Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Vaccines: A New American Success Story? — with The Wall Street Journal’s Gregory Zuckerman

Episode Date: October 30, 2021

Have we revolutionized vaccine development? What does this mean for our lives and our health well beyond the vaccine for Covid-19? Could this kind of life sciences revolution only happen in America? And what about Operation Warp Speed? Is it a model for future public-private partnerships to solve big problems? Greg Zuckerman of The Wall Street Journal joins the podcast to discuss his new and fascinating book, “A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of the Life-or-Death Race for a COVID-19 Vaccine.”   Greg’s previous books include: “The Man Who Solved The Market:  How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution”, and then there was “The Greatest Trade Ever”, “The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters”, and “Rising Above: How 11 Athletes Overcame Challenges in Their Youth to Become Stars”. Greg is s a Special Writer and investigative reporter  at The Wall Street Journal, ​a 20-year veteran of the paper and a three-time winner of the Gerald Loeb award — the highest honor in business journalism.

Listen, I hate to be sort of an apologist in any way for Wall Street and for Big Pharma, but Wall Street and Big Pharma saved the day here. They're not always looking out for us. There are reasons for criticism, but we have to give them deep gratitude when it comes to these vaccines. They spent years of frustrated work that we need to be grateful for. Welcome to Post-Corona, where we try to understand COVID-19's lasting impact on the economy, culture, and geopolitics. I'm Dan Senor. In spite of all the human catastrophe of the past two years, there have been a few things to be grateful for. Among them, that children were

barely harmed, at least physically in a direct way, by the pandemic, almost by some kind of divine intervention. And then, of course, that technology enabled huge swaths, although not all, of our economy to continue to function despite the lockdowns. And that we developed vaccines in record time. Really, there's been nothing in history like it. Rapid vaccine development. How did it happen? Now, I know we were planning to wrap this series with a conversation with Scott Gottlieb, but we'll wait until the next episode for that conversation because we wanted to have a timely conversation today with Greg Zuckerman of the Wall Street Journal, who just sent me a copy of his new book called A Shot to Save the World, the inside story of the life or death race for a

COVID-19 vaccine. I just got it. I've been devouring it. I wanted to have him on this podcast. He may have just cracked some of the questions I've been raising in this series about the future of vaccine development. Greg is a prolific writer. His previous books include The Man Who Solved the Market, How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution, and then there was The Greatest Trade Ever, and then there was, before that, The Frackers, The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters, and then one of my favorites, Rising Above, How 11 Athletes Overcame Challenges in Their Youth to Become Stars. That last book he actually wrote with his kids.

I recommend all these books. Greg is also a special writer and investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal. He's a 20-year veteran of the paper and a three-time winner of the Gerald Loeb Award. The Gerald Loeb Award. The Gerald Loeb Award is the highest honor in business journalism. Greg will help us understand how the vaccine revolution happened so quickly. And where does it go from here beyond COVID-19? This is Post-Corona. And I'm pleased to welcome Greg Zuckerman from The Wall Street Journal and the author of A Shot

to Save the World, the inside story of the life or death race for a COVID-19 vaccine. Hi, Greg. Hey, Dan. Nice to be here. Good to be with you. So, Greg, I want to jump into the book, which is really, really terrific, and some of the issues you unpack in the book. But before I do, I want to take our listeners back to where you were before you tackled this project, this book project, The Shot to Save the World, in terms of your own experience with COVID, your personal experience? Because I think it's important for people to understand what you are dealing with, because this is actually an upbeat book, and it provides badly needed good news in a sea of not a lot of good news these days, or certainly during that time, but it wasn't always good news for you and your family. So can you just talk a little bit about how you were all

affected personally by COVID? Sure. And before I get there, I wanted to just underscore your point that I aim this book to be a positive book. And we've all read and heard and discussed all the mistakes that were made. And I didn't need to emphasize that or go back to that. My book is about what went right. We've read about what went wrong. My book is about what went right. And so much has gone right. So to get my perspective and my experience, I don't know if it's so dissimilar for many others. I was traveling to Europe, first to Israel, then to Europe in January of 2020. We all heard about this virus in China. It was in the back of our minds, if we all can remember back to those weeks and that period.

And I have two sons, both in college right now, who were more concerned than I was. And they wore masks traveling from Israel to London. I was promoting an earlier book and did some speeches, and they came with me, and we had a good time. And I put on a mask, and people were looking at me, and I was a little embarrassed, and they thought I was odd. And walking through Heathrow, I remember distinctly taking it off, just feeling uncomfortable. And also, if we recall back then i remember reading um both health authorities in the people in the government elsewhere were saying we wrote in the wall street journal i think saying don't wear masks it's a it actually may hurt rather than help

so dr fauci told us not to wear masks yeah yeah's true. I remember him saying that as well. So here I was traveling through Middle East and Europe, came back to America in January, and I was no more concerned than anybody else. And then it hit, the virus swept the world. I was buried deep in my basement working from home in New Jersey, in suburban New Jersey. And yeah, my son eventually got COVID. My brother-in-law, sister-in-law nearby, we're very close with them. They all got, their families got it. My uncle died of COVID in Israel. A neighbor died of COVID. I know someone who has long COVID today and it's a miserable experience and I feel for him. His brain is foggy. It's hard to make decisions. It's hard to work. So Leah, like me, you know, and other friends and family have got the disease. None of the other ones got it too badly, thank God. So yeah, like

everybody else, I dealt with it and was careful and I didn't myself get it. But, you know, we all lived with some degree of fear over the past year. It was not a story you were just observing. You were living it. Right. But part of the reason I wrote this book is to be something of a distraction. So I was working for the Wall Street Journal this whole time, but, you know, worried about the world in the deep of my basement. And I decided to track the development of the vaccines. My hope, both as a citizen and as a writer, was that I made a bet that it would work, that we'd find some vaccines. And I set out to, in real time, try to get inside some of these efforts in the government, in private industry,

et cetera. Right. So you write, politicians, government officials, business leaders, and public health professionals were unprepared for the most devastating pandemic in a century. This is what you write in the book. The errors, oversights, and obfuscations witnessed after the mysterious respiratory illness first emerged in Wuhan, China in January 2020 could fill a book or two. It just won't be this one. This is the story of how science protected humanity from a modern day plague. So that is a very upbeat note. At what point, you said early on you made a bet. So give me, be more specific. What month in 2020 did you decide I I'm going to make this bet. I'm going to tell the story of a success story before you knew it was a success story.

