YouSaid · the spoken record

Francis Collins

lines on the record: 81
first: 2021-11-05
most recent: 2021-11-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I was glad to, and you asked really good questions. So your reputation as the best podcaster has borne itself out here this afternoon. Thank you.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think that for me as a Christian is a pretty clear, I mean, it's to live out the sermon on the mount. Once I read that, I couldn't unread it All those beatitudes, all the blessed, that's what we're supposed to do. And the meaning of life is to strive for that standard. Recognizing you're going to fail over and over again and that God forgives you.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's not a question, and I think science helps me with, so you're going to push me into the face zone, which is where I'd want to go with that. I think, well, what is the meaning? Why are we here? What do we put here to do? I do believe we're here for just a blink of an eye and that our existence somehow goes on beyond that in a way that I don't entirely understand despite efforts to do so. I think we are called upon in this blink of an eye to try to make the world a better place, to try to love people, to try to do a better job of our more altruistic instincts and less of our selfish instincts to try to be what God calls us to be, people who are holy, not people who are driven by self-indulgence. And sometimes I'm better at that than others.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know this whole legacy thing's a little bit hard to Embrace. It feels a little self promoting, doesn't it? I sort of feel like in many ways I went to my own funeral on October 5th when I announced that I was stepping down and I got the most amazing responses from people, some of whom I knew really well, some of whom I didn't know at all, who were just telling me stories about something that I had contributed to that made a difference to them. And that was incredibly heartwarming. And that's enough, you know. I don't want to build an edifice. I don't have a plan for a monument or a statue. God help us. I do feel like I've been incredibly fortunate. I've had the chance to play a role in things that were pretty profound from the genome project to NIH to COVID vaccines. And I ought to be plenty satisfied that I've had enough experiences here to feel pretty good about the way in which my life planned.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And to my surprise, a lot of people seem to be interested in that. They were tired of hearing the extreme voices like Dawkins at one end and people like Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis on the other end saying, if you trust science, you're going to hell. They thought there must be a way that these things could get along. And that's what I tried to put forward. And then I started a foundation by a logos, which then I had to step away from to become NIH director, which has just flourished maybe because I stepped away. I don't know. But it now has millions of people who come to that website and they run amazing meetings. And I think a lot of people have really come to a sense that this is okay. I can love science and I can love God. And that's not a bad thing.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not afraid. I'm not looking forward to it. I don't want to rush it because I feel like I got some things I can still do here. But as a person of faith, I don't think I'm afraid. I'm 71. I know I don't have an infinite amount of time left. And I want to use the time I've got in some sort of way that matters. I'm not ready to become a full-time golfer. But I don't quite know what that is. I do feel that I've had a chance to do amazingly powerful things as far as experiences. And maybe God has something else in mind. I wrote this book 16 years ago, The Language of God, about science and faith, trying to explain how from my perspective these are compatible, these are in harmony Complementary if you are careful about which kind of question you're asking.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then when he got cancer, I became sort of his ally trying to help him find pathways through Various options and maybe helped him to stay around on this planet for an extra six months or so And I have the warmest feelings of being in his apartment downtown over a glass of wine. Talking about whatever. Sometimes it was science. He was fascinated by science. Sometimes it was Thomas Jefferson. Sometimes it was faith. And I knew it would always be really interesting.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I love Hitch. I'm sorry he's gone. Iron sharpens iron. There's nothing better for trying to figure out where you are with your own. And your own opinions, your own worldviews than encountering somebody who's completely in another space and who's got the gift as Hitch did of challenging everything and doing so over a glass of Scotch or two or three. Yeah, we got off to a rough start. We're in an interaction we had at a rather highbrow dinner. He was really deeply insulting of a question I was asking. But you know, I was like, okay, that's fine. Let's figure out how we can have a more civil conversation. And then I really learned to greatly admire his intellect and to find the jousting with him. And it wasn't all about faith, although it often was really inspiring and innovating, energizing”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I'm wrestling with vaccine hesitancy and trying to figure out what answers to come up with, I get so frustrated sometimes and I'm comforted by reassurances that God is aware of that. I don't have to do this alone. So I know there are people like your friend Sam Harris. Who feel differently? Sam wrote a rather famous op-ed in the New York Times when I was nominated as the NIH director saying this is a terrible mistake. Oh no. Sam. You can't have somebody who believes in God running the NIH. He's just going to completely ruin the place.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And ultimately, what kind of God is it caused me to search through various religions and see, well, what do people think about that? To my surprise, encountered the person of Jesus Christ as unique in every possible way in answering a lot of the questions I couldn't otherwise answer. And somewhat kicking and screaming, I became a Christian, even though at the time as a medical student already interested in genetics, people predicted my head would then explode because these were incompatible worldviews. They really have not been for me. I am so fortunate, I think, that in a given day wrestling with an issue, it can have both the rigorous scientific component and it can have the spiritual component. COVID-19 is a great example. These vaccines are both an amazing scientific achievement and an answer to prayer.