Speaker 1: Hi everyone, I'm Katie Kuric and this is next question.
Speaker 1: Best Selling author Michael Lewis has a real knack for
Speaker 1: extracting page turning drama out of otherwise mundane and complicated
Speaker 1: subjects like the housing bubble, bond sales, and baseball stats.
Speaker 1: Several of those nonfiction books have been turned into award winning,
Speaker 1: celebrity packed films like The Big Short, mortgage backed securities,
Speaker 1: sub prime loans, tranches. It's pretty confusing, right, does it
Speaker 1: make you feel bored? We're stupid? Well, it's supposed to
Speaker 1: add moneyball John Be's on base percentage with four seven,
Speaker 1: Damon's on base and I'll made this with Add that
Speaker 1: up and you get divided by three. That's what we're
Speaker 1: looking for. Three ball players, three ball players. Who's is now?
Speaker 1: Michael Lewis is taking a crack at our pandemic reality,
Speaker 1: which is still unfolding. His new book is called The
Speaker 1: Premonition of Pandemic Story through the lens of three really
Speaker 1: remarkable scientists. Michael tries to unravel the government's gross mismanagement
Speaker 1: of the COVID response that's led to nearly six hundred
Speaker 1: thousand deaths, which is among the World's Worst Outcomes. You'll
Speaker 1: get to hear from one of the main characters in
Speaker 1: the book later in this episode, but for now, let's
Speaker 1: start with Michael Lewis. So, Michael Lewis, first of all,
Speaker 1: so great to have you again on the podcast. And
Speaker 1: how crazy is it that your last book, The Fifth Risk,
Speaker 1: was all about, quote, what happens when the people in
Speaker 1: charge of managing risks have no interest in them and
Speaker 1: boom the pandemic hits were you basically proves your thesis.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't want to gloat about this. It's
Speaker 1: not an attractive it's not an attractive way to go
Speaker 1: through life, but I did. The point of The Fifth
Speaker 1: Risk was you don't know what's gonna happen. Right. We
Speaker 1: have this instrument called the government that is uniquely suited
Speaker 1: to deal with certain kinds of problems, and there's no
Speaker 1: other instrument to deal with them, and pandemic disease is
Speaker 1: one of them. And the fact that kind of like
Speaker 1: then the Trump people rolled in and didn't pay much
Speaker 1: attention to the government and said it was basically the
Speaker 1: problem and didn't get the transition briefings and all that.
Speaker 1: I did have this terror like what's gonna happen? How
Speaker 1: is it gonna kill me? And and I didn't have
Speaker 1: I didn't have any specific sense of like what was
Speaker 1: gonna happen next, But I thought one of these risks
Speaker 1: is gonna become reality and then you're gonna see what
Speaker 1: happens when you when you just abdicate the responsibility. So
Speaker 1: that's what's got me interested in the in writing in
Speaker 1: the book in the first place was just like, well,
Speaker 1: it happened, what happens next? You might be the only writer, author,
Speaker 1: reporter Michael who doesn't point a finger squarely in Trump's direction.
Speaker 1: And in fact, one of the people you profile in
Speaker 1: your book says, basically, Trump is a comorbidity of a
Speaker 1: larger disease. Can you explain what he meant by that? Yeah.
Speaker 1: All of the characters in the book, the three main characters,
Speaker 1: had been engaged pretty intensely with the question of what
Speaker 1: happens if a pathogen lands in America and it starts
Speaker 1: to spread well before Trump, and they had all seen
Speaker 1: that the tools we had to deal with it were inadequate.
Speaker 1: They had all seen that, particularly the CDC was not
Speaker 1: really up to controlling disease. It was more like we're
Speaker 1: like an academic institution, and that they could all see
Speaker 1: that we didn't have a system of public health, like
Speaker 1: it just didn't exist. What we have is these people
Speaker 1: who were in this extraordinary role of being local public
Speaker 1: health officers, and that they they're kind of tasked with
Speaker 1: battlefield command on the ground, but they aren't real source.
Speaker 1: They've been starved or resources for a generation. And the
Speaker 1: focus oddly had not been for a long time on
Speaker 1: like pandemics, it had been on bio terrorism, if it
Speaker 1: had been on other things. So these people could see that,
Speaker 1: all right, it doesn't matter who's president. We we have
Speaker 1: a problem, like we have a problem that we don't
Speaker 1: have the tool to deal with this. So when they
Speaker 1: would not say that Trump helped, they would say something like,
Speaker 1: we once had this machine. It worked pretty well. We
Speaker 1: allowed it to rust and decay and it was still
Speaker 1: sort of creaking down the highway, and then came a
Speaker 1: president who took a sledge hander to it. But it
Speaker 1: was it was the machine was not it was not
Speaker 1: in good shape when he was elected. So so that
Speaker 1: they weren't they they think of him as more symptom
Speaker 1: than cause it's sort of like the same spirit that
Speaker 1: elected him led to the corrosion of the machine in
Speaker 1: the first place. But you also write that George W.
Speaker 1: Bush actually set things in motion for pandemic preparedness after
Speaker 1: reading The Great Influenza by John M. Berry, and that
Speaker 1: was about the nineteen eighteen pandemic. Uh and he read
Speaker 1: it when he was on vacation, and he decided something
Speaker 1: needs to be done about this. So does George W.
