The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The First Shots: The Epic Rivalries and Heroic Science Behind the Race to the Coronavirus Vaccine by Brendan Borrell

Episode Date: October 21, 2021

The First Shots: The Epic Rivalries and Heroic Science Behind the Race to the Coronavirus Vaccine by Brendan Borrell The full inside story of the high-stakes, global race for the lifesaving vaccine to end the pandemic Heroic science. Chaotic politics. Billionaire entrepreneurs. Award-winning journalist Brendan Borrell brings the defining story of our times alive through compulsively readable, first-time reporting on the players leading the fight against a vicious virus. The First Shots, soon to be the subject of an HBO limited series with superstar director and producer Adam McKay (Succession, Vice, The Big Short), draws on exclusive, high-level access to weave together the intense vaccine-race conflicts among hard-driving, heroic scientists and the epic rivalries among Washington power players that shaped 18 months of fear, resolve, and triumph. From infectious disease expert Michael Callahan, an American doctor secretly on the ground in Wuhan in January 2020 to gauge the terrifying ravages of Disease X; to Robert (Dr. Bob) Kadlec, one of Operation Warp Speed’s architects, whose audacious plans for the American people run straight into the buzz saw of the Trump White House factions; to Stéphane Bancel of upstart Moderna Therapeutics going toe-to-toe with pharma behemoth Pfizer, The First Shots lays bare, in a way we have not seen, the full stunning story behind the medical science “moon shot” of our lifetimes.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in, keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Wow, that cracked on me. Thanks for coming by, guys. We certainly appreciate it. As always, to see the video version of this, the most amazing video version, it's free for an unlimited time on YouTube.com, 4ChessChrisVoss. You can go there, hit the bell notification button. Also, go to Goodreads.com, 4ChessChrisVoss. You can see everything we're reading and reviewing over there.

And you should follow me. I actually have an author page. So that's just like an added benefit, isn't it? I don't know. Maybe not. Anyway, go to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all the places that Chris Voss show and myself being the Chris Voss part of the Chris Voss show are at because I don't know, it seemed like a good idea at the time. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out.

It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well.

So you can pre-order the book right now wherever fine books are sold, but the best thing to do on getting a pre-order deal is to go to beaconsofleadership.com. That's beaconsofleadership.com. That's beaconsofleadership.com. On there, you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book. And for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like Amazon, you can get all sorts of extra goodies that we've taken and given away. Different collectors, limited edition, custom-made numbered book plates that are going to be autographed by me. There's all sorts of other goodies that you can get when you buy the book from beaconsofleadership.com. So be sure to

go there, check it out, or order the book wherever fine books are sold. Anyway, guys, we have an amazing author on the show, much more amazing than myself. His name is Brendan Burrell, and he has written an amazing new book that is very topical. I'll let you be the judge, but it sounds very topical to me. It's coming out October 26, 2021. So you're going to want to take and pre-order this baby so you can be the first on your block to see or read it. The First Shots, the rival, or I'm sorry, let me recut that. The First Shots, the epic rivalries and heroic science behind the race to the coronavirus vaccine. And he's coming on the show.

He's going to be talking to us about his amazing book and all the stuff he detailed in it. Not only that, he's an award-winning journalist and the author of this new book. And it tells the inside story of Operation Warp Speed. Over the last decade, his writing about science, health, and business has appeared in dozens of outlets, including The Atlantic, Bloomberg Businessweek, National Geographic, Wired, and The New York Times. He grew up in Texas, received a Ph.D. in biology from UC Berkeley in 2006 before turning full-time to journalism. He lives in Los Angeles. Welcome to the show, Brendan. How are you? I'm good. Thank you for having me here.

Good, good. And congratulations on the new book. This is always exciting. You get out of the editing process and get that book published, and now you got to go around and talk about it for the next six months. Yeah, it was an epic scramble. I'm glad to relax and just be able to talk rather than have to write. Most definitely. So give us your plugs so that people can find you on the interweb. I'm Brendan Burrell. You can find me on Twitter at bburrell. The webpage for the book is just thefirstshots.com. You can pre-order the book there.