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was not a person of faith when I was growing up. I became a believer in my 20s, influenced as a medical student by a recognition that I hadn't really thought through the issues of what's the meaning of life, why are we all here, what happens when you die, is there a God? Science is not so helpful in answering those questions. So I had to look around in other places and ultimately. To my own conclusion that atheism, which is where I had been, was the least supportable of the choices because it was the assertion of a universal negative, which scientists aren't supposed to do. Agnosticism came as an attractive option but felt a little bit like a cop-out, so I had to keep going trying to figure out why do believers actually believe this stuff? And came to realize it was all pretty compelling, that there's no proof I can't prove.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You also had this sense that we are such beginning readers here. We are still in kindergarten trying to make sense out of this 3 billion letter book. And we're going to be at this for generations to come.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While we were working on the genome project, it was sort of hard to get this sense of a wowness because it was just hard work and you were getting another megabase. Okay, this is good. But when did you actually step back and say we did it? the profoundness of that. I mean, there were two points, I guess. One was the announcement on that June 26, 2000, where the whole world heard, well, we don't quite have it, but we got a pretty good draft. And suddenly people were like realizing, oh, this is a big deal. For me, it was more when we got the full analysis of it, published it in February 2001, and that issue of nature paper that Eric Lander and Bob Watterson and I were the main authors, and we toiled over and tried to get as much insight as we could in there about what the meaning of all this was.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's also a medical textbook that can teach us things that will provide answers to illnesses we don't understand and alleviate suffering and premature death. So it's a pretty amazing thing to contemplate. And it has utterly transformed the way we do science. And it is in the process of transforming. The way we do medicine, although much of that still lies ahead.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Breathtaking, it's so fundamental. And yet for all of human history, we're ignorant of the details of what that instruction book looked like. And then we crossed a bridge into the territory of the known. And we had that in front of us, still written in a language that we had to learn how to read. And we're in the process of doing that and will be for decades to come. But we owned it. We had it. And it has such profound consequences. It's both a book about our history. It's a book of sort of the parts list of a human being, the genes that are in there and how they're regulated.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that keeps me from having a lot of time for anything else. And I wouldn't mind, because I don't think I'm done yet. I wouldn't mind having some time to really think about what the next chapter should be. And I have none of that time right now. Do I have another calling? Is there something else I could contribute that's different than this? I'd like to find that out.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if I wasn't going to stick it out for the entire Biden four year term, it's good not to wait too late during that to signal an intent to step down because the president's got to find the right person, got to nominate them, got to get the Senate to confirm them, which is an unpredictable process right now. And you don't want to try to do that in the second half of somebody's term as president. This has got to happen now. So I kind of decided back at the end of May that this should be my final year. And I'm okay with that. I do have some mixed emotions because I love the NIH. I love the job. It's exhausting. I'm traditionally for the last 20 months anyway, working 100 hours a week. It's just, that's what it takes to juggle all of this.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no other NIH director has served more than one president after being appointed by one, you're sort of done. And the idea of being carried over for a second presidency with Trump and now a third one with Biden is unheard of. I just think, Lex, that scientific organizations benefit from new vision. And 12 years is a really long time to have the same leader.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does me as well, and it was in many ways the finest hour that science has had in a long time being called upon when every day counted and making sure that time was not wasted and things were done rigorously but quickly.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With therapeutics, we have run at least 20 therapeutic agents through trials that active supported in record time. That's how we got monoclonal antibodies that we know work. That's been. Would not have been possible if I didn't already have a sense of how to work with the private sector that came out of AMP. AMP took two years to get started. Active took two weeks. We just kept the law Yeah, kept the lawyers out of the room and wait.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If it weren't for that background when COVID came along, it would have been a lot harder to build the partnership called Active, which has been my passion for the last 20 months, accelerating COVID-19 therapeutic interventions and vaccines. We just had our leadership team meeting this morning. That was amazing what's been accomplished. That's pretty much a hundred people who dropped everything just to work on this, about half from industry and half from government and academia. And that's how we got vaccine master protocols designed. So we all agreed about what the endpoints had to be. And you wondered, why are there 30,000 participants in each of these trials because of active group mapping out what the power needed to be for this to be convincing?”