WEBVTT - Pharma Gave Us a Vaccine in Record Time 0:00:00.040 --> 0:00:02.520 I'm Carol Mass, Sir. The Bloomberg Business Week cover story 0:00:02.560 --> 0:00:05.360 this week is about how so much went terribly wrong 0:00:05.400 --> 0:00:08.160 this year, but at least one thing went right. Fiser 0:00:08.240 --> 0:00:11.240 and Maderna both got their vaccines across the finish line, 0:00:11.600 --> 0:00:15.000 baring surprises. By spring, tens of millions of Americans will 0:00:15.000 --> 0:00:17.840 have receive shots. By summer, if there will be hundreds 0:00:17.880 --> 0:00:21.720 of millions, more lives will be saved, economies will recover. 0:00:22.239 --> 0:00:25.520 It's an achievement worth celebrating, a shining example of people 0:00:25.600 --> 0:00:29.160 understanding what their job really is than doing it. It's 0:00:29.200 --> 0:00:31.920 also a story that highlights just how badly the US 0:00:31.960 --> 0:00:35.720 screwed up almost everywhere else. This episode is brought to 0:00:35.760 --> 0:00:40.479 you by Principal Financial Group, combining actionable insights with specialized 0:00:40.560 --> 0:00:44.320 solutions to help you meet your investment goals. Get to 0:00:44.360 --> 0:00:50.320 know us at Principal dot Com. Business at its best. 0:00:51.440 --> 0:00:54.720 With a big hand from the government, pharmaceutical companies delivered 0:00:54.760 --> 0:00:58.680 the vaccine that the world desperately needed. Here's how something 0:00:59.640 --> 0:01:06.640 went right for a change by Drew Armstrong. At the 0:01:06.720 --> 0:01:11.480 end of before the coronavirus pandemic started, the two best 0:01:11.520 --> 0:01:14.680 known faces of the pharmaceutical business were the imprisoned Martin 0:01:14.720 --> 0:01:19.560 Screlly and the lawsuit laden opioid makers at Purdue Pharma. 0:01:19.880 --> 0:01:22.200 The rest of the industry was perhaps best known for 0:01:22.240 --> 0:01:26.119 the skyrocketing prices of its medicines. In a gallop pole 0:01:26.240 --> 0:01:29.680 of the public's view of various business sectors, pharma was 0:01:29.760 --> 0:01:33.920 ranked at the bottom, behind the oil industry, advertising in 0:01:33.959 --> 0:01:38.720 public relations, and lawyers. Who'd have guessed that a year 0:01:38.800 --> 0:01:41.800 later pharma would be getting credit for saving the world 0:01:42.520 --> 0:01:45.720 from cruise lines to meet backers. Business will have plenty 0:01:45.760 --> 0:01:48.560 to answer for in its handling of the pandemic, but 0:01:48.680 --> 0:01:52.480 this part of it worked. The COVID nineteen vaccines developed 0:01:52.480 --> 0:01:56.280 by the drug industry in partnership with governments will almost 0:01:56.320 --> 0:01:59.840 certainly prevent hundreds of thousands of American deaths and millions 0:02:00.120 --> 0:02:03.680 or around the world. They will revive trillions of dollars 0:02:03.720 --> 0:02:08.679 in economic activity, let grandparents see grandchildren, and finally bring 0:02:08.680 --> 0:02:11.200 an end to a year that has sing it together 0:02:11.320 --> 0:02:13.880 one last time as the ball drops over an empty 0:02:13.919 --> 0:02:18.800 Times Square. Really sucked. In a time when almost everything 0:02:18.840 --> 0:02:22.120 else went wrong, the vaccine effort was something that went 0:02:22.400 --> 0:02:27.399 mostly right. The quest started in early January, before most 0:02:27.400 --> 0:02:29.800 people in the US and Europe were even thinking about 0:02:29.840 --> 0:02:34.240 a pandemic. The biotechnology company Moderna had downloaded the genetic 0:02:34.280 --> 0:02:38.120 code for the novel coronavirus from researchers in China. Within 0:02:38.160 --> 0:02:41.400 a few days, scientists there had developed a vaccine with 0:02:41.480 --> 0:02:44.720 the U S National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, 0:02:45.160 --> 0:02:48.760 the research agency led by Anthony Fauci. By mid March, 0:02:49.120 --> 0:02:53.680 they'd started a clinical trial. Feiser announced its own plans 0:02:53.680 --> 0:02:56.640 around the same time. A year and a half before, 0:02:57.200 --> 0:03:00.000 it had signed a deal with a German biotech company, 0:03:00.000 --> 0:03:03.799 io in Tech, that has similar messenger RNA technology to 0:03:03.880 --> 0:03:08.359 Maderna's that could, in theory, rapidly assemble and test vaccines. 