And yeah, that's all there is. There you go. So what motivated you to want to write this book? Like everybody else, we all remember what it was like back January, February 2020. We're going about life as normal. We hear about this strange new bug coming from China. And I had all my plans for I'm going to go report in the desert here in California. I'm going to do this project, that project. And it just came to a halt. I couldn't travel. I was just personally invested in what was going on.

We were all just reading the news every morning. Oh, my. And I have this background in writing about science and infectious diseases. And so I started pitching a few stories here and there. It was becoming clear by March and April that the only way out of the coronavirus pandemic was a vaccine. And historically, vaccines take years to produce. The fastest ever is the mumps vaccine. That was four years.

Fauci was talking 18 months minimum. And it was clear that whatever was happening, that the vaccine story was the big one, and I wanted to be there following it. And yeah, over the last 18 months, that is what I devoted my life to is trying to understand everything that happens and how we got here. There you go. Give us an overall arcing of the book. Like, so what's some of the details? I noticed you outlined some different people in here or the players, if you will, of the game.

You've even got some people called Wolverines and some other things. Give us kind of overall arcing, if you would, of it. Yeah, the book is told chronologically across the pandemic year. I opened the book the moment that coronavirus, the first coronavirus gene sequence goes online. There is this mysterious outbreak of pneumonia there in Wuhan. And after a bit of a delay, the coronavirus gene sequence goes online. And that's the moment when the clock starts ticking because now scientists like a business, a product, a vaccine, and how it becomes this political football. And with Operation Warp Speed and just all of the craziness we saw unfold in last fall around the rollout of the vaccine and Trump's election. And I wanted to take readers inside to the players who actually made this happen. So it wasn't just like the scientists. So we learned about scientists.

It's like the public servants. It's the political appointees. We learn all of their stories and how they were fighting to get this thing out. So that's the arc of the book. And it's a pretty epic story that I feel proud to be able to tell. Yeah, I don't think we've ever developed a vaccine or made it public this fast ever. Is that correct? That's right. Yeah. Some vaccines have taken decades to develop and we're still not fully there. I mentioned the mumps vaccine. That was

four years. This thing was 11 months from sequence to approval and rollout because we pre-manufactured this thing. So it is quite an accomplishment. And I think a lot of people think, oh, we've heard about vaccine hesitancy. You might have a friend or somebody says, well, I'm a little afraid of it because it was rolled out so quickly. But the speed only came because of, say, decades of research that had gone into this ahead of time, developments on the mRNA, which is used in the Moderna and Pfizer shots, and some of the dedicated scientists who were studying some of these weird viruses, they had a strategy for how they would tackle it when they needed to make a vaccine.

Yeah, my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, because you've done the study on it, but the mRNA blueprint sort of way of telling the body how to fight stuff isn't like overnight new. They've been working on it for years. And actually, I think they didn't use it in a few other things. It's been tested for a long time. People really wanted to do therapeutics with it, make it artificial insulin or whatever. And that had been the first attempts to use mRNA.

And then I think there's an mRNA in some type of veterinary vaccine. I'd have to check that, but never before in humans. This is what's so remarkable. They basically inched up closer and closer to the finish line over these last couple of years. But it was really just this incredible need for a vaccine, the amazing amounts of money that the government sunk into this thing that allowed us to bring this thing across the finish line. And I think it's pretty clear that mRNA is going to revolutionize medicine for the next decade. That would be awesome if they could fix things like insulin and stuff like that for diabetics and things. Yeah. There's a lot of rare gene diseases that the targets that they're focusing on where, you know, rather than growing up a protein in a factory, you just give a person the gene.

Working like computers. So you just give us a little schematic and we'll run with it. So how do these vaccines work then? Yeah, this is what's a vaccine supposed to do. The basic idea is it's supposed to teach your body, you know, how to attack a virus, a parasite like or something like malaria, which is a single cell microorganism. So it's trying to train your body. And so the way you do that is you give it a weakened form of that thing or you give

it a piece of that thing because we all have this incredible immune system. We when we cut ourselves and we get some type of infection, our bodies produce antibodies. And so we have this natural antibody response. But you're a little bit slower if you've never encountered the bug before as what happened with this new coronavirus. So the point of the vaccine is give your body a little bit of a taste for it so it's already got the defense ready.