Speaker 1: Bush deserve a little more credit than he is getting
Speaker 1: in terms of at least seen that this was a
Speaker 1: potential threat to the country in the world. He deserves
Speaker 1: huge credit. I mean, I'm a little surprised to find
Speaker 1: myself saying that, but he deserves huge credit. And he
Speaker 1: he was freaked out, in a freaked out state of
Speaker 1: mind when he read it, because not only did he
Speaker 1: have nine eleven in the rear view mirror, but he
Speaker 1: had Katrina basically on his desk, and it was like,
Speaker 1: what else could go wrong? And he reads this book
Speaker 1: about nineteen eight and he turns to someone in the
Speaker 1: White House and he says, what's our pandemic plan? And
Speaker 1: the person says, we don't. We don't have one. And
Speaker 1: it was it was a really interesting case of how
Speaker 1: fast the government can move when the president's piste off,
Speaker 1: it was, you know, a couple of weeks from that
Speaker 1: moment to him using a rapidly sketched out plan by
Speaker 1: a doctor who was in the White House name region
Speaker 1: kaya you know, just a few pages to ask for
Speaker 1: seven billion dollars from Congress, could go about planning for
Speaker 1: a pandemic. And you can trace back to that moment
Speaker 1: not only my main couple of my main characters, but
Speaker 1: the whole plan to have a vaccine that that was
Speaker 1: not based on using chicken eggs. I mean that the
Speaker 1: reason we have vaccines so fast now is stuff they
Speaker 1: did back then. So that was an example that's sort
Speaker 1: of a shiny bright spot, like an example of the
Speaker 1: government taking on a problem figuring out how to deal
Speaker 1: with it. The problem is the strategy they cooked up
Speaker 1: for how to limit death and disease before the vaccine arrives,
Speaker 1: which is wholly original. All the social distancing that came
Speaker 1: out of their plan. It was swallowed and understood hook
Speaker 1: line and sinker bout foreign countries who the CDC explained
Speaker 1: it to, and we never really got minds around it.
Speaker 1: We were never prepared to do the things that you
Speaker 1: needed to do to contain a virus. Well, if George W.
Speaker 1: Bush deserves credit, conversely, does Barack Obama deserves some of
Speaker 1: the blame for letting this apparatus rust, as you said,
Speaker 1: to a point where it had been corroded so significantly
Speaker 1: that Trump just had to put a sledgehammer to it
Speaker 1: and destroy it. No, it's more complicated than that. So
Speaker 1: that if you'd ask those guys in the Bush white House,
Speaker 1: who's one of them stayed on into the Obama White
Speaker 1: House and brought his fellows back to help deal with
Speaker 1: the pandemic that didn't happen, the two thousand nine swine
Speaker 1: flu pandemic, they would say it was a decade long
Speaker 1: anyway process to implementing this plan, and that they'd say
Speaker 1: a couple of things. They'd say, One that Obama made
Speaker 1: the same mistake every other president made in the very beginning,
Speaker 1: but then corrected. And the mistake was to kind of
Speaker 1: shove to one side pandemic risk, meaning it wasn't it
Speaker 1: wasn't immediately on the National Security Council as a thing
Speaker 1: that responsibility. Bush has sort of elevated it for I
Speaker 1: don't know about months. Obama kind of put it to
Speaker 1: one side, but then brought it back quickly. And the
Speaker 1: Obama administration actually did a really good job of trying
Speaker 1: to institutionalize pandemic response in the White House. The Trump
Speaker 1: administration got rid of that, and uh, and that that
Speaker 1: was a problem. The other problem, I think and is
Speaker 1: it's bigger than Obama. It's generational. It's sort of like
Speaker 1: if it's a sin, I don't think of it as
Speaker 1: a sin. It's like a cinemomission. In the case of
Speaker 1: that administration, is that there is this argument that the
Speaker 1: only way we're going to deal with these problems really
Speaker 1: well is is pretty serious government reform, and it means
Speaker 1: actually reforming institutions like the CDC. I think the characters
Speaker 1: in the Bush administration who cooked up our pandemic plan
Speaker 1: made one big mistake. They overestimated the ability of the
Speaker 1: CDC to execute it. So they they thought, we embedded
Speaker 1: in the CDC and we're done. It's good. The CDC
Speaker 1: will run this thing like a like a war general.
Speaker 1: And they overestimated the kind of the willingness, the bravery,
Speaker 1: the capacities of the CDC, because all along the CDC
Speaker 1: had been becoming for you know, it's been on a
Speaker 1: steady drift for decades to becoming this kind of highly
Speaker 1: politicized academic institution. You know, that was so shocking to me.
Speaker 1: I mean, the CDC, as you point out in your book,
Speaker 1: is so dysfunctional, and I guess the downward slide began
Speaker 1: in the late seventies. I mean, basically, what happened to
Speaker 1: the CDC. It lost its independence, as you say, it
Speaker 1: became politicized, and the White House in essence had too
Speaker 1: much control over it, and it became less and less
Speaker 1: and less independent. Is that a fairer yes? Synopsis. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a very curious thing, the relationship between the White
Speaker 1: House and the CDC. But you go, what happened was
Speaker 1: there was a there was a mistake the CDC made
Speaker 1: back way back in the seven when it took charge
Speaker 1: of what looked like a dead lea virus coming to America.
Speaker 1: It looked like there was gonna be a swine flu outbreak.
Speaker 1: There had been one, a little one in New Jersey
Speaker 1: in the spring. They advocated rushing to vaccinate all Americans.
Speaker 1: Some people died, not many, but anful people died from
Speaker 1: the vaccine. And then they stopped vaccinating people in the
Speaker 1: and the pandemic never happened. After that, the CDC director
Speaker 1: ceases to be a career official who's got the protection
Speaker 1: of a permanent public servant who the president just can't fire,
Speaker 1: and who as also who runs the place for like
Speaker 1: a decade or more and has a very long term
Speaker 1: view of the institution. It's changed to a presidential appointing
Speaker 1: to a political appointing, which means that almost implicitly that
Speaker 1: the guy whoever, whoever is running the place is gonna
Speaker 1: be running for eighteen months or two years. They're gonna
Speaker 1: be on a much shorter leased with the White House.
Speaker 1: They're gonna be of the political party of the president
Speaker 1: most likely, they're gonna be and they're view they're gonna
Speaker 1: your renter instead of a home right. They're gonna be
Speaker 1: thinking of like, just avoid whatever the problems catastrophes of
Speaker 1: the next eighteen months or two years are, rather than
Speaker 1: build this institution for the moment it's going to be
Speaker 1: most needed, which is in probably in the distant future.