Yeah. I figured worst comes to worst. I learned some science and I speak to some really super smart people. That's what I do for a living and I enjoy doing, picking their brains. And I thought I would go for the ride along with them. It was the spring. It was probably early spring or maybe even late winter. And I guess what first intrigued me was this company in Cambridge, Massachusetts called Moderna. And it was fascinating to me just because I never

heard of it. And here they were at the lead or one of the leads at that point in the race. We'd heard about other efforts, University of Oxford. I didn't really have any insight into that one. This German company, Biontech, there were people out there that I was hearing about, but Moderna fascinated me because they were, not only were they unheard of, that I knew there was a lot of skepticism about them. even suspicion, downright accusations of even fraud. You hear, you heard people suggesting that the CEO was like a Elizabeth Holmes type, and yet here they were. They're the people that maybe are going to come up with a vaccine.

That kind of intrigued me. I like the outsider theme, and they were clear outsiders to the mainstream in science. So that was an intriguing theme for me. So you write in the book about Stéphane Bensal, who's the CEO of Moderna. What Stéphane Bensal was trying to do was an impossible task. Except, you write, he was trying to do this for a long time. It wasn't just an impossible task during COVID. I mean, Moderna, the company, the name was a mashup, as you point out, of the words modified and RNA.

They were deep into mRNA long before it was cool. So is that what turned you on to him, that he was plugging away at this when all the naysayers were saying this isn't going to work long before COVID? Yes, both he and his scientists. And it's true of other scientists around the world. I am really intrigued by that kind of persistence and resilience and ability to ignore the conventional wisdom. And that's what it was, the conventional wisdom for years.

And if you want, now or later, I can take a step back and just kind of explain why mRNA, people were so down on working with mRNA. Let's do that. Let's actually do that. Why don't you tell us why people were so down on it? Sure. So basically, mRNA is a molecule, modified RNA. It's in all of us. It's crucial for all of us. Basically, it transports, it takes, it's the messenger, it takes the instructions from DNA within the cell to another part of the cell where proteins are created that keep us alive. So in like bio 101, whatever, you know, AP bio, people remember, I did not take it myself, but I hired a PhD to help me along my effort. And it was basically getting an education along the way. And the axiom is DNA to mRNA to protein. That's just sort of how life exists. And so in other words, it was always this molecule. It's crucial. It's inside us. And scientists have always said,

well, what if we could develop this, synthesize this, create this mRNA molecule in the lab? Couldn't we then send messages to our body to create any protein that we want? And that means we can actually maybe make the body into its own drug factory kind of thing, vaccine factory, just by sending a message to the body's cells. So it was always kind of like this holy grail out there. What if we could develop mRNA in the lab? And then people kind of always said, well, don't waste your time on it because mRNA gets chopped up really quickly, as you just said, by the cell's enzymes. In other words, it doesn't last. And it's really almost, I wouldn't say possible, it's a real challenge for years, literally decades, just to get it into the

body's cells. We've got, our immune system fights it off. It's foreign. No one really had optimism that you could get it all the way into the cell. And that's what the, it's kind of ironic, I'm skipping ahead a little bit, but a lot of the anti-vaxxers today or some of them say well i don't want mrna in my body it's going to affect my dna it's going to change me but no the by on the contrary it's so short-lived that no one ever wanted to work with it so that was always a conventional wisdom don't waste your time with mrna and that's why it's important in my book i go back and I tell the story of mRNA. I tell the story of a number of scientists along the way, researchers who were obstinate, who were stubborn and said, no, we're going to ignore the conventional wisdom. We're going to figure out a way to make mRNA into a vaccine or a drug. And their stories,

to me, it's inspiring to plug away at a problem. I mean, I don't know about you, Dan, but part of the reason I do what I do for a living, I'm a journalist, I work at the Wall Street Journalist, I like to produce things kind of quickly. I mean, this book took a year and a half. That's longer than most of my article, but I like to do work and see it out there. And to be in a lab and to spend years, years, literally working on a problem,

making incremental improvements, I find that kind of impressive to have that kind of patience. And just to sort of set things up for people having, for our listeners to have a historical context, the idea of turning any of these mRNA tracks into an actual successful vaccine during COVID or any other time, just how unprecedented it was. So before 2020, I think the fastest vaccine developed was a vaccine for mumps, right? Which took about what? Four years. Four years. Okay. And then what about other vaccines? Measles, polio, typhoid Like, how long did those take? I mean, on average, 10 years. So some of those took even longer. And it is kind of interesting because I just hear from,

you know, my parents and the older generation, but polio, those who remember, those who've read about it, how we all just cheered and celebrated and it was front page news. And there wasn't any split in the country or the world about a polio vaccine. We just sort of embraced it. By contrast today, obviously, there's much more controversy about this modern day miracle. And then that's part of your point. And I think it's a point that needs to be emphasized. It is a modern day miracle, one that I think we're just a little too close to right now to appreciate what a wonder it is. It's really the greatest achievement, I would argue, of modern science, maybe even modern finance too, because

Wall Street played a huge role, investors played a huge role in this thing too. And yeah, again, I think we're just a little too close to appreciate it right now. So is that why you think we know so little about it? Because I am struck by this. this i mean i mentioned this to you earlier like i i still and and everyone i speak to who was involved in whether it was operation warp speed or was working in any of the pharmaceutical companies i i'm kind of i say why why don't we know anything about this like in other words we know things we know at a very top level but i this is extraordinary and yet we are almost we almost almost take it for granted now. Now, if you had your first shot, you have your second shot. Now, it's if you had your third shot.

And we just kind of are moving along as though getting these shots is just available to us. So I'll give you a few answers, I think, in terms of why we don't know that much about it. Well, that's why I wrote my book, so hopefully people can learn about how these things were developed. After this podcast, there will be a huge spike in book sales. There you go. People's familiarity with the story will go through the roof. But up till now. Sure.

So I'll give you a few answers. So first is, I think we have a little bit of COVID fatigue. So I'll just tell you in terms of my book. My book is out a short period of time. It's done well, thankfully. But there's a certain part of the populace and even the world of media, like some of the media, you know, I've been on TV and all that kind of stuff. But there's other people that I've done previous books. I've been on media and they say, Greg, I love you, but I'm done with COVID.