And so I think back in the early days, the first vaccine was, of course, the smallpox vaccine. And that's kind of used cowpox, a very similar type of virus. And by giving people this weak virus, you would be prepared when you get a smallpox infection. Later on, we started using killed viruses, like the polio vaccine was initially a killed virus vaccine. And then people started giving just little pieces of the virus, these protein-based vaccines, and then that led to mRNA. And the idea with each step in this process is the smaller the piece of the virus you give, the more focused immune response you get, the less likely you are to have side effects

and so on. Because this is the central challenge of a vaccine. This is what we faced this year, which is compared to a drug where you are only treating sick people, a vaccine is given to the healthy people. So you're exposing a whole lot larger swath of the population. And it's a swath of the population that's healthy. And so you don't want to do anything that could cause harm to them. Even a rare side effect becomes a problem. And so that's why developing vaccines is so challenging and it's done so slowly. For the thoroughness of it. So do we, in the speeding this up, were we balancing the destruction of our world and environment and financials and just everything. We just all be living in lockdown forever. Do we have to make a bet and exchange some risk for some security or to get back to security for that matter? Yeah, there's always that balance. It's like, hey, how long do you

want the country to be locked down? What is the risk of an elderly person getting COVID and dying and so on? And with the pandemic, there was clearly a need to move faster than normal. And it really caused the regulators at the Food and Drug Administration, for instance, this is a little known fact, but one of the architects of Operation Warp Speed is like the top guy at the FDA, Peter Marks. He's like this geeky cancer doctor, super passionate civil servant. And he was well aware of this game of balancing versus the benefit. And that was the whole thing with an emergency authorization. It's like, all right, what level of proof do we need? We don't need the full approval. We just need a really strong guarantee that this thing works and it's not dangerous. And so that's why they did shorten the timeline a bit, but they did the map

and they said, you know what? Most side effects from vaccines occur within the first six weeks of a vaccine being given. And they decided that's how long of a safety follow-up they wanted before they were willing to give it an emergency authorization. A lot of basically the way that the vaccine process was sped up was the, there's normally the biggest issue with developing a vaccine is the risk that your vaccine is going to be just a failure, a commercial failure. You spend all this money running these tests, and it doesn't quite work good enough. And so companies draw the process out. So they'll do one study, and then they hold their meeting, and then they'll do another. They'll invest a little bit more and a little bit more.

And what Operation Warp Speed did was it said, hey, we're going to throw all this cash at you. We want you to do everything in parallel. We want you to take all that dead space out, and we want you to start manufacturing the vaccine before it's been proven effective. And hey, if it fails clinical trials, we'll throw it out. I didn't know they'd started manufacturing before it was even approved. I guess I did. I didn't know how far along they were, how long the time took, but that's pretty amazing actually. Right? Yeah. I think the process of manufacturing a vaccine is just so complicated. Even they wanted to start, you know, manufacturing it immediately, but it did take quite a bit of time to start scaling up the process, especially mRNA, which had never been made on a commercial

scale. That's why everybody was super disappointed in December when whatever Pfizer was like, actually, we don't have a hundred 100 million doses we only have 20 million yeah um but there was they were working that whole time to try to scale things up and i remember one of the big things was the refrigeration issue and just trying to scale that that's right it was frozen these things had phizers had to be like negative 80 degrees fahrenheit um which is a ridiculously cold temperature. And the local doctor's offices have super freezers like that. Exactly. So it was like the UPS hubs had to have freezers. Pfizer made these special boxes that would carry like 975 doses in these dry ice compartments. That was really something that was

that was the downside of the mrna vaccine because they hadn't optimized the stability of it because that was and that's the original problem with mrna is it's a very short-lived molecule in the body it's very fragile and that's why it's so that's why you have to keep it really cold yeah plus you got to make sure that 5g chip stays, stays, you know, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Kidding people. Yeah.