0:03:09.200 --> 0:03:12.160 Like Maderna, the company's thought the technology could make it 0:03:12.160 --> 0:03:15.760 possible to quickly turn around a prototype. The world hasn't 0:03:15.760 --> 0:03:18.280 seen an emergency like this in one hundred years, says 0:03:18.280 --> 0:03:21.480 Stephen Joffey, the interim chairman of the Department of Medical 0:03:21.520 --> 0:03:24.680 Ethics and Health Policy at the Perlman School of Medicine 0:03:24.680 --> 0:03:27.520 at the University of Pennsylvania. We are lucky in the 0:03:27.560 --> 0:03:31.480 sense that the science was there. Other crucial pieces fell 0:03:31.480 --> 0:03:35.040 into place behind the scenes. For years, the research chiefs 0:03:35.080 --> 0:03:38.040 of the top pharmaceutical companies have had an annual gathering 0:03:38.080 --> 0:03:40.920 to talk about ways to speed up their work. As 0:03:40.960 --> 0:03:44.520 the COVID crisis got worse, about twenty drug companies started 0:03:44.520 --> 0:03:47.160 a working group with the National Institutes of Health and 0:03:47.240 --> 0:03:50.520 other government agencies, meeting every other week to look at 0:03:50.520 --> 0:03:55.160 potential therapies and coordinate clinical trials, says Paul Staffles, the 0:03:55.200 --> 0:03:58.240 chief scientific officer at Johnson and Johnson, which has a 0:03:58.320 --> 0:04:01.240 large scale COVID vaccine trial at expected to produce results 0:04:01.280 --> 0:04:05.120 in January. Those efforts would eventually be folded into what's 0:04:05.160 --> 0:04:09.360 now known as the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed program. 0:04:09.560 --> 0:04:12.400 Warp Speed was revealed at the end of April, when 0:04:12.400 --> 0:04:16.200 the pandemic had killed close to sixty thousand Americans. The 0:04:16.279 --> 0:04:19.040 goal was to develop and produce enough shots to inoculate 0:04:19.080 --> 0:04:23.040 three hundred million Americans before the new year. Some companies, 0:04:23.080 --> 0:04:26.320 including Maderna and J and J would get direct funding 0:04:26.360 --> 0:04:29.440 for their efforts. Weiser got an agreement from the government 0:04:29.440 --> 0:04:33.279 to buy the vaccine it produced if it worked. Crucially, 0:04:33.480 --> 0:04:37.920 the government was shouldering some risk financing the advanced production 0:04:38.000 --> 0:04:41.480 of the experimental vaccines while clinical trials were still going on. 0:04:42.279 --> 0:04:44.960 The most risk averse people on Earth and the riskiest 0:04:44.960 --> 0:04:48.080 business on Earth is how US Health and Human Services 0:04:48.080 --> 0:04:52.479 Secretary Alex Asar describes the drug industry. Probably the most 0:04:52.560 --> 0:04:55.400 common words said in a farmer company are how do 0:04:55.480 --> 0:04:59.880 you d risk this? Asar, whose department helped over sea warps, 0:05:00.560 --> 0:05:03.280 says he understood how tricky a bet on vaccines can 0:05:03.279 --> 0:05:06.200 be for a business. These companies are looking at making 0:05:06.200 --> 0:05:09.960 the multibillion dollar investments in R and D and manufacturing capacity, 0:05:10.200 --> 0:05:13.960 he says, and they had just been through Zekea stars. 0:05:14.240 --> 0:05:18.000 They've been through mers viruses for which the pharmaceutical industry 0:05:18.040 --> 0:05:21.080 investigated vaccines that never saw the outside of a clinical 0:05:21.120 --> 0:05:25.880 trial before those outbreaks dissipated or were squashed. The government's 0:05:25.920 --> 0:05:28.760 backing let smaller players get in the game and take 0:05:28.800 --> 0:05:33.400 some riskier technologies forward. Smaller companies such as Moderna, don't 0:05:33.480 --> 0:05:36.080 have the resources to do this on their own, Joffey 0:05:36.160 --> 0:05:40.360 says of large scale clinical