I don't want to know anymore about COVID. I've gone through a tough time. I'm COVID with COVID. I don't want to know any more about COVID. I've gone through a tough time. I'm COVIDed out. So I think some segment of the population is exhausted of the topic and doesn't want to hear anymore. Now, in terms of Operation Warp Speed, I'll give you two answers. The first is that some of the most important people leading the effort have been pretty secretive.

And I don't mean that in a negative kind of way, but like General Perna was the logistics head of the effort and did remarkable, miraculous work. The guy has not gotten enough publicity. And frankly, I'm like scooping myself here, but I would like to do more work on him. But he wouldn't talk to me. He wouldn't talk to me. He's a general. He comes from that world where he doesn't want to talk to anyone, doesn't want to get credit. He's recently retired, so I'm hoping he opens up.

He didn't want to talk. So I've got to tell you something. There was a great blog post by Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution, and he writes Operation Warp Speed, a story yet to be told. This is the title of the blog post. And he opens by saying, as just an indication, meaning it's just an indication of what we're talking about, how nobody knows really about the story. He says, I'm quoting here, it's just an indication I look for references in a bunch of pandemic books to General Perna, who led Operation Warp Speed. And he says, Michael Lewis in the pandemic never mentions Perna. Neither does Slavitt in the book Preventable, nor does Wright in the book The Plague Year, nor does Scott Gottlieb in Uncontrolled Speed.

I mean, he goes through all these books. Nightmare Scenario, have just two index entries for Perna, basically just stating his appointment and meeting with Trump. That's fascinating. He goes on and on and on. That's fascinating. He basically shows he's like this invisible figure. Yeah.

So he is in my book, but he's not as big a character as he could be. He worked with a guy- But that's by choice. So you're saying that he's choosing to lay low. Oh, for sure it's his choice, yes. He's just a military man. He didn't want the credit. He's a logistics guy.

He's behind the scenes. Until Operation Warp Speed, his job was to keep the army fed. And the way it was described to me by people who worked with him, with Perna, is you only hear about those kind of people when they mess up, when something bad goes on. And he's the kind of guy, he doesn't want that kind of credit. I do write about Juan Andres in the book. And Juan worked very closely with Perna. And he's also a logistics kind of guy. And it's also just hard for, I think, writers to focus on those kinds of people. The other answer I was going to give you is that Operation Warp Speed,

there's some political nature to it. There's the question of how much credit should the Trump administration get? How much credit should Trump get personally? And Operation Warp Speed, I look at it, it's kind of fascinating. I don't know if you, you're a sports guy, remember? Do you know Bill James?

Yep. Okay, so Bill James, he's the father of sabermetrics. He's all the moneyball kind of stuff that we all know about today. Yeah, pre-Billy Bean, Billy Bean. Exactly. I remember growing up as a kid reading his baseball. Now we're getting off topic a little bit, but he wrote a piece once about Darryl Strawberry.

And he said Darryl Strawberry is both underrated and overrated at the same time. And I think that's the same case with Operation Warp Speed. In other words, Operation Warp Speed, I don't think we appreciate, not just in terms of the money and the financing, but also in terms of logistics, supplies, resources. Perna did stuff like closing bridges so that Moderna could get necessary supplies shipped. Back then, remember, it was hard to ship stuff around the country. I mean, today again, but for different reasons. So they were crucial. And yet, I think it's overrated, overstated also.

As I write in my book, Moderna was running out of money in May of 2020. And I didn't know this. And I guess other people didn't because they pointed to this as a scoop in the book. And they turned to the government. And they couldn't get money from the government. They couldn't get money from the Gates Foundation. They couldn't get money. And now the stock had been underperforming, right? Like the year before the stock was down, I think something like 15% below its IPO price from a year earlier. So it's like they were, the market had kind of turned on. By then though, the market was, that was really

the only place they were getting any love on Wall Street. By then the stock had been going up, but they still didn't have the money. So Operation Warp Speed, and Operation Warp Speed, but I also write in my book, in other ways, slowed down Moderna. So they, for just kind of bureaucratic reasons, Slowy, and he was getting pressure himself. Slowy was the other person who ran it, Monsaf Slowy. He was getting pressure to include, they made Moderna,

when they were doing their testing in their trials, when they were testing their vaccine, they had to ask other questions while they were working with volunteers, stuff that had nothing to do with the vaccine because other people had needs and requirements and went to Operation Warp Speed.

And also Operation Warp Speed. And also Operation Warp Speed threw Novavax out of a plant, a manufacturing plant. Novavax is a company in Maryland, a really interesting company that I think will come out soon with a vaccine that will be approved and it's going to be very helpful elsewhere in the world. Anyway, Operation Warp Speed threw them out of a manufacturing plant in Maryland because Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca and Oxford were ahead of Novavax in the race. And they thought, hey, let's kick Novavax out and put these guys in there because we've got to get vaccines quickly. So that decision slowed things down for Novavax. So, again, in some ways, the scientists and the companies and the government and other people, they all played really important roles.

You don't want to overstate Operation Warp Speed either. Okay, but I will say this in defense of Operation Warp Speed. The core problem, it seems to me, that they did solve for was, or I guess among some of the most core problems was pharmaceutical companies were reluctant to get into manufacturing mode before they were approved, authorized, and ready to go to market. And what Operation Warp Speed determined is that sequencing just wouldn't work in the middle of a pandemic. So we've got to dual track this process. So let's give them the

guarantees that they're going to have purchases, whether or not they actually can produce something to go to market so they can begin doing all the other pieces that are normally sequenced after you get the approval. Yes. And it's historic what happened. Never before have we simultaneously developed and tested and manufactured. So can you just explain that? Just explain what was actually done. I mean, I did it at a very high level, but you were deep in it. Yeah, the reason why vaccines usually take years and years and years is no one's going to manufacture them, build the vaccines.

It's so difficult. It's very challenging. mRNA is easier than the historic way of making vaccines, which is taking a piece of the actual virus and killing it or attenuating it, weakening it and building vaccines. And you need vats and you need eggs, chicken eggs usually, or other kinds of eggs. It's a complicated, challenging process, the manufacturing process, but mRNA is difficult too. And no one's going to spend the money. It's hugely expensive until you've proven that you've got a vaccine. Why would you? So that's the beauty of Warp Speed. And the strategy was, we're going to write you these checks and we're going to make a bet that you can find a vaccine. And the brilliance of Warp Speed

is it was like an investment portfolio. They picked two vaccines from three different vaccine approaches. So there were two mRNA vaccines, the ones we're familiar with, the Pfizer one and the Moderna one. There were two adenovirus vaccines, which I can explain. And that's another approach that's revolutionary. It's going to lead to all kinds of interesting things. And that's J&J. And that's in the UK, the AstraZeneca-Oxford one. And there were two protein subunit approaches. And that's J&J and that's in UK, the AstraZeneca Oxford one.