Speaker 1: To me, the story was so rich because this isn't
Speaker 1: just the CDC. This has happened to a lot of
Speaker 1: institutions in Washington. We have four thousand and something presidential
Speaker 1: political appointees who come in and purport to run these places.
Speaker 1: And it's just impossible. If you're if what you are
Speaker 1: is an eighteen month visitors some vast institution, how are
Speaker 1: you going to lead that place? And you really are
Speaker 1: going to leave that place. You're gonna be better or
Speaker 1: worse than the person who came before you. But no
Speaker 1: company would do this right. You would never say I
Speaker 1: got to change your CEO every eighteen months, and they've
Speaker 1: got to be of a particular political affiliation. Were you
Speaker 1: shocked by that? Were you shocked? I mean, you wouldn't
Speaker 1: have been shocked but because of the fifth risk. But
Speaker 1: when it came to the c d C, was that
Speaker 1: shocking to you? There was a combination of shock and
Speaker 1: miss read because to me, the CDC had this, you know,
Speaker 1: golden reputation. It was one of those bright spots in
Speaker 1: the government. I would have thought it earned that reputation,
Speaker 1: but it earned it like a long time ago, the fifties,
Speaker 1: the sixties, the seventies, and then then things start to
Speaker 1: get murkier. So yes, I was shocked by their behavior
Speaker 1: in the pandemic. It's incredible that they're like preventing people
Speaker 1: from being tested for COVID who come back from wulan
Speaker 1: because their test doesn't work, or because they don't want
Speaker 1: to find it because if they find it, they have
Speaker 1: a problem with Trump because Trump doesn't want to find it.
Speaker 1: That's that It shocked me that they issued all this
Speaker 1: guidance that was wrong. All that stuff was shocking, But
Speaker 1: there was this mystery attached to the shock. How did
Speaker 1: it happen? Like, how did this place? It's not filled
Speaker 1: with evil people, It's filled with probably really good people
Speaker 1: who were just in a bad system. Like how did
Speaker 1: it get so systematically wrong? That was the thing that
Speaker 1: was the mystery to me and for my characters. You know,
Speaker 1: Charity Dean, who was the main character of the book,
Speaker 1: who's this local, this dynamic local public health office who's
Speaker 1: fighting disease, you know, in hand to hand combat before
Speaker 1: COVID finds that the CDC so interferes with her ability
Speaker 1: to stop people from getting sick and dying that she
Speaker 1: has to ban them from her investigations. I mean, she
Speaker 1: she knew what was going to happen if they were
Speaker 1: when there was a pandemic. It shocked me that it
Speaker 1: had gotten that bad, that that it had gotten gotten
Speaker 1: so un incapable of doing the thing it was supposed
Speaker 1: to do. I'm thinking about the hippocratic oath, you know,
Speaker 1: first do no harm, And it sounds like they were
Speaker 1: actually proactively harmy, not just they weren't just inefficient and ineffectual.
Speaker 1: They were actually hindering science, which is crazy. Well, they're
Speaker 1: hindering response right in their minds. Probably rightly, they were
Speaker 1: doing science like you wait till all the data is
Speaker 1: in before you allow any decisions to be made. You
Speaker 1: make sure you have complete certainty so you don't make
Speaker 1: any mistakes. You focus on like the you know, writing
Speaker 1: the paper, rather than fighting the disease. And the problem
Speaker 1: with disease war with with this kind of combat is
Speaker 1: its battlefield you're making. You have to make decisions in
Speaker 1: conditions of uncertainty because by the time you have certainty
Speaker 1: is too late. By the time you have certainty, you
Speaker 1: don't have four cases of COVID in America, you have fifty.
Speaker 1: Up next, one of the real life doctors featured in
Speaker 1: Michael's book, a member of a secret group of scientists
Speaker 1: trying to save the country. That's right after this let's
Speaker 1: talk about the Wolverines. So you find these three incredible
Speaker 1: badass scientists. First of all, how did you find them?
Speaker 1: How did you track them down? And what was your process?
Speaker 1: Michael um, the three main care This came to me
Speaker 1: in three different ways. So the fifth risk had a
Speaker 1: jungle guy named Max Styre who runs something called the
Speaker 1: Partnership for Public Service, who it's seeking to kind of
Speaker 1: fix government. He said to me early on, you got
Speaker 1: to talk to my uncle, who was the former US
Speaker 1: Navy secretary, who said to me, if you're going to
Speaker 1: write anything about this, you need to meet the Wolverines.
Speaker 1: And I said, who the hell are the Wolverines And
Speaker 1: he said, basically, they're kind of the secret group of
Speaker 1: doctors who meet whenever there is like a had a
Speaker 1: fear of disease, pandemic kind of problems, and they go
Speaker 1: back and they're kind of the people who are responsible
Speaker 1: for the invention of pandemic planning. So I was moving
Speaker 1: through the world last March, and the Wolverine say, you've
Speaker 1: got to meet this woman named Charity Dean, who's number
Speaker 1: two in the Health Department California. If anybody's gonna save
Speaker 1: if us, it's her and another character I wrote about
Speaker 1: in the Fifth Risk, who was Obama's chief data scientist
Speaker 1: named d J. Patel, called me up and said, I've
Speaker 1: just I'm from trying to help the state of California,
Speaker 1: and You've got to meet this woman named Charity Dean.