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Millions of dollars gone into this, and it has been a wild success after many people were skeptical. A couple years later, we had another project on Parkinson's. More recently, we added one on schizophrenia. Just this week, we added one on gene therapy, on bespoke gene therapy for ultra-rare diseases, which otherwise aren't going to have enough commercial appeal. But if we did this together, especially with FDA at the table, and they have been, we could make something happen, turn this into a sort of standardized approach where everything didn't have to be a one-off. I'm really excited about that. So what began as three projects is six, and it's about to be seven next year with a heart failure project. And all of us have gotten to know each other.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And over the course of that couple of years, built a momentum behind three starting projects, one on Alzheimer's, one on diabetes, one on rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. Very different. Each one of them trying to identify what is an area that we both really need to see advance, and we could do better together. And it's going to have to be open access, otherwise NIH is not going to play. And guess what, industry? If you really want to do this, you've got to have skin in the game. We'll cover half the cost you got to cover the other half.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It took a couple of years of convening people who usually didn't talk to each other. And there was a lot of suspicion. Academic scientists saying, oh, those scientists in pharma, they're not that smart. They're just trying to make money. And the academic scientists getting the rap from the pharmaceutical scientists, all they want to do is publish papers. They don't really care about helping anybody. And we found out both of those stereotypes were wrong.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Indeed. Another thing I've been able to do as director is to try to break down some of the boundaries that seem to be traditional between the public and the private sectors when it comes to areas of science that really could and should be open access anyway. Why don't we work together? That was obvious early on. And after identifying a few possible collaborators who are chief scientists of pharmaceutical companies, it looked as like we might be able to do something in that space. Out of that was born something called the Accelerating Medicines Partnership AMP.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That gave me hope as well, and having those experiences oftentimes in a group, I mean, another example where I was trying to figure out how do we take what we've learned about the genome and really apply it at scale to figure out how to prevent illness, not just treat it, but prevent it, out of which came this program called All of Us, this million strong American cohort of participants who make their electronic health records and their genome sequences and everything else available for researchers to look at, that came out of a couple of conversations with Obama and others in his office. And he asked the best questions. That was what struck me so much. I mean, a room full of scientists, and we'd be talking about the possible approaches, and he would come up with this incredibly insightful, penetrating question. Not that he knew what the answer was going to be, but he knew what the right question was.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're not biologists in a traditional sense. I love that, maybe partly because my PhD is in quantum mechanics. So I think it's really a good idea to bring disciplines together and see what happens. That's an exciting thing. And I will not ever forget having the chance to announce that program in the East Room in the White House with President Obama, who totally got it and totally loved science and working with him in some of those rare moments of sort of one-on-one conversation in the Oval Office, just him and me about science, that's a gift.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it isn't going to happen spontaneously without some encouragement, without pulling people together from different disciplines who don't know each other and maybe don't know how to quite understand each other's scientific language and create an environment for that to happen. That has been just an amazing experience. I mean, I mentioned the brain initiative as one of those. Brain initiative right now, I think it was about 600 investigators working on this. Last week, the whole issue of nature magazine was about the output of the brain initiative, basically now giving us a cell census of what those cells in the brain are doing, which is just never been imaginable. And interestingly, more than half of the investigators in the brain initiative are engineers.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And developing cancer immunotherapy, which seemed like sort of a backwater into some of the hottest science around. All those things sort of erupting and much more to come, I'm sure. We're on an exponential curve of medical research advances, and that's glorious to watch. And of course, COVID-19 as a beneficiary of decades of basic science understanding what mRNA is, understanding basics about coronaviruses and spike proteins and how to combine structural biology and immunology and genomics into this package that allows you to make a vaccine in 11 months. I would never have imagined that possible in 2009. So to have been able to kind of be the midwife helping all of those things get birth, that's been just an amazing 12 years. And as NIH director, you have this convening power and this ability to look across the whole landscape of biomedical research and identify areas that are just like ready for something big to happen.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot in 12 years. Science has just progressed an amazing way over those 12 years. Think about where we are right now. Something like gene editing being able to make changes in DNA even for therapeutic purposes, which is now curing sickle cell disease. Unthinkable when I became director in 2009. The ability to study single cells and ask them what they're doing and get an answer, single cell biology just has emerged in this incredibly powerful way. Having the courage to be able to say we could actually understand the human brain seemed like so far out there. And we're in the process of doing that with the brain initiative. Taking all that we've learned about the genome and applying it to cancer to make individual cancer treatment really precision.