Do you think I'm serious on that? Go seek mental help. Yeah, but I do getting extra bars with mine. I got the Moderna. I think that gives me three bars on the 18 team network. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I feel like, I feel like this is actually really a question,

even though it sounds a little bit like a joke, but, or it comes from a joke that we just did. But it does seem, I read everything and I've taken a lot of data, but I'm no scientist. That being said, I'm going to talk like I'm a scientist. No, I'm just kidding. It does seem like the Moderna virus or the vaccine seems to be like really good. And then there's the Pfizer one. one and then the j and j is something you get in an alleyway or something am i getting that am i right there that's a little bit harsh i'm putting on my my public health hat just to be fair to them all the thing is all three of

these vaccines are scientific marvels they will stop severe covid j and j first off is that there were a lot of hopes on j and j because it was like it didn't need to be frozen it was cheaper than the mrna vaccines and the idea that it could be effective in one shot operation warp speed basically pushed j and j to do it as one shot tested as one shot it was tested as two shots in other countries. And but they thought, yeah, if we could do one and done, that's like magic. And that you would only have to produce half as many doses

and so on. It didn't work out. And that was as well as people had hoped. With the other vaccines, yeah, Moderna and Pfizer ended up going a slightly different route

when they were racing through their development process. Moderna ended up with a hundred milliliter, a hundred microliter shot, microgram shot. Sorry, I'm not getting this out. And Pfizer's was one third of that size. And Moderna spaced their shots out a little bit further.

And I think the experts told me that there were pros and cons of these two approaches. The beauty of the Moderna shot was they were really siding on like, let's make sure this is effective as long as possible. The beauty of the Pfizer shot is, hey, you can stretch out the amount of material you have. You can produce more doses. You also can have fewer side effects. There are some studies that suggest that the reaction to the Moderna shot is more significant.

People are really, it hurts. I didn't have that. I got the Moderna shot and I'm fine. I didn't have that i got the moderna shot and i'm fine i didn't have a serious reaction but some people did and yeah pfizer definitely has experienced a little bit more of the waning immune and whether it's people are going to need moderna shot i know the third shots have been approved for moderna but the data look like it was going to last three to six months longer you're still pretty good off see i knew it was better yeah yeah which one did you go i got the modern yeah okay i had a i only hang out with modern people now i i had to

get rid of all my pfizer friends and jay friends because you know it's a club yeah they had interesting it's an interesting fall from grace for pfizer of course because it was called like a hot person vaccine and the status vaccine early on and And Pfizer came at it, and they put all their money in it. They didn't have to deal with the warp speed that much. They did interact with it in certain ways, whereas Moderna was the little guy, the David versus the Goliath. So why did Pfizer get out of being first? I guess they were first to the race winning.

The thing was Pfizer started from behind. Oh, really. Yeah. Moderna was working with the National Institutes of Health starting day one. They were, they started ramping up for their, there's three phases of clinical trials. You first, you test the animal, then you go into sort of a safety trial with people. And then you go to big, bigger efficacy trials and moderna was just racing and pfizer like most pharmaceutical companies was like sitting on the sidelines because like the thing about these like emerging diseases like bird flu and everything is everybody gets scared there's some headlines and then the thing burns itself out and that's in companies a big company doesn't want to tell its entire vaccine team hey stop making that seasonal flu vaccine that we make money from every year and focus on

this. It's just going to be a waste. And so Pfizer sat back for a while, and then it became clear, this is going to be a big problem. And they joined forces with this German biotech company called BioNTech. And they basically moved as fast as they could to be first, they did not want Moderna to beat them. And I think it's clear what they got out of it. Number one, being first across the finish line, you get bragging rights. Okay, they're the status vaccine. We know that I mean, they were able to sign more deals, because once their vaccine was proved effective, it's like countries were lining up. And so I think, and here in the US, it's, I don't know, like maybe 50% more Pfizer doses have

been delivered than Moderna doses. So they've benefited greatly from it. They're talking like $30 billion of income of revenue this year from the vaccine. And if they had been second place, Moderna was what, a week behind. So it's not a huge deal, but again, J&J, you're in, nobody, look at Novavax, they're way, nobody's talking about them. There are other logistical problems that people are worried about. It's, hey, if you're second place, how are you going to get people to enroll in your clinical trial? Everybody's going to want to get vaccinated and not take the chance do you talk in your book about the russian vaccine remember how he was like the first technically yeah if you give somebody a

vaccine without testing it at all yeah you can be sure yeah uh it depends on where they're actually backed up on that now they can't get enough of it is that great that's what they claim i should probably that's like reading the first pages of the top Chinese newspapers online. It's really hard to know what exactly to believe with that one. The thing about it is, yeah, the Russians have, there's this funny thing where if you have a strong bioweapons program, you probably have a strong vaccine program. So Russians have all these brilliant science. They just don't have the same level of investment. And we don't really know what they've released, how accurate it is.