Speaker 1: And so I wrote a note finally to the Governor
Speaker 1: of California. To the government of California, said I want
Speaker 1: to meet this woman named Charity Dean, and they said, no,
Speaker 1: you can't. She didn't want to talk to you. So
Speaker 1: it took me about four weeks to get her private
Speaker 1: cell number, and she said they're they're lying and and
Speaker 1: and to figure out that, yeah, she's She kind of
Speaker 1: unifies the story and she's the character I want to
Speaker 1: build the book around. And the wolverine who ends up
Speaker 1: being the main character from the tribe is Carter Measure,
Speaker 1: and he is this savant but what was so interesting
Speaker 1: to me about him is at heart, what he was
Speaker 1: is a a critical care doctor who, as he said,
Speaker 1: he has a d h D or a d D
Speaker 1: or something exampled. I can't focus unless he has a
Speaker 1: kind of life or death problem. And he discovered his
Speaker 1: calling in the I c U, where people were living
Speaker 1: and dying based on his, you know, decisions, and he
Speaker 1: had hyper focus in the I c U. And he
Speaker 1: was just really gifted at at and through kind of
Speaker 1: a series of accidents, he keeps being pulled up by
Speaker 1: the society by a string to deal with versions of
Speaker 1: like crises life or death crisis, but at the institutional level.
Speaker 1: First he's asked to run a giant VA hospital that's
Speaker 1: in a total state of crisis because he's obviously really competent,
Speaker 1: they think, and he frames it is like, the patient
Speaker 1: is now my hospital. Then he gets pulled up to
Speaker 1: run a whole chain of hospitals and the patient is
Speaker 1: the is this all these hospitals And I've got to
Speaker 1: prevent them from making the mistakes that end up causing
Speaker 1: us all this these problems, And kind of by accident,
Speaker 1: he's pulled into the Bush White House to figure out
Speaker 1: how to save the society from a pandemic. And he
Speaker 1: had this this incredible ability to come at a problem
Speaker 1: in a really weird way and think about a new
Speaker 1: kind of solution. And then Joe Ici, who is this
Speaker 1: biochemist at UCSF who is the most badass virus enter
Speaker 1: on the planet, and he's serving like in the James
Speaker 1: Bond movie. He's cute. He creates all the gadgets he
Speaker 1: used to go kill the bad guys. I do identify
Speaker 1: with Q, but I'd like to put it towards infectious
Speaker 1: disease rather than you know, hiding machine guns and cars.
Speaker 1: My name is Joseph Desi. I'm a professor in biochemistry
Speaker 1: and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, and
Speaker 1: I'm the co president of the chan Zuckerberg bio Hub.
Speaker 1: I first met Michael Lewis in two thousand and sixteen.
Speaker 1: Five years ago, I published a book called flash Boys.
Speaker 1: I was a big Michael Lewis fan, having read a
Speaker 1: number of his books. I think Flashboys is probably one
Speaker 1: of my favorites. A money manager in San Francisco who
Speaker 1: liked the book wanted to go to dinner, and I
Speaker 1: said sure. It turns out the reason he wants to
Speaker 1: go to dinner is to say I have the character
Speaker 1: for your next book. His name is Joe Esi. I thought,
Speaker 1: all right, I'll go have a lunch with JODORESI. I
Speaker 1: invited him over to the Chance Like Work bio Hub,
Speaker 1: which is a nonprofit research institute affiliated with UC Staff, Stanford,
Speaker 1: and Berkeley. It was like sort of indifferent to whether
Speaker 1: he was a character in one of my books. He
Speaker 1: just like that, that's cool, I'll meet this off. Um.
Speaker 1: He was electrical, I mean electric. I've kind of pitched
Speaker 1: this idea of of talking about infectious disease work and
Speaker 1: things like that, and he seemed mildly interested, but you know,
Speaker 1: not really that. I thought, God, I wish I knew
Speaker 1: something about science. I wish I didn't get a d
Speaker 1: in biology myself more year in high school, because someone
Speaker 1: should write a book about this. Gaw. I mean, he's unbelievable.
Speaker 1: He was like doing things like hunting down pandemics and snakes,
Speaker 1: like find finding a virus that was wiping out parents.
Speaker 1: He was. He was finding rare bugs that were killing
Speaker 1: people in mysterious ways. He was, And I just thought, yeah,
Speaker 1: I want to know more about this, but I didn't.
Speaker 1: I felt that I didn't have a reason to write
Speaker 1: about him until this happened. That was the last I
Speaker 1: saw of him until you know, the pandemic hit and
Speaker 1: then suddenly he got a lot more interested in infectious
Speaker 1: disease easy and then I called him and he was
Speaker 1: turned out shirt off. He's smack in the middle of it.
Speaker 1: The Chance Luckerberg biohob as I mentioned, is a nonprofit
Speaker 1: research institute of five ones. The three affiliate with UCSF
Speaker 1: Stanford and Berkeley, and we're a research institute that is
Speaker 1: dedicated to some basic science and the study of infectious
Speaker 1: diseases in particular. And so for example, we were working
Speaker 1: on a system for early detection of emerging pathogens worldwide,
Speaker 1: especially in low and middle income countries, and we were
Speaker 1: working on spinning up a number of these pathogen monitoring
Speaker 1: sites in numerous countries like Bangladesh and Cambodia and Nepal,
Speaker 1: Pakistan and many other places, with the idea that we
Speaker 1: needed an early warning radar and early detection network that
Speaker 1: would help us know when something new is coming our way.
Speaker 1: So I was helping Cambodia get set up in January.
Speaker 1: On my trip back from Cambodia through China, compared to
Speaker 1: when I came through China into Cambodia only about ten
Speaker 1: days prior, there was a much heightened level of security,
Speaker 1: and not the security of you know, um X ray
Speaker 1: machines looking for you know, things in luggage. It was
Speaker 1: security around people. So they were big, these big, you know,
Speaker 1: glass and acrylic boxes that you stood in and it
Speaker 1: monitored your fever. It was a temperature sensor with a
Speaker 1: video monitor, and there was a lot of security personnel
Speaker 1: and everybody had to go in there and kind of
Speaker 1: stand one at a time, and it was, you know,
Speaker 1: a level, a heightened level that just wasn't there ten
Speaker 1: days earlier. And that different said to me, Okay, something's
Speaker 1: going on. It's probably a bigger deal than we thought.