trials. Fiser, despite its corporate 0:05:40.360 --> 0:05:43.920 reputation as a rival consuming Shark, said it would offer 0:05:44.000 --> 0:05:48.160 up any excess manufacturing capacity it might have, potentially producing 0:05:48.160 --> 0:05:52.480 competitors vaccines. But even a company of J and J's size. 0:05:52.920 --> 0:05:56.680 It reported fifteen point one billion dollars in profits last year. 0:05:57.200 --> 0:06:01.000 Needs incentives to rapidly start up a costlyvaccine development and 0:06:01.040 --> 0:06:05.760 testing effort. Staffel says pharma companies could reasonably predict that 0:06:05.880 --> 0:06:08.719 COVID would be bad and that a vaccine would have 0:06:08.720 --> 0:06:12.279 a market, But to mobilize a billion, maybe two billion 0:06:12.360 --> 0:06:14.760 dollars to start manufacturing and do the R and D 0:06:15.200 --> 0:06:19.200 is daunting. He says, Well, we are big companies. Nobody 0:06:19.240 --> 0:06:21.520 can free up two billion dollars in their profit and 0:06:21.600 --> 0:06:26.279 law statement overnight. Moderna, Astra, Zeneca and other vaccine developers 0:06:26.279 --> 0:06:29.480 who joined warp Speed agreed to use similar structures for 0:06:29.520 --> 0:06:32.520 their clinical trials so they could easily be compared with 0:06:32.560 --> 0:06:34.679 one another, and so it would be easier to see 0:06:34.720 --> 0:06:38.560 clear winners. The government also put together a single safety 0:06:38.560 --> 0:06:42.320 board to oversee them, which pins Jaffey sits on. It 0:06:42.360 --> 0:06:45.320 was an unusual approach, but it let the safety monitors 0:06:45.360 --> 0:06:47.960 look for worrying side effects or problems that could show 0:06:48.040 --> 0:06:51.839 up in more than one trial. In usual circumstances, drug 0:06:51.880 --> 0:06:55.680 makers might design their experiments to show advantages over competitors 0:06:55.800 --> 0:06:59.479 or dodge a potential head to head analysis. Big Fiser 0:06:59.640 --> 0:07:03.239 and any Moderna both got their vaccines across the finish line. 0:07:03.839 --> 0:07:06.520 The shots cleared in December have been shipped out to 0:07:06.560 --> 0:07:10.560 states and are now going into people's arms. Barring surprises, 0:07:10.680 --> 0:07:14.400 By spring, tens of millions of Americans will have gotten them. 0:07:14.400 --> 0:07:17.600 By summer, hundreds of millions more will have It's an 0:07:17.640 --> 0:07:21.760 achievement worth celebrating, a shining example of people understanding what 0:07:21.800 --> 0:07:25.200 their job really is then doing it. And it's not 0:07:25.240 --> 0:07:28.520 a story with a single hero. It's one about government 0:07:28.560 --> 0:07:32.880 scientists and private sector researchers. The trial volunteers who put 0:07:32.920 --> 0:07:36.320 their bodies on the line, the doctors running the trials, 0:07:36.720 --> 0:07:39.640 the FedEx and UPS workers making sure the vaccine is 0:07:39.640 --> 0:07:43.960 delivered during a pandemic winter, the nurses donning PPE to 0:07:44.040 --> 0:07:47.480 administer the shots, down to the first person being vaccinated 0:07:47.560 --> 0:07:51.760 after the FDA's authorization go through the chain. And that's 0:07:51.760 --> 0:07:57.600 who made this happen. But it's also a story that 0:07:57.680 --> 0:08:01.360 highlights just how badly the US screwed up almost everything 0:08:01.400 --> 0:08:04.800 else to do with controlling the pandemic. The nation had 0:08:04.960 --> 0:08:09.040 every asset needed to curb the virus, the world's best scientists, 0:08:09.600 --> 0:08:14.360 the biggest collection of biotechnology and pharma companies, a powerful government, 0:08:14.720 --> 0:08:18.720 and well established public health institutions. The US even had 0:08:18.800 --> 0:08:23.560 unlimited financing. Perhaps the one other thing policymakers got right 0:08:23.960 --> 0:08:26.120 is that they pumped enough money into the system to 0:08:26.200 --> 0:08:29.600 keep the economy alive. But even then, Congress was slow 0:08:29.640 --> 0:08:33.520 to strike a second relief deal, and Americans still