And there were two protein subunit approaches. And that's this little company Novavax I mentioned. And I think GSK and Sanofi. Yeah, that's the other protein subunit. So yes, so because they had this money from Warp Speed, these companies could do everything. They could take the risk of manufacturing a vaccine before it was approved. The caveat is

that Pfizer didn't take any development money from Warp Speed. And Pfizer is the one that was first to the market and has helped more people than anybody else in the United States, at least. But they did sell their vaccine ahead of time to the government. And that was a lot of money and that was helpful to them. So yeah. In addition to Stefan Benzel from Moderna, another character you focus on in your book is Ugar Sahin from BioNTech. And you write also early on mRNA, long before COVID. You write in the book,

Dr. Sahin had spent more than two decades researching how to teach the immune system to fight disease. He needed an IPO to help make it happen, but investors were balking. And then you go on to say that he only raised $150 million in his IPO, which was something like half of what he had hoped for, valuing the company at $3.4 billion. And this was all before COVID. So also the company, he was facing headwinds with his company. What can you tell us about Uhar Sahin and his wife too, who's, they were quite a team. Yeah, fascinating individuals. I've spoken to a ton of people. I couldn't get to Germany, unfortunately, obviously with COVID and such. I had planned

a trip, but I couldn't. But I thankfully got to talk to dozens and dozens of people who worked with him, went to school with him. And I talked to Sahin and his wife as well. But it was a privilege to talk to those people. They're just kind of quirky, interesting characters. So Sahin was born in Turkey, came to Germany like a number of other Turks back then. Germany at the time was, West Germany was inviting Turkish workers. They needed the help, so they came there. And he grew up and he became fascinated by the immune system. He's really obsessed with the immune system.

And he's got this belief that the immune system can be taught to fight off cancer. And that's what he dedicated his life to, frankly. So he's a cancer guy. He's not a virus guy. He's not even an mRNA guy. He's a cancer guy. And he spent years trying to figure out ways to teach the body to fight off cancer and specifically developing a vaccine with a protein. Basically, a vaccine just teaches the body, it gives an education to the body's immune system. And usually you do it by introducing to the immune system, to the body, a little piece. Historically, it's been a little piece of a virus, of a pathogen, or just something that teaches you about the pathogen. So in this case, it's a spike protein,

you know, that protein that's characteristic of this coronavirus. So Sahin spent years working on different approaches to fight off cancer. And one of them was mRNA. So he wasn't sort of an mRNA pioneer, but he embraced it and threw himself into it. And he's just an interesting guy. He doesn't care about wealth. He's now a billionaire, but he still lives in an apartment in Mainz, Germany. He bikes to work. He doesn't own a television. He doesn't own a car. He's a little bit borderline surprised or even shocked when he realizes that his employees, his staffers aren't as dedicated to research as he is. That's all he does. I mean, I wrote about it in the book. Explain the sleeping schedule.

Yeah. I mean, it's not like publicly, no, but people within the company talk about how he and his wife sleep four hours a night, but it's not the same four hours. They supposedly only overlap two hours a night. At least that's what the staffers were told. No one's really sure why. I mean, they come home and they do go back to research. They're really dedicated, which is kind and they do go back to research.

They're really dedicated, which is kind of reassuring that there's people out there 24-7 thinking about ways to help us and cure us and heal us. And yeah, so they go on vacation and they literally bring big computer terminals and their stacks of paperwork on their vacations and they lug them down to the pool. They're unusual individuals. So early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Sahin calls a senior scientist at Pfizer and Sahin is very interested in trying to find a vaccine for COVID-19. And the scientist advisor warns him against spending too much time on it, reminding him that past coronaviruses, at least in the 21st century, had emerged and then disappeared. And I quote here, the scientist says to him, remember SARS? It was contained. MERS contained. And Sahin ignores that very fair point. Like, what did he know about this virus that was going to be different from those previous ones? Yeah, it's kind of fascinating that in January, when I was flying around the country without a

mask, or around the world without a mask, Ugar Sahin, as well as the key characters in my book, Stéphane Bancel, Dan Baruch, who's the key to the J&J vaccine, Adrian Hill and the people at Oxford, took them a little while, but they all were starting to get scared about the world and literally talking about a pandemic. Again, Januaryuary think of how

january 2020 yeah how blessed most of us were so here sahin and sahin for from his perspective he just read a paper and the paper was about this um it was in the lancet this well well regarded british scientific publication and it was about a family in wuhan and the fact that the entire family got coronavirus and the way he looked at it they got covid from the coronavirus and the fact that the entire family got coronavirus. And the way he looked at it, they got COVID from the coronavirus. And the way he looked at it is this is a respiratory disease. It's another coronavirus, but it seems like it's much easier to spread than the past ones. He realized that Wuhan's a pretty big city. It's got flights connecting all kinds of different places. This thing's going to spread. And it probably already has spread. And we are in

trouble. And we got to do something about it. And he got his wife, quickly convinced his wife, who's also a cancer researcher and a senior person at Biontech, and he convinced her, hey, we got to focus the company on it. And he told his staff and they were sort of, yeah, boss, okay, we're going to focus on this coronavirus. But then he realized a few days later, they weren't all that focused or worried. They were all going to, there's a huge big carnival there that everyone's into and they celebrate. It goes for months. And here he is. He thinks that the world's about to enter a pandemic, have to deal with a pandemic. And he sees his senior staff blasé about it. And it really drove him nuts. And he's like, no, guys, you didn't get it. I'm serious about this. We've got to build a

vaccine. And the reason, it's pretty impressive, you didn't get it. I'm serious about this. We've got to build a vaccine. And the reason, it's pretty impressive. Like he, they weren't experts necessarily in mRNA. I would argue that they were fast followers after Moderna. They learned from Moderna, I believe. And the techniques are those that I think Moderna really revolutionized. But to their credit, they were cancer specialists who had been developing this. This was one of their approaches. And they ran with them. They said, we think we can build it.