Speaker 1: But did we have much more information than that, No,
Speaker 1: we didn't really know. Alls I could tell is that
Speaker 1: the feeling inside the airport, the security level and the
Speaker 1: tenseness there, it was just something you could feel. February
Speaker 1: of the first cases really came in here. And then,
Speaker 1: you know, the thing that really became apparent to us
Speaker 1: was in early March, it became completely obvious that are
Speaker 1: testing capacity in the United States and the commercial providers
Speaker 1: and big labs were ill suited to carry the load
Speaker 1: that was coming. There was a tidal wave coming and
Speaker 1: nobody had the higher ground. Everybody was going to be flooded,
Speaker 1: and when tests were being sent out to commercial providers,
Speaker 1: they weren't coming back for ten or fourteen days, which
Speaker 1: is unacceptable because the window is, you know, now you
Speaker 1: need to have an answer in less than twenty four hours.
Speaker 1: These days, we want an answer in fifteen minutes, not
Speaker 1: twenty four hours. At that time, I would have been
Speaker 1: throwed with twenty four hours. And so you know, at
Speaker 1: at the chance, like bio Hub, we have this ability
Speaker 1: to be nimble, to change what we're doing and turn
Speaker 1: on a dime, and we really felt that it was
Speaker 1: going to be necessary to get into the game. We're
Speaker 1: a bunch of molecular biologists were study infectious disease. If
Speaker 1: we can't participate in this fight, what fight can we fight? In?
Speaker 1: This goal of setting up a clinical lab as fast
Speaker 1: as we could, it really took everything that we had.
Speaker 1: We begged and borrowed every piece of equipment we could
Speaker 1: get across the research campus. And luckily here at you CSF,
Speaker 1: we have a tremendous workforce of incredibly trained pH d
Speaker 1: s in virology and molecular biology and infectious disease, and
Speaker 1: so I was able to draw on over a hundred
Speaker 1: and seventy five volunteers. There were you know that are
Speaker 1: all PhD level volunteers. To show up and put their
Speaker 1: skills to use. Everybody wanted to get into the fight,
Speaker 1: and so they brought their skills, They brought their re agents,
Speaker 1: they brought their rope oots, they brought their time. We
Speaker 1: built a clinical testing lab starting on March twelve, and
Speaker 1: we had it up and running returned our first clinical
Speaker 1: result on March twentieth. So it took us eight days
Speaker 1: to set up the entire lab and get clinical testing
Speaker 1: for COVID down. And then we just rolled it out
Speaker 1: to essentially all the counties in California. And so when
Speaker 1: we initially did outreach and sort of hey, local counties,
Speaker 1: we know you're not getting your test back for seven
Speaker 1: or ten days, we could do it way faster and
Speaker 1: by the way, we'll do it for free. Uh. And
Speaker 1: we didn't really get that much of a response, and
Speaker 1: we didn't really understand why. And I think Priscilla put
Speaker 1: it really well. Actually, she said, you know, a lot
Speaker 1: of departments of public health don't know how to ask
Speaker 1: for something because they've never been given anything. And it's true.
Speaker 1: When we worked with our our local county department and
Speaker 1: health offices, you know, in different counties around the Bay Area,
Speaker 1: we found owned that there's a great disparity in different
Speaker 1: public offices. Some had some decent resources, others had almost nothing.
Speaker 1: And it's from years of neglect of our public health system. Frankly,
Speaker 1: and I think the pandemic has taught us that we
Speaker 1: need to reinforce and rebuild those public health institutions so
Speaker 1: that this doesn't happen again. Uh and um, I hope
Speaker 1: that this crisis spurs us to actions so that does
Speaker 1: occur now. Luckily, we were able to reach out to
Speaker 1: our public health directors across the state. Actually, Priscilla Chant
Speaker 1: actually had a conference call and she invited everybody onto
Speaker 1: the call from all the different counties and said, hey,
Speaker 1: what's not to like about free testing? And they got it,
Speaker 1: and they finally got it. It sticks some talking to you,
Speaker 1: and then it took off, and of course we did it,
Speaker 1: you know more, we did, you know, thousands and thousands
Speaker 1: and thousands of tests until the state was able to
Speaker 1: bring up its own mass testing sort of systems, and
Speaker 1: direct Emagine to testing also came online, which also made
Speaker 1: things much faster and easier. And so once those came online,
Speaker 1: we're able to sort of ramp down the clinical testing.
Speaker 1: But simultaneously, we were always ramping up the sequencing, and
Speaker 1: of course variance and sequencing only got super popular in
Speaker 1: round December. But we've been sequencing since April, not just
Speaker 1: for variance, but for using the data for actionable intervention
Speaker 1: at the public health level. And the way that works
Speaker 1: is this, we can sequence the positive samples and we
Speaker 1: can understand which genomes are related. Since the virus makes
Speaker 1: mistakes in itself as it copies itself and transmits from
Speaker 1: one person to the other, it creates basically a little
Speaker 1: breadcrumb trail in which you can track back which infections
Speaker 1: were related to who. When we were working with some
Speaker 1: of our public health officials and counties, UM I remember
Speaker 1: um one reporter asking the the official, Hey, if you
Speaker 1: can have anything today right now, you know what would
Speaker 1: it be? A shiny new testing machine? Uh? You know,
Speaker 1: a mobile van? Wan? What what do we what do
Speaker 1: you need right now? What could it be? And the
Speaker 1: Department of Health official said information that's more valuable than anything.
Speaker 1: Where is the virus coming in? Are there new introductions
Speaker 1: to my city or is there continuing forward spread among
Speaker 1: a certain community? Where can I cut the transmission change short?
Speaker 1: What is my next action that it's going to save lives,
Speaker 1: and that's how we can put genomic epidemiology to work.