That's true. That's true. I remember when it was like Putin's daughter took it and you're like, did Putin take it? And really in Russia, they need a vaccine for people who fall out of second story windows accidentally. That's what they need a vaccine for. Let's see. So Pfizer got out first. You profile some of the key scientists behind the coronavirus vaccine. Tell us a little bit about that. five foot tall, Midwesterner, just a swell guy, worked at the National Institutes of Health. And he's retired now, but he worked under Tony Fauci, for instance, at something called the Vaccine Research Center. And he worked on some HIV work and then worked on this little obscure virus called the respiratory syncytial, which actually it's a pretty important thing, but not many people have heard about it. But he all through his sort

of dedicated work, he developed this like strategy for attacking coronaviruses, which is they all have the spike, you've I'm sure you've heard about it, they're covered in 40 or so spikes, which is how they get into our body cells. But the problem, sort of the concern with some of these coronaviruses is that spike changes shape and he and his people working his lab came up with this strategy to basically make a disembodied spike the spike protein and have it so fixed in a form that your body can develop antibodies to and because he'd done that he was able to basically within two days of the gene sequence coming out, send a proposed vaccine design to Moderna. And the thing about Barney, yeah,

the thing about Barney is he's not just a basic scientist. Like he has a fascinating life story and getting the vaccine out to say the black community has been very important. And he's just a big sort of, he's been a big supporter of bringing in sort of underrepresented voices in his lab. So there was a woman who was doing the mouse experiments there at the NIH.

Her name's Kismetia Corbett. And she became a huge Twitter star because she's a funny woman, a Black woman who grew up in Hurdle Mills in North Carolina among the tobacco fields and has become this world-class coronavirus vaccine researcher. And yeah, she's just great. So yeah, I think in the book, I tried to paint the stories of all of the characters that contributed to the vaccine.

And of course, again, it wasn't just scientists, but it was people at the FDA that are these dedicated, passionate civil servants that made this thing happen. Because the science is just one part. There's the product, there's the getting, delivering the vaccine as well. You write about how Operation Warp Speed, what it is, how it works, and President Trump's operation. How influential was this in really helping get the vaccine rolling out and out to people?

Yeah, no, I think that's an interesting question. The, one of the central problems with vaccines throughout is that they've never gotten enough funding. The thing is, a vaccine is not as much of a profit maker as a drug, or at least that's what drug companies have said in the past. And when things were ramping up, it's, yeah, Moderna was moving fast and Moderna has some money, but they weren't investing as much. They weren't moving as fast as they could. And other companies, it was the same deal. Johnson & Johnson was saying, oh, maybe we'll have a vaccine in a couple of years. The Operation Warp Speed really did come together, number one, to put a huge amount of cash into the vaccine race to get companies to start pre-manufacturing their

vaccines. And then also there was some handholding involved. And there was actually some friction with this, but in terms of designing the clinical trial in a way that they would succeed during a pandemic was a big concern. Looking back, we think, oh, yeah, it was so easy. Sure, the vaccines cases of coronavirus. The way you show if a vaccine is successful, if it's effective, is by comparing the number of coronavirus cases you have among your vaccinated group versus your unvaccinated group. And there was like talk that there was like going to be the summer lull and then, you know, because everybody is respecting social distancing and masking. We know that's not true. But there was this fear that there wasn't going to be enough circulating coronavirus in the summer, that you wouldn't know if your vaccine worked. And then in the winter, you'd get this tidal wave of cases suddenly coming when people move inside and we wouldn't have approved vaccine. And so part of Operation Warp Speed was like working with the companies. Initially, they thought, OK, let's there was one proposal to test the vaccines in prisons. There was, because there were all these

prison outbreaks there, the outbreaks of coronavirus in prisons, but they said, oh, that's not a good idea. Then there was like an idea to basically try to track, predict what cities were going to have outbreaks. Because remember, back then, it wasn't like coronaviruses all over the country would pop up one spot, pop up somewhere else. And if you want to test your vaccine, you want to be where the outbreaks are. And so there was just this enormous logistics effort to make sure these clinical trials were happening in the right way. In the end, the coronavirus kind of took off and it was pretty easy to test. But, yeah, I think a lot of this is we owed