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have you seen the New Yorker cartoon where there are two dogs in the bar having a martini and one is saying they're dressed up in their business suits and one says to the other, you know, it's not enough for the dogs to win. The cats have to lose.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I will defend that. I am not in the place of those who think all animal research is evil because I think if there's something that's going to be done to save a child from a terrible disease or an adult, and it involves animal research that's been carefully reviewed, then I think ethically why it doesn't make me comfortable. It still seems like it's the right choice. I think to say all animal research should be taken off the table is also very unethical because that means you have basically doomed a lot of people for whom that research might have saved their lives to having no more hope.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that completely saying that every step that's happening there is ethical by some Standard that would be hard for anybody to agree to? No, but at least it's a consensus of what people think is acceptable. Dogs are the only host for some diseases like Leishmaniasis, which was that paper that we were not responsible for, but I know why they were doing the experiment, or like lymphatic filariasis, which is an experiment that we are supporting in Georgia that involves dogs getting infected with a parasite because that's the only model we have to know whether a treatment is going to work or not.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're kept around in these primate laboratories with people coming up with other things to do, but they weren't compelling scientifically. So I think that was the right decision. I took a lot of flack from some of the scientific communities said, well, you're caving into the animal rights people. And now that you've said no more research on chimps, what's next? Certainly, when it comes to companion animals, everybody's heart starts to be hurting when you see anything done that seems harmful to a dog or a cat. I have a cat. I don't have a dog. And I understand that completely. That's why we have these oversight groups that decide before you do any of that kind of research. Is it justified? And what kind of provision is going to be made to avoid pain and suffering? And those have input from the public as well as the scientific community.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was the conclusion. That was based on a lot of deep thinking and a lot of input from people who have considered this issue. And a panel of the National Academy of Sciences that was asked to review the issue. I mean, the question that I wanted them to look at was, are we actually learning anything that's really essential from chimpanzee invasive research at this point? Or is it time to say that these closest relatives of ours should not be subjected to that any further and ought to be retired to a sanctuary? And that was the conclusion that there was really no kind of medical experimentation that needed to be done on chimps in order to proceed. So why are we still doing this? Many of these were chimpanzees that were purchased because we thought they would be good hosts for HIV AIDS and they sort of weren't.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We should have about 410 million tests for that month ready to go. And if we can get one or two more platforms approved, and by the way, we are now helping FDA by being their validation lay. If we can get a couple more of these approved, we could be in the half a billion tests a month. Which is really getting where we need to be.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From Congress got a billion dollars to create this program called Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics, RADX. And we turned into a venture capital organization and we invited every small business or academic lab that had a cool idea about how to do home testing to bring it forward. And we threw them into what we called our shark tank of business experts, engineers, technology, people. People understood how to deal with supply chains and manufacturing. And right now, today there are about 2 million tests being done based on what came out of that program, including most of the home tests that you can now buy on the pharmacy shelves. And we did that. And I wish we had done it faster, but it was an amazingly speedy effort. And you're right, companies are really good. Once they've got an FDA emergency use authorization, and we helped a lot of them get that, they can scale up their manufacturing. I think in December.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And look to see what happens as far as stemming the spread of the epidemic and measuring it by wastewater because you can really tell whether you've cut back the amount of infection in the community. Yeah, I'm so with you. We got off to such a bad start with testing. And of course, all the testing was being done for the first several months in big box laboratories where you had to send the sample off and put it through the mail somehow and get the result back sometimes five days later after you've already infected a dozen people. It was just a completely wrong model. But it's what we had and everybody was like, oh, we got to stick with PCR because if you start using those home tests that are based on antigens lateral flow, probably there's going to be false positives and false negatives. Okay, sure. No test is perfect. But having a test is not acceptable or accessible is the worst setting. So we, NIH, with some...”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am so completely with you on that. And NIH has been smacking the middle of trying to make that dream come true. We're running a trial right now in Georgia, Indiana, Hawaii. And where's the other one? Kentucky. Basically, blanketing a community with free”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because otherwise, that's where the next variant will probably arrive. And who knows how bad it will be. And it will cross the world quickly, as we've seen happen repeatedly in the last 22 months.