ended 0:08:33.600 --> 0:08:38.440 up with a badly contained, deadly outbreak. Schools have gone remote, 0:08:39.000 --> 0:08:42.760 lots of restaurants will never reopen. Chances are you know 0:08:42.920 --> 0:08:45.880 somebody who was sick enough to be hospitalized or to 0:08:46.000 --> 0:08:50.360 have died. Michael Mina, an assistant professor of epidemiology at 0:08:50.360 --> 0:08:53.559 the Harvard TH H. Chan School of Public Health, believes 0:08:53.600 --> 0:08:57.240 that cheap, plentiful, rapid tests long ago could have done 0:08:57.240 --> 0:08:59.600 more to stop the pandemic than just about anything else 0:08:59.600 --> 0:09:02.160 we've done on over the past few months. While watching 0:09:02.240 --> 0:09:05.679 cases and debts stack up and hoping for a vaccine, 0:09:06.480 --> 0:09:08.400 the only way to deal with the virus like this 0:09:08.480 --> 0:09:12.360 appropriately is to try and identify people who are infectious. 0:09:12.400 --> 0:09:16.959 He says he's helped develop an inexpensive, mostly accurate test 0:09:17.040 --> 0:09:19.640 with rapid results that can be done on a strip 0:09:19.679 --> 0:09:23.079 of paper. It's not as accurate as the diagnostic tests 0:09:23.080 --> 0:09:25.559 you have to wait hours in line for and often 0:09:25.720 --> 0:09:28.439 days to get a result back from. But it costs 0:09:28.480 --> 0:09:31.440 pretty much nothing and is easy to make. We make 0:09:31.480 --> 0:09:34.439 more bags of doritos than I'm asking for, he says, 0:09:34.480 --> 0:09:37.840 of the number of tests needed. These are paper strips 0:09:37.880 --> 0:09:40.760 that get cut from one big piece of paper. His 0:09:40.880 --> 0:09:43.600 idea is that if you test like crazy, you can 0:09:43.640 --> 0:09:46.280 find enough cases to tell people who are infectious not 0:09:46.360 --> 0:09:48.760 to be out and about, and you halt a huge 0:09:48.760 --> 0:09:51.840 amount of transmission. There are people who aren't wearing a 0:09:51.880 --> 0:09:55.439 mask because of politics or whatever, Mina says, but they 0:09:55.440 --> 0:09:57.280 may still not want to get their eighty year old 0:09:57.320 --> 0:10:00.440 mom sick at Sunday dinner. He's pushed the idea to 0:10:00.480 --> 0:10:03.120 anyone who will listen, but it would need regulators to 0:10:03.120 --> 0:10:06.360 sign off and has never gotten off the ground. So 0:10:06.480 --> 0:10:09.920 where was the warp speed for testing? Fauci, who's been 0:10:09.920 --> 0:10:12.640 the face of the US response to the outbreak, or 0:10:12.679 --> 0:10:14.760 at least the face of what it could have looked like, 0:10:15.360 --> 0:10:17.920 said at a December ninth event at Harvard's School of 0:10:17.960 --> 0:10:20.320 Public Health, that is not as if a program of 0:10:20.360 --> 0:10:23.760 mass cheap testing would have been impossible to achieve. We 0:10:23.880 --> 0:10:26.839 have done things infinitely more complicated than that. He said, 0:10:27.280 --> 0:10:31.000 we have the technology, we can do it, which, when 0:10:31.000 --> 0:10:34.320 you think about it, brings up more questions. Where was 0:10:34.360 --> 0:10:38.359 the warp speed for contact tracing, for public health measures, 0:10:38.400 --> 0:10:42.079 for data, for making sure health care workers had protective gear. 0:10:42.679 --> 0:10:45.760 Where was the warp speed for keeping open businesses, churches, 0:10:45.760 --> 0:10:49.400 and schools? For everything that went wrong? Where was that 0:10:49.520 --> 0:10:52.880 combination of leadership and industry and money that could have 0:10:52.960 --> 0:10:56.719 made it go right. While we've been marveling rightly at 0:10:56.720 --> 0:10:59.680 the science that's made a vaccine possible, most of that 0:10:59.760 --> 0:11:03.480 other stuff never got going at the same level. HHS 0:11:03.559 --> 0:11:06.960 Secretary Asar says there was a national strategy for much 0:11:06.960 --> 0:11:10.040 of this. It just wasn't as visible as warp speed. 