Speaker 1: It's been a wild roller coaster ride. It's been very
Speaker 1: tense and very exciting, but also stressful at the same time.
Speaker 1: I learned lessons about how how our public health system works.
Speaker 1: I learned lessons about disease transmission that I didn't fully appreciate,
Speaker 1: and the potential for pandemic spread in asymptomatic individuals. The
Speaker 1: basic biology of this virus will be studying for decades
Speaker 1: to come. We still don't fundamentally understand the biology of that.
Speaker 1: It has been wonderful to see the miracle the MR
Speaker 1: and A vaccines from both Visor Maderna in particular. Those
Speaker 1: have been incredible innovations that I was initially skeptical of,
Speaker 1: but it has done really well and I think we
Speaker 1: can all see the light at the end of the
Speaker 1: tunnel now. So you know, the other thing that I
Speaker 1: learned is that in these situations, there's no points for hesitation.
Speaker 1: You have to act and act quickly, and sometimes it's
Speaker 1: not going to be the right move, but the inaction,
Speaker 1: the waiting for more data, is potentially more damaging over
Speaker 1: the long run than not doing something. We're going to
Speaker 1: take a short break, but when we come back. Michael
Speaker 1: Lewis on how to handle what some experts are calling
Speaker 1: the age of pandemics. Talk about the notion, Michael, of premonition,
Speaker 1: the fact that these folks have this essential trait that
Speaker 1: enabled them to sense that something catastrophic was was on
Speaker 1: the horizon and to act on the impulse. I mean,
Speaker 1: what did these three people have in common? What did
Speaker 1: you learn from them? Well, all three of them. Once
Speaker 1: you're living in the world of you know, biochemical events.
Speaker 1: Once you're once you're spending a lot of time thinking
Speaker 1: about how various viruses mutate, might change, and how broken
Speaker 1: our relationship with nature is so that things are leaping
Speaker 1: from animals to people more often. When you're really looking
Speaker 1: at that close. It really isn't a matter of if
Speaker 1: the wind right that that they they became all of them,
Speaker 1: And there are different ways and for different reasons became
Speaker 1: convinced that the risk of pandemic was higher than say,
Speaker 1: what I thought it was. But the whole premonition notion
Speaker 1: is is an interesting one because car a measure was
Speaker 1: among his gifts was his ability to figure out very
Speaker 1: very quickly what's happening in the beginning of a pandemic,
Speaker 1: and so he's January twenty. He has a very accurate
Speaker 1: read on the lethality and transmissibility of the virus in Wuhan,
Speaker 1: and he knows it's coming here. So if he had
Speaker 1: been in charge, as there's every possibility he would have
Speaker 1: been in charge, just wasn't um, we would have started acting,
Speaker 1: you know, two months before we did, and he would
Speaker 1: tell you, you've got to get it. You've got to
Speaker 1: have this sort of like clairvoyance because by the time
Speaker 1: you see the virus, you know in action. By the
Speaker 1: time you see the first death, you're looking at the
Speaker 1: equivalent of starlight. You're looking at something an infection that
Speaker 1: took place maybe five weeks ago, and in those five
Speaker 1: weeks that virus has multiplied exponentially. So if you wait
Speaker 1: till the death, you've got so many cases in your community.
Speaker 1: You can't you can't manage it. You need to anticipate it.
Speaker 1: Charity is the one who got a mystical on me
Speaker 1: about this, and that Charity Dean, she was the only
Speaker 1: one who's actually stopping disease on the ground, and she
Speaker 1: found that she had to kind of use that she
Speaker 1: had to smell it. I mean it was like it
Speaker 1: was like jungle instincts with her, and she I'll tell
Speaker 1: a story that sent a chilled down my spot. It
Speaker 1: was not not long after I met her. I had
Speaker 1: been interviewing her something and she mentioned to me, I
Speaker 1: don't know why that every year she made her New
Speaker 1: Year's resolutions, but she made them on her birthday, which
Speaker 1: was December twenty, and she scribbled them down on the
Speaker 1: back of her grandmother's photograph, her dead grandmother who she adored.
Speaker 1: And one day, sometime after we had met, I said,
Speaker 1: I think to get to know you better, it would
Speaker 1: really help me if you just let me wander around
Speaker 1: your house a bit, because there were a lot of
Speaker 1: like very personal touches in the house. And she went
Speaker 1: out back with her kids and she left me to
Speaker 1: wander the house. I get to her bedroom and her
Speaker 1: grandmother's photograph is beside her bed, and I think she said,
Speaker 1: I could look at anything, So I pull it off
Speaker 1: the wall and it's got all her New Year's resolutions,
Speaker 1: her birthday resolutions going back for like twelve years. They
Speaker 1: are all of the sort that I make, like learn Spanish,
Speaker 1: or or like go to Africa, or they're all resident,
Speaker 1: they're all kind of like what you're gonna do? Until
Speaker 1: two thousand and nineteen, and in December two thousand and nineteen,
Speaker 1: her first resolution is something very personal, and number two
Speaker 1: it says it has started. And now this is this,
Speaker 1: This is before anybody would have known that there was
Speaker 1: a virus in Upan. And this is a woman who's
Speaker 1: been waiting her whole life for the pandemic. There's nothing
Speaker 1: like that on anywhere on this And I call her
Speaker 1: up I said, I said, like, what is this? And
Speaker 1: she said, yeah, yeah. I had this vision in my
Speaker 1: head of this giant tsunami washing over America and I thought,
Speaker 1: something's coming. Now I don't know what it is. I'm
Speaker 1: on red alert. And she'd written this down and I thought,
Speaker 1: you know, I can't explain it. She couldn't explain it.
Speaker 1: She didn't make a big deal of it. But it
Speaker 1: was sort of like you sometimes when you're an expert
Speaker 1: in something, when you do something so often you don't
Speaker 1: know why you know what you know. And something had
Speaker 1: bothered her and it was that instinct. She says she
Speaker 1: had learned to trust because if she didn't trust it.
