This is the first time you've allowed a film crew back here? That is accurate. Justin Lee leads the genomic sequencing laboratory

and showed us how positive COVID test samples from all over the world are processed so genetic information can be extracted and analyzed in this sequencer to look for new variants of the virus. This was our most recent sequencing run. Each square represents one person's COVID test sample. And about what percentage are Omicron? From the U.S. samples that are collected recently, 99 percent are Omicron. Wow. So out of 96 wells, only one of them is yellow. Only one is delta. Only one is delta. Since first being identified in the United States just three months ago, Omicron

and its subvariants have almost entirely replaced the Delta variant, which had caused more severe disease. Earlier in the pandemic, the CDC was lagging behind in genetic sequencing. Now, hundreds of millions of dollars in emergency funding have helped create a nationwide early detection system. We want to be able to detect about 0.1% of any new variant that comes into this country with 99% certainty. And are you getting any kind of a hint that there's some new variant of concern? No, not right now. Nope. I mean, we're tracking things, but there's nothing that appears to be, you know, the next Omicron. We breathe a heavy sigh of relief when we don't see anything.

Exactly. Morning! But no threat is too small. In this COVID-19 briefing, we witnessed Dr. Walensky ask staff for an update on what some are nicknaming Deltacron, a genetic hybrid of the Delta and Omicron variants. It's only been found rarely in the U.S., and Dr. Walensky says the CDC does not consider it a threat at this time. Anything more on Deltacron? No, I mean, it's out there. But we're

still in a handful of cases, not in hundreds of thousands of cases. Recently, news about the pandemic in the United States has been encouraging. Hospitalizations, cases, and deaths are dropping, and effective antiviral treatments are becoming much more available for those who do get sick. Dr. Walensky has announced a new set of guidelines, meaning right now, about 90 percent of Americans can choose to drop their masks. You hear the word endemic a lot. What exactly does that mean? You're in a steady state. Your pandemic or your disease is neither increasing nor decreasing. So will there be a moment where it's at such a low level that even though it's still on every continent, say, we're not calling it a pandemic anymore?

I think we will get to a place with this disease where we live with a relatively low level all year long and that maybe we have some surges during respiratory virus season. Those surges are annoying and for some they will likely be tragic, but they are not to the tune of two and three thousand deaths a day. I think we live that way with influenza. Yeah. Dr. Walensky has learned to be cautious after telling fully vaccinated Americans back in May 2021 they could take off their masks. Once you are fully vaccinated, two weeks after your last dose, you can shed your mask. But the party only lasted a few months. New CDC research during a surge of the Delta variant forced her to tell the country that masks should go back on. I will never forget the gut punch on that Friday night

when I first saw the data out of Barnstable County, Massachusetts, that demonstrated that there were vaccinated people that were transmitting it to other people. We said we have to put our masks back on. Do you think communicating, we don't know, was done well enough to the public from the very beginning? You know... Or it may change? There were so many times where we were optimistic.

There were so many times where we didn't know. And since my getting here, what I said is we're going to lead with the science. The implication was that science was black and white. And in fact, in an ever-evolving virus and a two-year-long pandemic, the science isn't always black and white. It's oftentimes shades of gray. But from the point of view of the taxi cab driver who drove me here a couple of days ago,

he remembers it as they told us you could take your mask off, and then they changed their mind. Right. One recent poll showed that less than half the American public trusts the CDC when it comes to advice about the virus. Do you take it personally? I certainly don't love to see statistics like that, but I think they will get better as we emerge from this pandemic.

Yeah, really important question. During her 13 months on the job, Dr. Walensky has been on a mission to improve public trust in the agency. We want to give people a break. She's done more than 90 press conferences and hundreds of interviews. She told us she wants Americans to know the crucial work the CDC's 13,000 scientists, medical professionals, and public health workers do around the world. Do they know that we deliver antiretroviral therapy to 12 million people around the world every year? With AIDS? With AIDS, no. Do they know that we're working to eradicate polio? Do they know that when somebody gets sick with salmonella that we look for the source? Do they know that we're responsible for, you know,

opioid statistics in the country? Dr. Walensky took us into the CDC's Emergency Operations Center, a command post normally packed during disease outbreaks. I hear phrases like command center, deployments, task forces. It's kind of got a military sound to it. It feels like it's war. We have to act like this is war.