And as you said, Uyghur reached out to, excuse me, Phil Dormitzer, a senior, really good guy at Pfizer. And Dormitzer, super smart, but he was reflecting the conventional wisdom, which was, yeah, don't waste too much time on a vaccine. Vaccines are not, and this is one thing that was eye-opening to me, until this past year, vaccines were kind of a loser business for people in the pharma world. You know, you give it every once in a while, every year or two, a vaccine, maybe once in a lifetime, and it's not something you have to take every day, and you can't charge that much for a vaccine, et cetera. So Dormitzer was saying, don't waste so much time on COVID. Remember SARS-1,

remember MERS, this stuff peters out. And yes, Sahin said he ignored him. He said, no, I think this is going to be a pandemic. And he got others on board at Pfizer and the rest is history. Okay. I want to ask you about just going way back to the 80s. You write a little bit about efforts to find a vaccine or develop a vaccine for HIV AIDS and how some of the same tracks that we have experienced in the pursuit of a COVID-19 vaccine were at work in the 80s. And there was this race, you know, race for a vaccine, or at least race for vaccine, race for a drug. Why did those efforts hit so many roadblocks, whereas this effort did not? Yeah, so I do start my book off with the chase for an HIV vaccine. Partly I just find it fascinating that the players, the characters, and there were lessons learned along the way that were applicable,

as you say. So there were interesting characters and companies, and they were similar in that they were usually kind of outsiders. The mainstream, big pharma, some of them did spend a little time on it, but most didn't focus too much on an AIDS vaccine, just like here. You would have thought Merck and GSK and Sanofi, they're the giants when it comes today to vaccines. They didn't produce a COVID-19 vaccine. And similarly, the giants weren't all that excited about working on an AIDS vaccine. So it took outsiders, just like with COVID. And there were fits and starts and twists and turns. And there was one effort that Merck was really excited about that ended just awfully horribly. Not only did it fail, but it literally caused some people to be more susceptible to AIDS. And they closed the whole effort. But what I find

interesting is, so that was using a virus, basically transporting the genetic material from HIV, that virus, using a different virus. And you say to yourself, well, why would you put a vaccine in you that's full of a virus? Well, Merck and others figured out a way to make this virus harmless. You take a gene out, and it basically viruses. Their whole job is to infect you and spread. And so if you could have a harmless vaccine, I'm sorry, harmless virus as the basis of a vaccine, that seemed like a great idea, and that's what Merck thought, and it ended miserably. And that virus that they used is called ADD5, adenovirus 5.

But what I really find really fascinating is that all the scientists called ADD5, adenovirus 5. So, but what I really find really fascinating is that all the scientists involved, they said, great, there's no such thing as a failure when it comes to science. We learn, we learn about everything. We learn about the immune system. We learn about this ADD5. And there's a scientist in Boston named Dan Baruch

who said, okay, maybe ADD5 is not going to work, but what about a different kind of virus called ADD26? And there are all kinds of reasons why ADD26 is more effective as a vaccine. And that became, they spent years working on it. And Dan Baruch has been focused on AIDS this whole time and it hasn't worked, but eventually became the J&J vaccine. And another ad, a chimp ad, no, became the Oxford Astra vaccine. So it led to success when it comes to vaccines for COVID. And to answer your question, COVID relative to AIDS and relative to a lot of other things is actually a pretty easy virus to handle. Yeah, there are variants. We're aware of the variants, but AIDS is different from one

the virus itself. HIV is different from one patient to the next. Can you imagine just, it's a virus that's just within each person's body. It's a little bit different and it commandeers our immune system. So our immune system is helpless against HIV. And so it's always changing HIV as a virus. It's really difficult. Mutations are on a whole other trajectory. Exactly. Exactly. So there's still optimism. Some of the same people I write about in my book who've had success with COVID are still focused on AIDS and we're still optimistic about AIDS. So I don't want to count these guys out, but AIDS is so much harder than COVID.

Speaking of other setbacks, but fast forwarding, I want to talk about April 13th, 2021. The public health authorities put a pause on the J&J vaccine for a short period of time, but it obviously makes shocking news internationally. And you write about this. So I guess first, this is just as we look at other setbacks, why did they do this? Why did the public health authorities put on the pause? And what do you think the implications were? So it's hard to remember back then, but back then we're talking April, the spring of 2021, Jane Jay's vaccine was emerging as probably the most popular among the most popular of all the vaccines, largely because it was a one-shot vaccine. And who doesn't want to...

And wasn't its distribution easier, too? Yes, exactly right. Its distribution advantage is at least over Pfizer. And Moderna. And Moderna. Both of those have to be kept at cold temperatures. Pfizer is much colder than Moderna is, but Pfizer, the BioNTech vaccine,

to be clear. But right, the J&J one, in terms of storage, it was much easier transportation. So there was also, not only did that help domestically in the US, but when you start contemplating distributing vaccines globally, it could reach a lot more geographies with, I guess, a little more ease? Oh, much more ease. Yes, right. Exactly. In terms of countries around the world that don't have the same ability to store, poorer countries, to store these vaccines in cold temperatures and give them out quickly in terms of distribution, et cetera, the J&J one, AstraZeneca as well, but J&J one didn't need to be kept at those kind of temperatures. And so, and, and, you know, sports teams were embracing them. People, a lot of people

just don't want to get two shots. I don't know. And it's hard enough to convince people to take one shot, to take one shot, two shots. A lot of people were worried and maybe rightly so that people wouldn't roll up their sleeves for them. So yeah, J&J was emerging as maybe not quite as protective and effective as the mRNA viruses, but a pretty solid one, and the figures were good, pretty convincing. And then there were instances in which the authorities discovered that some women, and they usually were women of childbearing age, were seeing blood clots. And it was a controversial decision. They stepped in and they paused the distribution of the vaccines. And it was controversial because it was so rare. And there were some people saying,

well, geez, we don't step in and stop other kinds of medical procedures that have such rare instances of these kinds of side effects. I mean, the pill, the women take the pill and their instances, incidences of side effects of even awful bad side effects are higher than these J&J vaccines. So why aren't we helping these women? We don't care as much about the women, childbearing women, as we do when it comes to the vaccine. So the response of the authorities, and I agree with them, is that, yeah, had this J&J vaccine been the only one available, then we probably would have not worried and stepped in and not been as concerned because it is so rare, these incidences of the blood clots. But since we had alternatives, the Moderna and the Pfizer, they did step in, they looked into it, they realized,

it took them a little bit, they realized that, yes, there are some of these cases, but they are not enough, they're not prevalent enough to be especially concerned about it, unless you are a woman in that category of age. And it's not a terrible idea to choose another vaccine at that point. Do you think they jumped the gun in terms of fueling the overall vaccine hesitancy gestalt among certain communities in the US? I don't. I think that some of those people that are resistant to vaccines would have been resistant either way and have proven resistant. I don't think I've seen any kind of data suggesting that this move about J&J is something that undermines broad confidence in the vaccines.