0:11:10.840 --> 0:11:13.520 But we're still facing a tough winter even with large 0:11:13.520 --> 0:11:17.800 scale vaccination efforts on the horizon. Tests are more common now, 0:11:18.120 --> 0:11:21.120 but hardly plentiful, at least not in the volume you'd 0:11:21.120 --> 0:11:24.240 need to truly use them for a broad, constant public 0:11:24.240 --> 0:11:27.240 health surveillance, the kind that would allow people on mass 0:11:27.280 --> 0:11:30.400 to go to school or work, travel on airplanes, or 0:11:30.440 --> 0:11:34.199 attend concerts or sporting events. In the New York City 0:11:34.240 --> 0:11:37.120 suburb where I live, my wife and I spent days 0:11:37.200 --> 0:11:39.480 trying to book a just to be sure COVID test 0:11:39.840 --> 0:11:43.199 before we headed south to visit relatives for Christmas. As 0:11:43.240 --> 0:11:46.120 I'm filing this to my editor, we're barreling down the 0:11:46.120 --> 0:11:48.720 interstate with plans to eat food out of a cooler 0:11:49.160 --> 0:11:51.880 p on the side of the road, and brave fourteen 0:11:51.960 --> 0:11:55.800 hours in a midsize suv with two small children, one 0:11:55.840 --> 0:11:59.360 of whom is disastrously vomit prone, all to preserve the 0:11:59.400 --> 0:12:02.280 little bubble of isolation we've kept up ahead of the trip. 0:12:03.200 --> 0:12:06.080 Even the uncomplicated things have been hard for much of 0:12:06.080 --> 0:12:09.200 the country. Not wearing a mask is seen as a 0:12:09.200 --> 0:12:13.480 political act by a significant portion of the population, unhelped 0:12:13.480 --> 0:12:16.520 by a mixed message from government leaders, some of whom 0:12:16.559 --> 0:12:20.719 have suggested that basically masks or for losers. We love 0:12:20.800 --> 0:12:23.600 to inject ourselves with stuff, but when it comes to 0:12:23.679 --> 0:12:27.079 simple messaging about health, doing something that would help people, 0:12:27.280 --> 0:12:30.679 we hate it. Mina says, we are very willing to 0:12:30.679 --> 0:12:33.360 mop up messes, but we have no willingness to stop 0:12:33.400 --> 0:12:36.840 them before they occur. There is one more opportunity to 0:12:36.880 --> 0:12:39.920 get a big thing right. The US gets credit for 0:12:39.960 --> 0:12:43.240 having pushed the development of the vaccines. Now it has 0:12:43.280 --> 0:12:46.480 to make sure people take them. First. The government has 0:12:46.480 --> 0:12:49.720 to guarantee there's enough vaccine. That was a key part 0:12:49.760 --> 0:12:53.080 of the goal of WARP speed. Since the program started, 0:12:53.160 --> 0:12:55.840 the US has signed deals for enough shots to cover 0:12:55.920 --> 0:12:59.120 five hundred and five million people, with the option to 0:12:59.160 --> 0:13:02.160 buy more, but it has only enough from Fizer so 0:13:02.280 --> 0:13:06.560 far for fifty million, and from Moderna for one hundred million. 0:13:07.240 --> 0:13:10.520 Other vaccines it's made deals for, such as Astrasenica's and 0:13:10.600 --> 0:13:13.960 JAY and Jay's, are still in development. There are growing 0:13:14.040 --> 0:13:17.959 concerns that the US, after leading development of vaccines, may 0:13:17.960 --> 0:13:20.720 not get them as fast as it had hoped. Instead 0:13:20.760 --> 0:13:23.400 of three hundred million covered by the end of twenty twenty, 0:13:23.840 --> 0:13:26.600 the US is now aiming to supply vaccine for twenty 0:13:26.640 --> 0:13:29.120 million people by the end of December and getting to 0:13:29.200 --> 0:13:31.599 a total of one hundred million by the end of February. 0:13:32.080 --> 0:13:34.920 Vaccinating all of America now looks more like an end 0:13:34.960 --> 0:13:38.840 of twenty twenty one goal. Even if there is enough vaccine, 0:13:38.840 --> 0:13:41.199 of course, people have to be willing to take it. 0:13:41.679 --> 0:13:44.600 If we have a ninety five percent effective vaccine and 0:13:44.720 --> 0:13:47.200 only forty percent to fifty percent of the people in 0:13:47.280 --> 0:13:50.280 society get vaccinated, It's going to take quite a while 0:13:50.360 --> 0:13:52.600 to get to that blanket of herd immunity that's going 0:13:52.640 --> 0:13:58.800 to protect us, Bauchi said at the Harvard