We are at war against this virus. When we started, we had... A top priority has been improving the collection and analysis of data. Dr. Walensky showed us how, at the beginning of the pandemic, fewer than 200 hospitals, clinics, and doctors' offices could send automated information on things like diagnoses, outcomes,

and immunizations. How could you, do you work with so little data? Boy, did we have to work hard to put the pedal to the metal and create the infrastructure. We've built that in the last year. So we now have, in December of 2020, we had 6,500 facilities, and end of last year we had over 10,000 facilities, and we have more work to do. Dr. Walensky says they can now better use data to gain insight into things like the effectiveness of vaccinations. Here we're looking at deaths, and we can map it towards the unvaccinated versus in the people who've received two doses of the vaccine versus people who've been boosted. And so you see this massive difference between vaccinated and unvaccinated. It's kind of stunning. It is stunning.

41 times the risk of dying from COVID-19 in December of 2021 if you are unvaccinated compared to if you are boosted. Virologist Paul Dupre used this animation to show how the body creates more and more immune cells with each shot of vaccine. That's why almost every immunization we get, like measles and polio, takes more than one dose to be long-lasting. There are lymph nodes all across the body. And when you get immunized, the vaccine is taken up by the lymph nodes in the armpit. These white cells are produced. These white memory cells patrol the body.

And whenever the second immunization occurs, they remember, they explode in the lymph nodes. And those memory cells are able to produce antibodies, but they're also able to recognize infected cells and take those cells out really quickly before those cells start producing more virus in the body. So months or even years after a vaccination, these memory cells may be there kind of asleep. But with one click of an infection, they wake up and they explode into action.

And with each vaccination, the amount of immunity goes up. Yes, you can think of it like a staircase. The first vaccination, we're up one step. The second vaccination, maybe we get to the third step. And the boost, we're up at step 10. So we get this really faster, more robust response as we vaccinate once, twice, and then boost. The CDC says research is ongoing to determine if down the line periodic COVID-19 immunizations will be needed, just like the annual flu shot. The coronavirus vaccines were developed so quickly because scientists at the National Institutes of Health and elsewhere had already done the research needed to understand

coronavirus' molecular structure. Last fall, the NIH asked Paul Dupre to join a team to study other viruses that can harm humans. So kind of a most-wanted list. Some of the most deadly agents are represented here. The NIH has prioritized these seven viral families that cause potentially lethal illnesses like Ebola, Lassa fever, and encephalitis. Dupre says more transmissible viruses emerging from any of these families could unleash another global pandemic. What are scientists doing in the lab today?

Looking at the three-dimensional structure of these, understanding the genetics, understanding how they evolve, how quickly they change, by understanding the viruses, we're ready to fight them whenever they come along and cause trouble. You want to get it right. Like so many Americans, Dr. Rochelle Walensky is taking advantage of a new phase in the pandemic. But as we head towards what may be the off-ramp of the pandemic, she told us she is taking nothing for granted. The country is waking up.

Yeah. Does it excite you or scare you? We're tiptoeing back into it and how energizing and exciting to be able to do that right now. And yet we've been hit with so many curveballs, right? And so my job is to protect the public against those curveballs. And so we have to be, you know, vigilant to make sure that those curveballs don't In the world of skiing, there are two kinds of skiers. Those who like to stay on groomed runs and be guided gently around obstacles, and those who like to ski the whole mountain and ski towards the obstacles. That is called free riding.

Man-made jumps, rails, and half pipes are rejected in favor of the drops, jagged cliffs, and deep chutes created by Mother Nature. The sport of freeriding took off in the 1990s and is now one of the fastest-growing disciplines in skiing. Given the risks inherent with the terrain, it attracts some of the bravest and most adventurous skiers in the world. But even among that group, 15-year-old Jacob Smith stands out. We thought you should see what he does, because he cannot. This is Big Sky, Montana, home to some of the steepest and most challenging ski slopes in the country. And that is Jacob Smith, who is blind. Three years ago he was just 12 years old

as he made his way to the top of the 11,000 foot high Lone Peak to ski down it. Watch this dropping in 321. Jacob drops into the big cool are a narrow rock walled 1400 foot shoot. That dot is him making his way Jacob drops into the big couloir, a narrow, rock-walled, 1,400-foot chute. That dot is him, making his way turn by turn. A wrong move can be catastrophic. The run has a 50-degree slope, which means if you slip down the couloir, there's little chance you can stop yourself.