Otherwise, you would see these people embracing the mRNA vaccines. And I see more concern from people about mRNA than I do the J&J approach. So I think it was the right decision at the time. So Moderna and Pfizer, and not just the pharmaceutical companies, but all the distribution efforts and a whole bunch of adjacent companies that were involved in various tracks and elements of this whole vaccination miracle that you write about.

I can't help but think when reading your book, and I've commented on this in other episodes of this podcast, that it's a uniquely American experience, which is the critics have been fiercely critical of the U.S. system during a pandemic, that our system of government is too decentralized, right? 3,143 counties in the United States. Actually, if you count all the territories, then it's the equivalent of 3,243 counties in the United States. Each county or almost every county has its own health

commissioner and independent agency and autonomous decision-making. And trying to run a country and manage through a public health crisis with that kind of decentralization is really, really hard. And people are pointing to contrasting it to European governments and where it's so much more efficient, top down, well organized, very centralized on the one hand. On the other hand, one could argue without that decentralized, very entrepreneurial spirit and system, free market system in the United States, we may not have had all that innovation right here in the United States that led to this incredible success story that you read about. I think it's very true. Both the fact that it's a very American crisis and it was very American

solution in terms of the vaccine. So a crisis meaning that we're decentralized, as you said. We've got an ethos in many parts of the country. And I've traveled little towns in Oklahoma and Texas and North Dakota for a previous book I did called The Frackers. And I got to know some of the people there. And they think in a unique way. They don't want to be told what to do. They're very independent speaking. Something that I can't necessarily told what to do. They're very independent speaking, something that I can't necessarily relate to, frankly. But I understand, you know, that they don't want to be told and sometimes mandates are the kind of last thing they want to hear about. And that isn't a very American for good or for bad characteristic. Whereas, you know, comparing to some of these

other countries that handled COVID better, there's more of an ethos of togetherness and wearing a mask. You go through Asia, they were masked even before all this, obviously. And looking out for each other. There's such an independence in America. And also this whole new feeling that I'm an expert. Everyone's an expert. You know, I saw something on YouTube and therefore I'm going to ignore what my internist, who I've been going to for 20 or 30 years, has to say. So that's kind of the sad part that's led us to dealing with this in such a poor way in our country.

Sadly, some things are characteristic of America. But I also think that and I believe there's no way we could have developed these vaccines, these miracle vaccines, anywhere else but in America. You could say, well, yeah, in Mainz, Germany, that's where Biontech is, and that's where they did so much of the science. But I've talked to Ugr Sahin, the Turkish-born immigrant to Germany, who said there's no way without the American support, and I'm talking about investors, the IPO that we mentioned earlier today, the innovation from America. There's no way. Again, they did a lot of the stuff.

They followed a lot of stuff that Moderna was doing in Cambridge, Massachusetts in terms of scientific breakthroughs. And just sort of the entrepreneurship. And I'm not talking about financial entrepreneurship. These labs, these scientific labs, the scientists deep in these labs, the researchers that I've talked to, and they slog and they go through frustrations and they come up with innovations. It just really impresses me. And it strikes me as just very American. I agree, the perseverance and frankly, the upside, the hope for fame and fortune and the incentive to make a lot of money, that's huge and hugely important. And rightfully so.

If these guys want to get rich and famous and they're also creating healthy vaccines and protective medicines for us, good for them. And yeah, it took investors to step up and write checks for years for Moderna. And these companies floated stocks, obviously, in American Stock Exchange. But these investors, VCs, others,

there was no guarantee that it was going to be of success. There was no proof, really. Majority was a very secretive company. They weren't releasing much information. They weren't sharing what they were doing. It took real guts on the part of investors. And listen, I hate to be sort of an apologist in any way for Wall Street and for Big Pharma, but Wall Street and Big Pharma saved the day here. They're not always looking out for us. There's reasons for criticism, but we have to give them deep gratitude when it comes to these vaccines. They spent years of frustrated work and innovative work that we need to be grateful for. It's amazing because at the same time that we're, you know, among young people in the United States, there's this rise of support for embracing of socialism.

You know, you see this in all the public opinion surveys. And yet at the same time that it was this exact system that you're describing, investors, entrepreneurs, pharmaceutical companies, entrepreneurial scientists in labs slaving away that got us out of this pandemic. Very much so. Very much so. Very much so. The other interesting thing is how many immigrants are involved at the forefront of these companies, of the research that people have talked to, both the unheralded types of— Well, the CEO of Pfizer, Greek immigrant. The CEO of Moderna, a French immigrant. The CEO of BioNTech is a Turkish immigrant to Germany.

But you're right. It's the leadership of the—and you're saying it's not just the leadership. Exactly. And I write in my book about immigrant after immigrant. You'll read it. I don't want to go through the characters necessarily, but the researchers along the way. In other words, the 1993 researcher in Duke, Elie Gulboa, an immigrant from Israel. The Kiriko in Ed Penn, who made the breakthroughs with Drew

Weissman a few years later when it came to, it came to MRNA. Now these were, um, unheralded at the time, but when we look back on it and that's kind of why I wrote the book to give these people credit throughout Moderna, people deep within Moderna, a lot of immigrants, hardworking people. It's a very American book. Staying on that theme, what was your reaction to when the federal government was pushing the pharmaceutical companies to share their IP internationally and just kind of dump it into the international marketplace and potentially losing a great degree of the upside that they, I believe, earned because of the risk they had been taking? So it's a tough question. And they're still feeling pressure, and they will continue to do so.

