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

“Let's unpack that. First of all, I think the concerns about Joe are not limited to his taking Ibermectin much more seriously, his being fairly publicly negative about vaccines at a time where people are dying. 700,000 people have died from COVID-19. Estimates by Kaiser are at least 100,000 of those were unnecessary deaths of unvaccinated people. And for Joe to promote that further, even as this pandemic rages through our population is simply irresponsible.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm with you on the shifting more from where we are to humility and love. That's got to be the right answer. That's very biblical, by the way”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Truth as a means of making decisions. Truth as a means of figuring out how to wrestle with a question like, should I get this vaccine for myself or my children? Seems to have lost its primacy. And instead, it's an opinion of somebody who Expressed it very strongly, or some Facebook post that I read two hours ago. And for those to become substitutes for objective truth? Not just, of course, for vaccines, but for many other issues, like was the 2020 election actually fair? This worries me deeply. Bad enough to have polarization and divisions. But to have no way of resolving those by actually saying, okay, what's true here? Makes me very worried about the path we're on. And I'm usually an optimist”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Take pleasure in stirring up this kind of fear for their own reasons. And that is shameful. I'm really sympathetic with the people who are confused and fearful. I am not sympathetic with people who are distributing information that's demonstrably false and continue to do so. They're taking lives. I didn't realize how strong Sector of disinformation would be. And it's been, in many ways, more effective than the means of spreading the truth. This is going to take us into another place. But Lex, if there's something I'm really worried about in this country, and it's not just this country, but it's the one I live in, is that we have another epidemic besides COVID-19. And it's an epidemic of the loss of the anchor of truth.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Along with that, a sense that maybe this vaccine will have long-term effects that we won't know about for years to come. And one can say that hasn't been seen with other vaccines and there's no particular reason to think this one's going to be different than the dozens of others that we have experience with. But you can't absolutely say, no, there's no chance of that. So it does come down to listening and then trying in a fashion that doesn't convey a message that you're smarter than the person you're talking to because that isn't going to help To really address what the substance is of the concerns. But my heart goes out to so many people who are fearful about this because of all the information that has been dumped on them. Some of it by politicians, a lot of it by the internet, some of it by parts of the media that seem to”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can totally empathize, especially when people are barraged by conflicting information coming at them from all kinds of directions. I've spent a lot of my time in the last year trying to figure out how to do a better job of listening Because I think we have all got the risk of assuming we know the basis for somebody's hesitancy. And that often doesn't turn out to be what you thought. And the variety of reasons is quite broad. I think a big concern is just this sense of uncertainty about whether this was done too fast and that corners were cut and there are good answers to that.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is a complicated calculation. As a scientist, your temptation would be to give a full brain dump of all the details of the information about what's known and what isn't known and what experiments need to be done. Most of the time, that's not going to play well in a sound bite on the evening news. So you have to kind of distill it down to a recommendation that is the best you can do at that time with the information you've got.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you have more confidence in the ability to get beyond our current divisions than I do after seeing just how deep and dark they have become. Tony Fauci has said multiple times the recommendation about not wearing masks was for two reasons. A shortage of masks which were needed in hospitals and a lack of realization early in the course of the epidemic that this was a virus that could Heavily infect asymptomatic people As that changed, he changed. Now, did he make an error? No, he was making a judgment based on the data available at the time, but he certainly made that clear over and over again. It has not stopped those who would like to demonize him from saying, well, he just flip-flopped. You can't trust the guy. He says one thing today and one thing tomorrow.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the best way you give people trust is to tell them the truth. And so they recognize that when you're sharing information, it's the best you've got at that point. And Tony Fauci does that at every moment. I don't think him expressing more humility would change the fact that they're looking for a target of somebody to blame, to basically distract people from the failings of their own political party. Maybe I'm less targeted, not because of a difference in the way in which I convey the information. I'm less visible. If Tony were out of the scene and I was placed in that role, I'd probably be seeing ratcheting up of that same targeting.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It over and over again to the point where he now has to have 24 7 security to protect him against people who really want to do violence to him. For that to be a reason to say that then he should be fired is to hand the evil forces the victory. I will not do that.