event. Early 0:13:58.880 --> 0:14:01.800 on in the development of the vaccines, there was debate 0:14:01.840 --> 0:14:05.040 about whether to run what are known as challenge trials, 0:14:05.240 --> 0:14:08.880 in these healthy volunteers get an experimental vaccine and are 0:14:08.920 --> 0:14:13.559 deliberately exposed. It's an ethical razor's edge. Is it moral 0:14:13.679 --> 0:14:15.960 to give somebody a virus you know, kills a small 0:14:16.040 --> 0:14:19.240 percentage of patients with their best defense being a vaccine 0:14:19.240 --> 0:14:22.880 that isn't known to work. Because there weren't COVID therapies 0:14:22.920 --> 0:14:26.480 that could cure an infected patient, researchers passed on the 0:14:26.520 --> 0:14:31.040 idea it wasn't worth the chance that someone could die. Instead, 0:14:31.160 --> 0:14:34.400 the vaccine trials signed up tens of thousands of volunteers, 0:14:35.000 --> 0:14:37.600 split into those who got the real shot and those 0:14:37.640 --> 0:14:40.520 who got a placebo. To find out if the vaccine 0:14:40.560 --> 0:14:43.040 was effective, they had to go back out into the 0:14:43.040 --> 0:14:45.400 real world and bump into the virus on their own. 0:14:46.200 --> 0:14:49.480 The idea with these large trials, the gold standard for 0:14:49.560 --> 0:14:52.760 testing of vaccines efficacy and safety is that if the 0:14:52.880 --> 0:14:56.720 vaccine works. COVID cases rapidly accumulate in the group that 0:14:56.800 --> 0:14:59.560 got the placebo, but not in those who got the 0:14:59.600 --> 0:15:02.720 real thing. Get enough cases and you can perform a 0:15:02.760 --> 0:15:06.960 statistical analysis of exactly how effective the vaccine is. But 0:15:07.040 --> 0:15:10.040 if there isn't enough virus circulating, few in the trial 0:15:10.120 --> 0:15:15.080 get infected and results take longer. Over the summer, Visors 0:15:15.080 --> 0:15:18.320 and Maderna's trials went into lulls as the pandemic waned. 0:15:18.880 --> 0:15:22.560 Then in the fall, cases exploded. Millions of infections were 0:15:22.560 --> 0:15:25.680 tallied around the country, and thousands of people died, and 0:15:25.720 --> 0:15:29.320 the results started pouring in on the trials. Jay and 0:15:29.400 --> 0:15:31.680 j said in December it would shrink the size of 0:15:31.680 --> 0:15:34.880 its sixty thou person trial because the cases were coming 0:15:34.880 --> 0:15:38.520 in so fast. The US, because of its failure to 0:15:38.560 --> 0:15:42.760 control the pandemic, had essentially created one big challenge trial. 0:15:43.560 --> 0:15:45.840 There is an irony and a situation that we all 0:15:45.880 --> 0:15:49.400 hoped wouldn't have occurred. US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner 0:15:49.480 --> 0:15:53.239 Stephen Hans says the number of cases did help expedite 0:15:53.240 --> 0:15:57.040 the performance of clinical trials both here and abroad. That 0:15:57.080 --> 0:15:59.760 did help us get to this point, But I think 0:16:00.080 --> 0:16:02.480 of us would have wanted it to be that way. 0:16:02.880 --> 0:16:06.960 That's the contradiction of the USS vaccine success. The government 0:16:07.000 --> 0:16:10.040 and scientists, all working together, came up with a shot 0:16:10.120 --> 0:16:12.840 to save the world, and then they were able to 0:16:12.880 --> 0:16:15.960 prove so quickly that it worked only because those same 0:16:15.960 --> 0:16:22.240 institutions couldn't save us from ourselves. With Robert Langreth, and 0:16:22.360 --> 0:16:25.000 that is the Bloomberg Business Week cover story this week. 0:16:25.080 --> 0:16:28.160 Check out more stories in the magazine on newsstands, online 0:16:28.200 --> 0:16:31.240 at Bloomberg dot com and on the Bloomberg And be 0:16:31.240 --> 0:16:33.920 sure to check out Bloomberg Business Week Daily on Bloomberg 0:16:34.000 --> 0:16:36.760 Radio Monday through Friday, starting at two pm Wall Street Time, 0:16:37.240 --> 0:16:39.720 also on our podcast feed at Bloomberg dot com and 0:16:40.160 --> 0:16:43.160 on YouTube search Bloomberg Global News. I'm Carol Masser.