I think it's a much tougher issue than people on both sides kind of suggest. So you need to create incentives for these biotech companies. They need huge incentives because hundreds of millions of dollars, even more, billions of dollars were raised by both Moderna and Biontech in periods when there was very little reason for investors to write checks other than maybe a huge home run down the road. So if you're going to say, well, yeah, you can help us, you can write these big checks, but we're going to limit the upside down the road, I don't know. For the next huge disease challenge, they're going to have the same incentive to write those checks. So you need to create those incentives. And it's also the case that this is really hard stuff. I mean, again, my book writes, I write about decades of hard work and incremental improvements.

And it's almost like a baton or a relay race where you're passing a baton. Someone makes a breakthrough, but it's not enough. And you pass it on to the next one. So it took a lot of hard work. And to just suggest that, well, all you do is give the IP to some other country, some other effort, and they can produce these vaccines. No. Moderna, to get that manufacturing plan, they've had one manufacturing plant in Norway, Massachusetts. They spent years trying to get it right. And it's going to be hard for another effort somewhere else in Africa or Asia or somewhere else to just kind of take the IP and produce it. Now, that all said, Moderna is worth $135 billion today.

They're sitting on ungodly amounts of profit. $135 billion. $135 billion market cap company, yes. $135 up from like $3.5 or something, I don't know, a year or two ago. So they're sitting on, many of the top guys are billionaires right now. So to put pressure on them to help and to hand over more and to share more, I don't think it's a terrible idea to the extent that they can. I do have to say, talking to those people there, and I'm not any kind of big defender, I just know what they've gone through, they're going all out. And they've sold their production to the first bidders, and that's the United States,

and a lot of people in the West. You could say, well, they have the money, and it is sad. And the vaccines are not equitable, sadly. But the manufacturing and the production has been taken for a lot of vaccines. They've scooped it up already, the West. And these people are going all out. And I've talked to them. And I end off the book talking about how, yeah, they're really wealthy, but they are psychologically damaged. And I'm not overstaying that. The people within Moderna, they've been going all out. They feel the weight of the world. Some of them are beating themselves up for not doing enough, even though they've saved countless lives. They figure, well, had we gotten less sleep,

even though they got very little of it, had we gotten less sleep, we could have saved more people. And so, and I talked to the president, he kind of says his goal of the next year is to somehow heal, help his people heal from this past experience. So I think we need to be understanding of that as well. Yeah, the system is a fragile system. So when it works, and it produces these great innovations, we say, all right, spread the wealth. But, you know, to your point, there's a lot of incentives built into this fragile system that keep people innovating and working hard and having that lab mentality where they're throwing a thousand things against the wall every day to see what sticks and sleeping four hours a night and you know, and

there should be a payoff for this incredible sweat equity and That they that they have and that they put into these projects in terms of Future applications of mRNA so mRNA so mRNA is this huge success. Where do you see it going now in terms of the future of life sciences? Because it's not just about COVID. It could be about a whole other range of illness and disease. Yeah, so I'm optimistic. I wouldn't say I'm confident, but I've got a lot of optimism. I'll start off why I'm not confident is because you could argue that COVID is an exception to the rule. Many other maladies, diseases, you need to target certain parts of the body. And we haven't really been able to do that yet with mRNA as the basis of a vaccine or a drug. And it's actually important to remember that Moderna started off as a drug company, not a vaccine company. Again,

no one really wanted to be in vaccines. Moderna didn't either. It raised hundreds of millions of dollars, even over a billion dollars on the hope that they could do drugs. And they have not been able to succeed when it comes to drugs. No one else has either. I think part of it is, again, you need to target certain parts of the body. I think with heart, there'll be some heart drugs that will be effective. You can handle the heart a little bit better. But so far, it's been difficult proving mRNA effective when it comes to other kinds of vaccines and drugs. That all said, part of why one can argue they should be allowed to make these ungodly amounts of profit is because these companies, I'm talking about Moderna, BioNTech, and some of the others are key in my book. They're taking all that money and they are

plowing it into new drugs and new medicines and new vaccines. And we're hopeful, I'm very hopeful it's going to be successful. They're not sitting back and just counting their money. They're targeting cancer. They're targeting MS, lupus. The idea being for some of these, I know BioNTech believes this, just like they've been able to turn on, to rev up, to stir the immune system when it comes to COVID, maybe we can turn off the immune system and help people that are dealing with immune-related issues where their immune system goes into overdrive and just doesn't behave properly. Wouldn't that be a wonder? Malaria. I mean, Adrian Hill, I write about a really difficult person, controversial scientist at the University of Oxford,

not liked by many in that field. He could be really hard on his colleagues, on peers, etc. His whole life is dedicated to malaria and finding a malaria vaccine. And he's optimistic, and he may be able to figure it out. AIDS, I mean, Dan Baruch, the J&J guy, his whole life is AIDS. So I am optimistic that the talent that we've seen when it comes to COVID and the new resources that have developed, thanks to all these profits, are going to lead to real breakthroughs over the next few years. I mean, you could really make an argument. You really could see. It's possible to look back on this period, as awful as it's been, and I've seen it up close and personal, as we all have, as awful as this period has been, if it leads to cancer treatments, to treatments for MS, for lupus, for those kinds

of things, it'll actually be all, I don't know, worthwhile. It'll lead to all kinds of wonders. So I'm optimistic and hopeful about the future. Two other quick questions, maybe not quick. First, what did you learn during this process about the Chinese and Russian vaccines, the Sputnik and the Sino Pharm vaccines, in terms of how you'd compare them both in development to our process? And obviously, we know about their efficacy, which is uneven. Yeah, it's good, but not great and not trustworthy to the extent that we're used to. If they were the only ones in the world, I think we'd all take them, frankly, but it's not one I would roll up my sleeves for myself. So when it comes to the Russian Sputnik one, do you remember when I spoke earlier about

that Merck effort to build a vaccine against HIV? They used a virus called ADD5 and it led to a really poor result, disappointing, awful results. That is the basis. That ADD5 virus is the basis for the Sputnik vaccine. They combine it with another adenovirus. I don't want to suggest that AD Ad5 is going to hurt people. No, the issue is that Ad5 is a virus that the body often has seen. It's a cold virus. It has experience with it.

So as a result, it's on its aware. It's harder for this virus to get into the body and do its thing, meaning create a protein because the body's like, wait, I've seen this Ad5 before. I had a cold a few years ago. I'm going to fight this thing off. And it's especially hard for ADD5 on repeated boosters, that kind of thing. So it's not a virus that's the ideal approach, I would think, but it's not a terrible one because again, they combine it with ADD5 with another virus for their second shots. So it's not terrible. The Chinese one is pretty good. They have a lot of different Chinese vaccines.