Speaker 1: She didn't have a tool for dealing with disease because
Speaker 1: you need that instinct that is freaky but maybe not
Speaker 1: as freaky but also freaky. Is an interview that you
Speaker 1: gave to The Guardian in December of two thousand nineteen, Michael,
Speaker 1: and you say, for people to suddenly start to value
Speaker 1: what good government does, I think there will have to
Speaker 1: be something that threatens a lot of people at once.
Speaker 1: The problem with a wildfire in California or a hurricane
Speaker 1: in Florida is that for most people it is happening
Speaker 1: to someone else. I think a pandemic might do it.
Speaker 1: Something that could affect millions of people indiscriminately and from
Speaker 1: which you could not insulate yourself even if you were rich.
Speaker 1: I think that might do it. Okay, do doo doo
Speaker 1: doo doo doo doo doo. That wasn't December of two
Speaker 1: thousand nineteen. Yeah, but I didn't know anything. So it's
Speaker 1: it's um. Charity's performance is more impressive than mine, I
Speaker 1: would say, but I would say this in my I
Speaker 1: want to like par settlement because here's what I was thinking,
Speaker 1: and how different it is from what happened. It wasn't
Speaker 1: It's not true that you couldn't insulate yourself from this.
Speaker 1: Rich people have been able to insulate themselves from this.
Speaker 1: There's been a few exceptions, but the price has fallen vary.
Speaker 1: The cost has fallen very unevenly on the society, so
Speaker 1: that my pandemic is very different from the pandemic of
Speaker 1: a migrant worker in California and or some someone who
Speaker 1: can't afford not to work from home. And so the
Speaker 1: politics of it weren't what I thought it was going
Speaker 1: to be because enough people could escape and tell a
Speaker 1: story about how it's a hoax, it's not really that serious,
Speaker 1: all that stuff. As six hundred thousand Americans die, the
Speaker 1: biff that it gave to the society wasn't quite as
Speaker 1: direct as I imagined it would be. However, I do
Speaker 1: think that is what's happening. I think that the bidens
Speaker 1: being able to get it, will get away with stuff.
Speaker 1: There's more full throated like defense of government going on
Speaker 1: now than than than ever happened in the Obama administration.
Speaker 1: And because you I think that there's there's more of
Speaker 1: a market for the for the idea like, yeah, we
Speaker 1: screwed up, We screwed up because our government was screwed
Speaker 1: up enough people would see that that it's it's had
Speaker 1: some effects. So I was wrong that a pandemic was
Speaker 1: completely going to completely fix this. A pandemic had a
Speaker 1: slightly different effect than I thought. But in that direction,
Speaker 1: did any of these scientists try to cut through the
Speaker 1: government bureaucracy and sound the alarm since they're the people
Speaker 1: you wish were in charge when this all was happening,
Speaker 1: and what happened to them when they tried, Oh my god,
Speaker 1: well let's start a car mession. Since he wrote the
Speaker 1: pandemic plan, the White House neglected. So at the beginning
Speaker 1: of the Trump administration, there were some characters you would
Speaker 1: not have expected to be there because they had associations
Speaker 1: with previous administrations. I guess there were so many jobs
Speaker 1: to feel that some people slipt through, And one of
Speaker 1: them was Tom Bosster, who had been on the been
Speaker 1: on the National security in the Bush administration, and he
Speaker 1: had watched Carter Measure and his partner in crime, Richard Hatchett,
Speaker 1: cook up this plan and was so in awe of
Speaker 1: him that when he got there in two thousand and seventeen,
Speaker 1: one of his first calls was to them and say,
Speaker 1: I want to badge you into the White House right now,
Speaker 1: because if there's a pandemic, you guys are coming to
Speaker 1: run it now. When John Bolton was brought into the
Speaker 1: Trump White House, he fired Boston and at that moment
Speaker 1: the actual link with past knowledge was severed. However, everybody,
Speaker 1: the people there are people in the know, like Tony Fauci,
Speaker 1: know who Carter Measure is. And Carter started writing these emails,
Speaker 1: they called him the Red Dawn emails that had a
Speaker 1: bigger and bigger following, and it was read. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, it was read by the Surgeon General, it
Speaker 1: was read by people in the f d A, it
Speaker 1: was read by people in the CDC. And he knew that.
Speaker 1: And so he was trying with that, use that bullhorn
Speaker 1: to get them to do stuff. So but we're crazy
Speaker 1: doing it. I mean, he couldn't believe. Carter is a
Speaker 1: hard person to upset. He couldn't believe how long it
Speaker 1: took for them to acknowledge there was any kind of threat.
Speaker 1: But so yes, he tried. He got the CDC itself,
Speaker 1: even though he lives in Atlanta. Didn't want to see
Speaker 1: him in the flesh Um the second person charity Deane
Speaker 1: number two in the state of California. She sees with
Speaker 1: Carter sees bid January this thing, but she's primed. It
Speaker 1: has started. Uh that this thing in Wuhan is um.
Speaker 1: This is serious. You don't well people inside their homes
Speaker 1: to die if you're if you've got a mild outbreak
Speaker 1: and um. And she started to try to sound the alarm.
Speaker 1: Her boss, uh Redder, the riot at, said you're not
Speaker 1: allowed to use the word pandemic. You're scaring people. You're
Speaker 1: not allowed to do that exponential math on the whiteboard
Speaker 1: showing the twenty million in California are gonna get infected
Speaker 1: unless we mitigate this thing. She was shut down. She
Speaker 1: was told go in your box and stay there. You're
Speaker 1: not welcome at any meetings on the subject uh for
Speaker 1: two and something months. So she got shut down. Joe
Speaker 1: Does is in a slightly different position. He's at a nonprofit.