Operation Warp Speed. And just to circle back to your point about, oh, it's Trump's Operation Warp Speed. This is a big point I make in the book, which I just think is fascinating is yes, the president gave the operation of a green light the approval, but it's the people who created it, the Peter Marks at the FDAda who already mentioned and then bob cadlick who was like this former spy military man who ran this obscure agency called the assistant secretary for preparedness and response like that guy was almost fired by trump multiple times so it's like uh and then the health secretary alex azar again was like almost lost his job in um in april as well and so it's like the group in the

health department were basically operation warp speed was their baby and it basically kept them on the job and then of course it becomes trump's legacy yeah yeah the whole thing of trying to fire those guys and fauci and the nation that he should trust the fauci more than the president which is kind of weird i think i think these people like, he used to run for president, but he seemed to be more trusted than that. So in the future, is this going to make us better prepared for the next pandemic? Because from what I understand, there's just more coming. Yeah, I think that's the hardest thing here.

How do you prepare for just an event that is super unlikely, but super damaging, like a meteorite or an asteroid or whatever? How much money do you want to invest in that? And so Barney Graham, the scientist I told you about at the National Institutes of Health, what he's pointed out is there's about 25 families of viruses that have members, viruses in these families, these groups that are potential threats to people, okay? And we have licensed vaccines for 12 of those. That means there's been enough research and development that we know how to stop one of them. And so that means we might have a head start if another outbreak occurs in that family. The coronavirus, we were lucky

because Barney had done sort of initial research on the coronavirus, so we had a head start. What about these 13 other virus families? His argument is these should all serve as prototype. We should make prototype vaccines to these potential threats. So we should be spending maybe not operation warp speed levels of funding, but a significant amount of funding towards developing vaccines for viruses that have yet to emerge. And that will give us a head start if some random virus suddenly lands in our country again. The Biden administration certainly has ponied up some more cash towards some of this basic research. The way it is with this stuff, it's everybody's thinking about it now. Where are we going to be five years from now? Oh yeah, coronavirus. So it is going to take

sustained investment. I'm sure there's going to be a years from now oh yeah coronavirus so it is going to take sustained investment it's going to i'm sure there's going to be a whole new generation of vaccinologists and virologists everybody that's what everybody's going to want to be right now if they're in elementary school i think so but yeah based on your research do you think coronavirus came from that that's definitely like a pretty hot button issue issue. I wouldn't hazard a guess. I'm not one of these people that's strongly in one camp or another. It's certainly, I would say that it's entirely possible. All of the information that's come out, basically the general theory is there's a lab in Wuhan called the Wuhan Institute of Viral.

They've done a lot of work on coronaviruses. They've collected coronaviruses from the field in a cave. I think it's like a thousand miles from Wuhan. And the question is, did this virus naturally emerge from, say, the wildlife trade? Or was it somehow brought to Wuhan by these scientists, and then there was some experiment that went wrong, someone got infected, and they spread it? And it's been

interesting how divisive this has been there's been a bunch of scientists who've rallied behind the wuhan institute people to or locked arms and said this is ridiculous all other plenty of other pandemics have emerged from wildlife like the first sars pandemic back in 2002 and 2003 so why is this any different but it's and? And part of the problem is that China is not very open, right? They weren't open when they were delaying the release of the coronavirus sequence. They have not been totally transparent with what's been going on at that Wuhan Institute of Virology. And there have been some misstatements by the scientists at the institute that make people very suspicious and yeah i definitely get into this a little bit in my book because it was

the chatter inside the administration about where this thing came from and no we don't have an answer yet and it seems really unlikely that we're gonna have one anytime soon yeah probably does i believe i had another author on the show where there was some reporting I picked up or scanned over. I collect a lot of data. I read a lot of stuff. I get bored a lot. And there was somebody who said that one of the problems that had been – one of the things that had been in the system that was jamming things up was some of the religious people were put over in charge over the health departments and the science departments in the white house and there was interference they were running with