When you're standing at the top, you feel like if you move, you're going to die. And that's the moment most people would say, you know what, maybe not a good idea. Yeah, but I'm kind of just like, well, I'm already up here, so I've got to make it down somehow. He did, and became the only legally blind athlete to ski the legendary run. You did it!

That was awesome. History just has been made. Forever. How did you feel when you made it to the bottom? I'm excited that I did it. That was awesome. History just has been made. Forever. How did you feel when you made it to the bottom? Excited that I did it. I didn't crash. I thought it was awesome. I guess we made it four more times, so I just wanted to do it again.

You were testing your luck that day. We got Jacob Smith on course. Jacob is still testing his luck and good sense. We met him in January at a junior regional free ride tournament in Big Sky. That's him, now 15 years old, competing against 40 other teenage daredevils, all of whom can see perfectly well. Coming right off the top of that. Finding pretty good landing. This time, the background for all the competitors' spectacular experiment with gravity

was another triple diamond shoot, appropriately named DTM. DTM stands for? Don't tell mama. It is an insane run, like a 45-degree slope. Yeah. Did the judges give you any slack for being blind? No, zero. Do you think they should? No, I don't. I want to be treated normal so I compete with other sighted skiers.

It's not an insignificant difference. We worked with his doctors and our graphic artists to show roughly what Jacob can see on a run. He has extreme tunnel vision and no depth perception on top of that. It's blurry. His visual acuity is rated 2,800, four times the level of legal blindness. Think of the big E on the eye chart. He would need it to be blown up four times in order to see it from 20 feet away. Fantastic ski technique. You wouldn't be able to tell he's visually impaired. So how does Jacob ski like this? His family keeps him on course. Go up with your right feet really far.

On competition days, his little brother Preston patiently helps him hike to the top of the venue. It's so high, the lifts won't take you there. First down, down, perfect, perfect, keep going. Then his father Nathan helps him get down. Nice turns, nice turns. Jacob has a two-way radio turned up high in his pocket. His dad is on the other end at the base, somehow calmly guiding him down. Okay, right, right, right. It's on me to make sure I don't let him down,

that I get him in trouble, you know, that I have to guide him through narrower chutes or not go off a cliff. You have to be his eyes. Yeah. And there can't be a delay. He can't say, are you sure, Dad? Nope.

Have you ever missed it? Have you ever said, oh, gosh, I forgot to tell him about that or I didn't see that? Oh, yeah, all the time. But his adaptation is pretty amazing. How much do you trust him? I mean, enough to turn right when he tells me. Jacob's just putting his all into my dad's voice. It's crazy. Skiing, just listening to someone turn there, turn there. Could you ski like that?

It's like closing your eyes, basically. It would be so hard. Jacob's siblings are all competitive skiers. That's Andrew, who's 17, doing a 360. Preston is 14, and Julia is 12. Do the other competitors know that he's blind? Some do, but they always, like, announce it over the intercom that, like, blind skier Jacob coming down the hill. He is the only ever, I have to say, blind skier. That's when everyone turns and looks. Oh, it's a miracle. Look at him. Would you know if you didn't know?

He's such a good skier for legally blind. They just get mad at him if he's in the way. If we tell anybody that he's legally blind, then nobody believes us. They just give us a bad look. Jacob was born with vision. Soon after he learned to walk, he was on skis. Family vacations were spent bombing down the trails in Big Sky with his family.

But it was back home at their ranch in North Dakota that an unexpected obstacle changed Jacob's life. He started getting headaches and began bumping into things. He was eight years old. I like ran into a wall or something that my mom saw and then it was like two days after I went to the eye doctor and he took one look at my eyes, looked at my mom, and then just asked, like, which hospital you want, because my octave nerve was swelling and bleeding. Did you have any sense that things were going wrong up until that point? No. That day, Jacob was flown here to the Masonic Children's Hospital in Minneapolis,

where he underwent an emergency 12-hour surgery after an MRI revealed a cancerous brain tumor the size of a softball that was crushing his optic nerve. It's the scariest thing I've ever seen in my life. It looked like half his brain was a tumor. So at that point, you're not thinking, I'm worried he's going to lose his vision. You're thinking, I'm losing my child. You're going to lose your child. I'm going to bury a kid. In that first surgery, doctors removed enough of the tumor to relieve the pressure on Jacob's optic nerve to stop his vision from continuing to deteriorate. Here he is leaving a message for his siblings a few days later. I miss you all a lot. I really, really do. My situation is getting better. I'm coming home and I'm really excited. But Jacob would need three more major brain surgeries over the next three years, all before he was 12 years old.