Speaker 1: He's running the Chance Zuckerberg bio Hub, which is a
Speaker 1: couple of enterprise that was funded with Mark Zuckerberg's money.
Speaker 1: But when his wife's his wife is a pediatrician, it
Speaker 1: was her interest to try to eliminate disease by the
Speaker 1: end of the twenty one century. He's got resources. He,
Speaker 1: to his shock, realizes that, my god, we're not even
Speaker 1: have a test to do in the in the United States.
Speaker 1: He turns the bio hub into it into the fastest,
Speaker 1: biggest COVID testing lab in this area, maybe in the
Speaker 1: country at one point, and starts to try to give
Speaker 1: away free, free COVID testing and finds incredibly that as
Speaker 1: starved as we are of COVID testing, that the system
Speaker 1: is not equipped to take free stuff to take his help.
Speaker 1: So local public health officers say, we don't have test
Speaker 1: tubes are swabs to administer the test. He provides them
Speaker 1: with that, we don't have fax machines to receive receive
Speaker 1: the results. He provides them with that. I mean that
Speaker 1: over and over. He's got to resource these public institutions
Speaker 1: in order to get sort of receive his help. And Joe,
Speaker 1: who had never heard of the public I mean, he
Speaker 1: heard of it, but he didn't know anything about the
Speaker 1: public health system until he starts to try to help it,
Speaker 1: sees just how ossified, how corroded, how inapt and incapable
Speaker 1: the system is, even though it's filled with like people
Speaker 1: he admires, they just don't have the tools. Um, so
Speaker 1: each of them. I mean, you just add the question
Speaker 1: just asked me got to the heart of the story
Speaker 1: of why. What interested me about the story? I have
Speaker 1: these extraordinary characters trying to having to do extraordinary things
Speaker 1: because the system that should have taken care of it
Speaker 1: was broken, And the way they flounder about and tried
Speaker 1: to try to operate inside the broken system is sort
Speaker 1: of a portrait of the system. And it's the system
Speaker 1: that is the endgame in the story. It's like, we
Speaker 1: can't have this, like we we're not gonna survive if
Speaker 1: our systems look like this, and these people are telling
Speaker 1: us how how it looks, and so what's the solution?
Speaker 1: I know, Dr Fauci told me we're living in an
Speaker 1: age of pandemics, um, And I think you can talk
Speaker 1: about any existential threat, not just a coronavirus, but anything
Speaker 1: that the current systems or structure of government is not
Speaker 1: capable of handling. So do you think there were real
Speaker 1: lessons learned from this? Will things change or are you
Speaker 1: fearful that it will remain as ossified as ever? I
Speaker 1: act seemed prett hopeful. Uh and I'm pretty hopeful because
Speaker 1: even though this country has this bizarre movement to declare
Speaker 1: the whole thing a hoax, enough people's lives have been
Speaker 1: disrupted and touched, and there's enough evidence from outside of
Speaker 1: America just how awful it could be. But doesn't it
Speaker 1: freak you out, Michael, that like Republican men refused to
Speaker 1: be vaccinated. I mean, it's so crazy. You know, we're
Speaker 1: we are, We're a byproduct of a long period of
Speaker 1: basic prosperity and peace that we're we have the luxury
Speaker 1: of being idiots that we won't survive if we're that way,
Speaker 1: And I think that the more more existential the risk,
Speaker 1: the quicker the society will respond and fix itself. I
Speaker 1: think we have, Like I guess, I guess I think
Speaker 1: about the country, it has a bizarre ability to bounce
Speaker 1: in all kinds of directions and change. It's a very
Speaker 1: changeable society. It's a young society in a way, uh,
Speaker 1: and so as much weirdness as there is now, I
Speaker 1: could see it bounce in a complete different direction. Yes,
Speaker 1: we'll have always have some people who won't get vaccinated,
Speaker 1: but I'm not terrified for our future. I actually think
Speaker 1: these people you know this is our field. Here's an
Speaker 1: analogy that that describes how I feel. We had this
Speaker 1: team that just we had a catastrophic season. We had
Speaker 1: all these resources and we just stuck it up. We
Speaker 1: lost all our games. You asked me to go in
Speaker 1: and evaluate the situation. Is maybe a person who might
Speaker 1: be the next coach. If I walked in and I thought, Wow,
Speaker 1: this team does suck. I don't want to be I
Speaker 1: don't want to coach this team. There's a reason they
Speaker 1: lost all these games. You know, I wouldn't take the job.
Speaker 1: But I walk into this team and I write about
Speaker 1: the team, and I see such talent. It's like, this
Speaker 1: is an incredibly talented team. This is like the most
Speaker 1: talented team. It's like giving me the Golden State Warriors
Speaker 1: from three years ago and somehow they used to having
Speaker 1: to lose all these games. Yeah, I'll take this job.
Speaker 1: I can fix this because talent that it's hard to
Speaker 1: you know, you know you got the talent, it just
Speaker 1: needs to be organized. So the fact that we have
Speaker 1: these resources, and I don't mean just material resources, these
Speaker 1: inner resources, I think it's very hopeful. A huge thank
Speaker 1: you to Michael Lewis and to Dr Joe Deresi of
Speaker 1: the University of California's San Francisco and the chan Zuckerberg
Speaker 1: bio Hub. Michael's new book is called The Premonition of
Speaker 1: Pandemic Story and it's out now. Next Question with Katie
Speaker 1: Kurik is a production of I Heart Media and Katie
Speaker 1: Kurk Media. The executive producers are me, Katie Curic, and
Speaker 1: Courtney Litz. The supervising producer is Lauren Hansen. Associate producers
Speaker 1: Derek Clements, Adrianna Fassio, and Emily Pinto. The show is
Speaker 1: edited and mixed by Derrick Clements. For more information about
Speaker 1: today's episode, or to sign up for my morning newsletter,
Speaker 1: wake Up Call, go to Katie Couric dot com. You
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