embracing the science of this is that true or am i not collecting my data properly or maybe i just got a different opinion from somebody wrote a book huh are you what are you referring to specifically about the use of like fetal embryonic cells? Uh, no, they, it was, they, they put over the science divisions or the National Institutes of Health. They put people in the administration that were largely deeply religious. They just believe if you believe in the Bible and do it. I think it was Nina Burleigh's book that, that there was that inference. I'd have to go back and check. So don't quote don't quote me but but anyway i was just wondering if you'd seen that so i definitely one of one of the things i do talk about in the book is the is the issue around the fetal embryonic cells basically there was a pretty intense debate within the trump administration in the early days about whether they should ban the use of these cells so basically to for various studies scientists will take tissue from aborted embryos and and will use those cells i think sometimes they will put them they'll do what's

called make a humanized mice where they put the cells into a mouse to make it grow human cells in it or else they'll develop new sort of get these cells to grow in the line in a lab for several generations and that's like some that's very important for doing certain types of vaccine and therapeutic work and this was this huge debate and ultimately some more religious members of the administration joe grogan who is the head of what's called the Domestic Policy Council, this very powerful group in the White House, won that battle and basically had these cells banned from federal research. And the question of how big of a deal that was, it's hard to say. I think there is some thought that using it, there could have been some benefits for that, but I don't know that it really slowed us down with the vaccine.

Okay. Well, that's good to know. That's good to know because, yeah, that may have been some of it. There was a lot of the Centers for National Policy people were brought in or brought in pushing that sort of narrative and religious anti-science narrative. And I was wondering if that effect, do you saw, on one hand, the Trump administration pushed the Operation Warp Speed, and on the other hand, they started playing it against each other

and creating all this confusion and then fire Fauci and then maybe bleach is better in your neck or whatever, injecting it. Just for argument's sake, if we'd had a better scientifically based or let's just say a more stable genius in the White House, would things have maybe turned out faster and better? You can say that they did a great job with Operation Warp Speed, but maybe we wouldn't be as bad off as we have been these last few months or as many people would have died. Is there any, I don't know, am I just making stuff up out of thin air? No, I think many of us hope that the, you thought rolling the vaccine out,

once you get the vaccine, like that's the hard part. And then everybody's going to line up to take it. And initially there was more people who wanted it than there were doses. And now we've reached this point where there's been this growing resistance to it. I think like the scale of that movement has been striking even in me. So I actually, this is a little bit of an aside, but I worked on this story a couple years

ago about this other infectious disease called HINDRA, which is, it's like Ebola in Australia. It comes from bats and then they give it to horses and then horse owners would end up getting this thing. And within days of catching it, you can die. And so it was just this horrible thing. And it turns out that and some people develop a company, a Merck subsidiary developed a vaccine that you vaccinate your horse and then you can break the chain of infection. It shouldn't be controversial at all. But all these horse owners refused to give their horses the vaccine because they felt it had too many side effects or was killing their horses. And it was just crazy to me that, yeah, and the level of the sort of social, the social variables here have been during the

whole course of the pandemic, the viruses, like we can understand, we can study who we there's like science there. But the sociology of vaccines is a whole other level of the unknown. And, yeah, I think that the mixed messages we got from the Trump that the Trump administration delivered, which is we're going to get a vaccine out as soon as possible. FDA is slowing us down. That made people distrust the vaccine. And then once the thing was out and it was actually proven effective, then there's been this weird response to it. No, it doesn't work. And, yeah, so it is very.

And it took a lot of cues from the Fauci. For a while there, Fauci was ruling the stand there in the White House in the press room, and then they had him removed because he was making the small guy feel smaller. So it's really interesting, the whole dynamic of how it went down. And I think you can look at—we're getting into another set of politics here, but I think you can really look at the Trump administration and go, they probably would have rolled right through another president's second term if not for the coronavirus and the way they handled it, if they would have handled it competently from start to finish. I'm talking about everything. You've covered some, you know, good stuff that they did. But if everything had been competent and done,

we might have been really out of the vaccine, out of the sort of woods maybe by the time the election rolled around. And I think that's one of the key of woods maybe by the time the election rolled around and i think that's one of the key components of his biggest mistakes yeah i definitely think that's the case he even with that that handicap as you guys you will of a pandemic it's not like he totally bombed the election he was he was far short when it came down to it yeah and i think one one of the things that i just i really found fascinating in working on this book is I do go deep inside the administration and the white house and the health department, because it wasn't just, there were quite a few dedicated people, including political appointees who were trying to solve this crisis, but there was no leadership,