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, not even counting the kids. 64 million. Get the kids vaccinated. Hopefully, their parents will see that as a good thing, too. Get those of us who are due for boosters boosted because that's going to reduce our likelihood of having breakthrough infections and keep spreading it. Convince people that until we're really done with this and we're not now, that social distancing and mask wearing indoors are still critical to cut down the number of new infections. Of course, that's our country. This is a worldwide pandemic. I worry greatly about the fact that low and middle income countries have for the most part not even gotten started with access to vaccines. And we have to figure out a way to speed that up.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a full cocktail. It's not just one thing. In our own country here in the US, it would be getting those 64 million reluctant people to actually go ahead and get vaccinated”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And hooray for our immune system, may I say, because the vaccine immunized you against that original Wuhan virus. Now we can see that especially immune system is so clever that it's also making a diversity of antibodies to cover some other things that might happen to that virus to make it a little different and you're still getting really good coverage even for beta which was South Africa B1351 which is the most different it looks pretty good but that doesn't mean it will always be as good as that if something gets really far away from the original virus. Now the good news is we would know what to do in that situation. The mRNA vaccines allow you to redesign the vaccine like that and to quickly get it through a few thousand participants in a clinical trial to be sure it's raising anybody's and then bang you could go but I don't want to have to do that. There will be people's lives at risk in the meantime. And what's the best way to keep that from happening? Well try to cut down the number of infections.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. I mean, this whole story of viral evolution scientifically is just amazingly elegant. Anybody who really wanted to understand how evolution works in real time study SARS-CoV-2 because it's not just Delta, it's alpha, it's beta, and it's gamma and it's the fact that these sweep through the world's population by fairly minor differences in fitness. So, the real question many people are wrestling is Is Delta it? Is it such a fit virus that nothing else will be able to displace it? I don't know. I mean, there's now Delta AY4, which is a variant of Delta that at least in the UK seems to be taking over the delta population as though it's maybe even a little more contagious. That might be the first hint that we're seeing something new here. It's not completely different virus. It's still Delta, but it's Delta Plus.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm totally worried about the variance. Delta was such an impressive arrival on the scene in all the wrong ways. I mean, it took over. World, yeah, in the space of just a couple months because of its extremely contagious ability.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Children have died from this disease. Yes, some of them had underlying factors like obesity, but a lot of them did not. So it's fair to say younger people are less susceptible to serious illness, kids even less so than young adults, but it ain't zero. And if the vaccine is really safe and really effective, then you probably want everybody to take advantage of that, even though some are dropping their risks more than others. Everybody's dropping their risks some.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, the average person in the ICU right now with COVID-19 is under age 50. I think there's a lot of people still thinking, oh, it's just those old people in the nursing homes. It's not going to be about me. They're wrong. And there are plenty of instances of people who were totally healthy with no underlying diseases taking good care of themselves, not obese, exercising who have died from this disease.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first, just to say it's great for Joe to be a skeptic, to ask questions. We should all be doing that. But then the next step is to go and see what the data says and see if there are actually answers to those questions. So coming to healthy people. Done a bunch of podcasts besides this one, the one I think I remember most was a podcast with a worldwide wrestling superstar. He's about six foot six and just absolutely solid muscle. And he got COVID. Almost And recovering from that, he said, I've got to let my Supporters know because you can imagine worldwide wrestling fans are probably not big embracers of the need for vaccines. And he just turned himself into a spokesperson for the fact that this virus doesn't care how healthy you are, how much you exercise, what a great specimen you are. It wiped him out. And we see that.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and should know perhaps as soon as a month from now in a very carefully controlled trial did it help or did it not so there will be an answer coming back to joe again i don't think the fact that he took ibrmectin and hoping it might work is that big a knock against him it's more the conveying of we don't trust what science says which is vaccines are going to save your life we're going to trust what's on the internet that says ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine really do work even though the scientific community says probably not”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, the Ivermectin is just one other twist. Obviously, Ivermectin has been controversial for months and months. The reason that it got particular attention is because of the way in which it seemed to have captured the imagination of a lot of people to the point where they were taking doses that were intended for livestock. And some of them got pretty sick as a result from overdosing on this stuff. That was not good judgment. The drug itself remains uncertain. There's a recent review that looks at all of the studies of Ivermectin and basically concludes that it probably doesn't work. We are running a study right now. I looked at that data this morning in a trial called Active6, which is one of the ones that my public-private partnership is running. We're up to about 400 patients who've been randomized to Ivermectin or placebo.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source