They seem somewhat effective. They're not terrible. But I know that they've had a lot of discussions with BioNTech about bringing the mRNA vaccine, the Pfizer one, to China. So that kind of suggests they'd like to improve on what they've got. Last question about Operation Warp Speed. Do you think it becomes a model for future public-private partnerships in the context of other crises we face, whether it's public health or it could be, doesn't have to be in public health. But just the idea that people look at this,

I mean, it's interesting, because it's at a time that there's high distrust of government, and yet at the same time, high distrust of the markets and the finance community and business leaders. Science and science too. Science, high distrust of science, exactly. And yet they all work together here.

What can we do with this model? So I'd like to think it could be a model for the future, but I'm really pessimistic because it's a little bit like, I guess, like the Marshall Plan. I mean, assuming one thinks that's a positive. After that, we should do a Marshall Plan for this. We should do a Marshall Plan for that. And on paper, it makes sense,

but you sort of need a crisis like this to focus the mind, get people working together. It was an urgency. So sadly, we may need something like this. Hopefully we don't have to deal with it. But it did focus people to work together in extraordinary ways, as we talked about earlier, building a vaccine, developing it and manufacturing at the same time. It's unprecedented. So, yes, on paper, it makes sense. But we're not a nation, sadly. We're not a people that plans ahead. You know, we plan ahead maybe for next week, not even next year, let alone the next decade. I mean, health officials have been warning about a coronavirus for years.

We've all seen those kind of clips from people. So to think that we're gonna use this as some model would be nice if we had that kind of foresight and planning, but I'm a little skeptical. In September of 2019, the Council of Economic Advisors, the President's Council of Economic Advisors, President Trump's Council of Economic Advisors produced a report titled Mitigating the Impact of Pandemic Influenza Through Vaccine Innovation. And the report obviously talks about the potential cost of a

pandemic, but this is 2019, September, 2019. I reiterate, I underline, but they also in the report talk about how a private public partnership could mitigate these costs and um you know so they were they were thinking ahead it was buried in the bowels of the you know old executive office building in the in the uh trump administration i guess it got dusted off but someone was thinking ahead yeah so anyway listen to end or assuming we're ending soon to end on a positive note, Tony Fauci has long hoped for some vaccine method that can be developed quickly, that you get the sequence of a virus, some pathogen, and can quickly develop a vaccine to take it on. And that is what mRNA is. All you need is the genetic sequence. As I write in my book, once that was released, these guys were off to the races.

And similarly, the boosters, we're going to get different kind of boosters for different variants. You can create them easily with mRNA. You have to test it, et cetera. But we're in a new era of vaccine development, thanks to mRNA, in which— Yeah, if you get the genetic sequence, it's like coding. It's like you can email around code and just. It's like, you know, you can email around code. Yes. And, and just build vaccines on the fly. Yes, exactly. And the original goal, the hope was that our bodies could be, could be manufacturing facilities, making drugs and vaccines for ourselves. And

that's the hope with mRNA. So that is a way to anticipate and react to future crises as well by turning to MRNA, and that's the hope for the future. Last question for you, Greg, and then we'll let you go. I'm a big fan of a number of your books, and I find a style consistent in a number of them, at least the ones I've read that i have found in this one too which is you write about unsung heroes um i mean that was certainly the case in in in frackers um you you so was first of all is am i right in identifying that that sort of bias of yours towards a certain kind of story

and storytelling and characters, A. And B, was it obvious to you early, I guess based on some of the things you said earlier, that there were these people that we would never hear of and you wanted to write about them? Yeah, so I write the same story. That's a knock on me potentially, but I am a real fascinated by, it's not even so much

unsung, unlikely heroes. So when it came to the financial crisis, 2008, who should have anticipated the crisis? It should have been the big banks. It should have been the big short sellers, the experts in mortgages. They were all caught flat footed. And instead it was this guy, John Paulson, who I wrote a book about and his colleagues who on their last legs on wall street on Wall Street, 50, 60-year-old kind of people that may be kicking around forever. They're the ones who made the big killing? That doesn't make sense. So then, yeah, with the frackers, who should have led this energy revolution that has made us? I don't think people appreciate this either, Dan.

We've been exporting oil to the Saudis, crude to the Saudis over the past few years. That's a crazy concept. Anybody, I remember in the back of my mind, you know, I remember being in the backseat of my parents' car in 1973 in a long line for a gas at the pump. And now to say we've got this surplus of oil and gas, and it's not thanks to BP and Exxon and Chevron and Shell. It was like these independent frackers that I wrote about. So I do like that theme.

And I wrote, a couple years ago, I wrote a book about the greatest investor in history, the greatest traders. It's called The Man Who Solved the Market, about this group in Renaissance Technologies and Jim Simons. They're scientists. They're mathematicians. They didn't go to business school.

They didn't read the classics that I did, the financial classics growing up. They don't care about that kind of stuff. So yeah, I am partial to that theme. And here, too, who should have saved? It should have been Merck, the vaccine giants. Instead, it was this company, Moderna, that people thought might've been a fraud going into 2020. Yeah, I am just sort of fascinated by that theme. And I also think there are life lessons. Like I like, you know, you can learn from these people because they're usually self-confident. They ignore the conventional wisdom. They zig when everybody zig when everybody else zags and there's some value to learning from these people.

It's a terrific book. It's amazing how fast you turned it around a shot to save the world, the inside story of the life or death race for a COVID-19 vaccine. Uh, I'm thoroughly enjoying it. I encourage everyone to read it even even more importantly, to purchase it, whether or not you read it. And Greg, thanks for joining us for this conversation. It was a great time. That was a lot of fun. Really good discussion

that you don't get this kind of depth most everywhere else in the media world. So I appreciate your time. All right. Take care. Thanks. Thanks, guys. That's our show for today. If you want to follow Greg Zuckerman's work, you can find him on Twitter. That's at G Zuckerman, G-Z-U-C-K-E-R-M-A-N. And of course,

you can find all of his work at the Wall Street Journal. And you can find any of his books, all of which I recommend, at barnesandnoble.com or your favorite independent bookstore or that other e-commerce site. I think they're calling it Amazon. Also, be on the lookout for our transition to our new series about these revenant 2020s, but more info on that to follow. Post Corona is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.