My head feels okay. Each time with an extensive rehabilitation. Did you ever get down about it? Like I did, but at the same time, I just prayed a lot. When you were praying about it, were you praying, this will be over? Were you praying, I want to get my vision back? Or were you praying, I'll stay alive? That I'll stay alive and that I'll get through it.

And that's what happened. Finally, in 2017, a course of radiation eradicated the cancer and Jacob got a clean scan. But his doctor said the radiation increased his lifetime risk of another brain tumor by up to 30%. Right now, the tumor that we originally targeted is gone. You know, so far so good. It doesn't sound like you've exhaled. I don't think you ever exhale. Because?

Because there's always the what if. You know, when you get put into that situation that you never felt you ever should have been or expected, I don't think you're ever going to exhale and go, we're done. Whose idea was it to return to skiing? Well, my dad's. Turn and go straight through. So we came out here and we kind of just tried it out. Everywhere I went skiing for probably the first year or two was with either my dad or a coach.

You've taught your kids to ski, but you've never taught a blind child to ski. No. So you did not know what you were doing? No. So tell me about those early days. Well, at first everyone said get a rope and a sign and he's going to be a blind skier and you're going to guide him.

I'm like, nope, that's not an option. We're not going to do it that way. Because why? Because I'm not going to let that define him. Father and son admit they're trying to carve their own path, sort of figuring it out as they go. Jacob says he's learned to listen for danger, other skiers, the churning of a lift, or icy conditions underfoot. Andy says he remembers many of the runs from when he could see. Can you feel your way down a run you didn't go on before you lost your vision?

I mean, yeah, I can, and I've done it. And how does it work out? It's pretty scary, and sometimes takes me a little minute. That's got to be terrifying. You get used to it. How many crashes were there in those early days? I don't even think I can count that high. When Jacob was 10, he shattered his femur in 60 places when he skied into a tree. Are you not nervous that there's going to be a catastrophic accident, that he could

die doing this? It's not the way I vision life. I don't look for the reasons not to do things. I'm not going to put him in something that I'm not going through first, that the consequences of falling are not going to be life-threatening. What are you fearful of? The only big fear I have is not succeeding. You're more afraid of not succeeding

than you are of getting hurt? Yes. Why is that? Because I've already lost my vision, so a couple broken bones and a couple more mishaps, I guess, isn't a big deal to me at all. Clearly, he's fearless. bones and a couple more m isn't a big deal to me at fearless as a parent. Are

not reckless. He knows his he has the ability to ski mountain, but he's not go by himself. Like he wants wants to trust. He won't doesn't trust. Nathan said Jacob is cautious about skiing and competing on low-visibility days, when he can see even less than usual. Still, he finds a way of keeping up with his siblings.

They are an enviable pack on the mountain. Do you see him being, like, super plugged into everything else, right, to the sounds? He was saying, like, here's the lift, the snow. Yeah. What do you see him being like super plugged into everything else, right? To the sounds. He was saying he like, here's the lift, the snow. Yeah. What do you see? His hearing is very like, he chooses what he wants to hear. So what do you mean? There's times at home where he'll be like, you could say his name a thousand times and he'll pretend like he didn't hear one word. But then skiing, it's like you could like and he'll just turn, you know. On competition day, Jacob suits up and sends it. Dad, drop in. Three, two, one.

Finishing 19th out of 41 competitors. For Jacob, success isn't about the trophy. It's about freedom. Showing others how to negotiate obstacles, even when you can't about the trophy. It's about freedom, showing others how to negotiate obstacles, even when you can't see them coming. Coming to the finish line. Honestly, no matter what gets thrown in front of you, what kind of comes out of nowhere and strikes you, takes you off guard a little bit,

there is always a way to conquer it, to adapt, to make it happen, and still do what you want to do. Next Sunday on 60 Minutes, Anderson Cooper with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Three years ago, he was mayor of a small city in Indiana. Now, at 40, he's in charge of distributing the largest slice of the bipartisan infrastructure law, more than $560 billion to rebuild America's highways, bridges, tunnels, airports and railroads.

When it comes to roads and bridges, we haven't invested at this level since the Eisenhower administration, since they built the interstate highway system in the first place. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.