right? So the lack of leadership led to just infighting and power struggles and doing one thing one day, doing another thing the other day. And I think I like to say that the first few months of the pandemic, I don't think things could have been done that differently. We look around the world and a lot of countries with you know better governance were did not fare there was scientific disagreement there was it wasn't just political but it's like when you got into april and may of last year that's when it became sort of the political side trying to crush what was becoming the scientific consensus which was that we need to obey social distancing. We need to wear masks. We need to basically slow this virus until we have a vaccine. And that's

where things went off the rails. Yeah. And people have learned that our hospital systems are a mess. Crazy. This has been a great discussion. I think it's really important that people read these books, understand stuff, and that we really embrace scientists because technically basically they're the ones that saved us on this one oh yeah for sure yeah we don't screw without science otherwise it's a prey and see how that works out but we know some people are doing that yeah some people are doing that yeah i've and you know i i've been i've seen a lot of data recently where um they've compared people that have the vaccines that survive when there's breakthroughs and people that don't. I know a lot of friends that didn't get the vaccine that have become long haulers now.

They've actually gotten it twice. And I know way too many people now at this point that have gotten the twice long hauler thing. We don't, and there might be some effects of it, but geez, we still don't even know the long-term effects of getting the COVID vaccine, or I'm sorry, getting the coronavirus. And I've heard stuff from Glass Lung to God knows what, especially in young children. And we could end up where, I don't know, these people have higher cases of MS, I don't know, 20, 30 years from now or something.

Who knows where this is going to lead? So it's crazy. We can't get it locked down. Yeah, absolutely. I think getting the vaccine is many times safer than getting the actual virus. Do you think, my last question for you here, do you think we're going to need more than three? We're going to be living with this for a while, aren't we? I think that it's what the scientists told me when I was working on this is we don't know for sure how long this immunity is going to last. We don't know how there could be more dangerous variants that emerge like Delta, which was more transmissible. But I think what we're generally seeing is that the virus is going to be more like the common cold in the future.

I don't know how many more peaks we're going to face. People say that this winter is not going to be as severe as last as the last one, but it could be bad for some people. But I think the coronavirus is definitely with us for a long time. And maybe in the future, we'll have to get a variant vaccine. I don't think that's. I'll never forget the first time I when I got my first shot from Moderna, it was like a relief. I was like, just knowing that I couldn't die or there was a real, what was it, 99% chance I wouldn't die? Just knowing that was just like such a relief and such a secure thing.

It was, you were like, wow, okay, all right. So we got this thing going. Yeah. Thank you very much for coming by, Brendan. Give us your plugs so we can find you on the interwebs. Yeah, thanks. My name is Brendan Burrell. My Twitter is bburrell. Uh, website's brendanburrell.com or you can go to the website for the book,

thefirstshots.com. And yeah, I'm excited to share the book with people. I think you'll find out a lot about the inside story of the vaccine race that you've never heard before. Yeah. And I think it will help educate people a lot more too, as well. Thanks for coming on the show, Brendan. We certainly appreciate it, man. Yeah. Thanks for having me. There you go. Thanks for tuning in. Go pre-order the book. You want to definitely get a hold of this baby so you can say you're the first one on your block to read it. And of course, educate yourself about the vaccine. If you have vaccine hesitancy or you're listening to a lot of weird news out there, go read the book. Find out what really went on to it. See the study and the science behind it. Learn more about what it's doing and you get your vaccines, will you? The First Shots, the epic rivalries and heroic science

behind the race to the coronavirus vaccine coming out October 26, 2021. Go ahead and order that baby up. Get it to be the first on your block to do it. Go to all our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube.com, 4chesschrisfoss, and goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you guys next time. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation.

It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre-order the book right now wherever fine books are sold,

but the best thing to do on getting a pre-order deal is to go to beaconsofleadership.com. That's beaconsofleadership.com. That's beaconsofleadership.com. On there, you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book. And for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like Amazon, you can get all sorts of extra goodies that we've taken and given away. Different collectors, limited edition, custom-made numbered book plates that are going to be autographed by me. There's all sorts of other goodies that you can get when you buy the book from beaconsofleadership.com. So be sure to go there, check it out, or order the book wherever fine books are sold.