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a circular argument. They've decided they don't like Tony, so they make up stuff and they twist comments that he's made about things like gain of function, where he's referring to the very specific gain of function that's covered by this policy. And they're trying to say, he lied to the Congress, that's simply not true. They don't like the fact that Tony changes the medical recommendations about what to do with COVID-19 over the space of more than a year. And they call that flip-flopping and you can't trust the guy because he says one thing last year and one thing this year. Well, the science has changed. Delta variant has changed. You don't want him to be saying the same thing he did a year ago. That would be wrong now. It was the best we could do then. People don't understand that or else they don't want to understand that. So when you basically whip up a largely political argument against a scientist and hammer at”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely not. Do so would be basically to give The opportunity for those who want to make up stories about anybody to destroy them. There is nothing in the ways in which Tony Fauci has been targeted that is based upon truth. How could we then accept those cries for his firing as having legitimacy?”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course it does. We know that SARS, for instance, did manage to leak out of a lab in China two or three times, and at least in some instances people died. Fortunately, quickly contained All one can do in that circumstance because you need to study the virus and understand it in order to keep it from causing a broader pandemic. But you need to insist upon the kind of biosecurity, the BSL2, 3 and 4 framework under which those experiments have to be done. And certainly at NIH, we're extremely rigorous about that. But you can't count on every human being to always do exactly what they're supposed to. So there's a risk there, which is another reason why if we're contemplating supporting research on pathogens that might be the next pandemic, you have to factor that in, not just whether people are going to do something that we couldn't have predicted, where all of a sudden they created a virus that's much worse without knowing they were going to do that, but also just having an accident that's in the mix when those estimates are done about whether the risk is worth it or not.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is some. I wish it were stronger. This is a general issue in terms of do we have a mechanism, particularly when it comes to ethical issues, to be able to decide what's allowable and what's not and enforce it. I mean, look where we are with germline genome editing for humans, for instance. There is no enforcement mechanism. There's just bully pulpits and governments that get to decide for themselves.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I don't see it as an imminent risk. There's lots of scary novels and movies written about it, but I do think it's something we have to consider, what are all the things that ought to be watched. You may not know that if somebody is ordering a particular oligonucleotide, From one of the main suppliers, and it happens to match smallpox. Going to get caught So there is effort underway to try to track any nefarious actions that might be going on.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do worry about the risks and The moment where we have the greatest control, the greatest oversight is when this is federally funded research. But as you're alluding, there's no reason to imagine that's the only place that this kind of activity would go on. If there was an evil source that wished to create a virus that was highly pathogenic in their garage, the technology does get easier. And there is no international oversight about this either, that you could say has the same stringency as what we have in the United States. So yes, that is a concern. It would take a seriously deranged group or person to undertake this on purpose, given the likelihood that they too would go down. We don't imagine there are going to be bioweapons that only kill your enemies and don't kill you. Sorry, we're too much alike. For that to work.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And say, is the threshold too easy, too hard? Do we need to reconsider it? Let's look at the experience. COVID came along. The members of the board said, please, we're all infectious disease experts. We don't have time for this right now. But I think the time is right to do this. I'm totally supportive of that. And that should be just as public a discussion as you can imagine about what are the benefits and the risks. And if somebody decided ultimately, this came together and said, we just shouldn't be doing these experiments under any circumstances. If that was the conclusion, well, that would be the conclusion. But it hasn't been so far.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm totally with you, but I want to reassure you, Lex, that this is not an issue that's been ignored, that this issue about the kind of gain of function that might result in a serious human pathogen has been front and center in many deliberations for a decade or more involved a lot of my time along the way, by the way, and has been discussed publicly on multiple occasions, including two major meetings of the National Academy of Sciences getting input from everybody and ultimately arriving at our current framework. Now, we actually, back in January of 2020, just before COVID-19 changed everything, had planned and even charged that same national science advisory board on biosecurity to reconvene and look at the current framework and say, do we have it right? Let's look at the experience over those three years.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm comfortable discussing the gray area. What I'm uncomfortable with is people deciding to define for themselves what that threshold is based on sort of some political argument. The threshold was very explicitly laid out. Everybody agreed to that on the basis of this three years of deliberation. So that's what it is. If that threshold needs to be reconsidered, let's reconsider it, but let's not try to take an experiment that's already been done and decide that the threshold isn't what it was because that really is doing a disservice to the whole process.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to talk about specific members of Congress, but I will say it's really unfortunate that Tony Fauci, who is the epitome of a dedicated public servant, has now somehow been targeted for political reasons as somebody that certain figures are trying to discredit, perhaps to try to distract from their own failings. This never should have happened. Here's a person who's dedicated his whole life to trying to prevent illnesses from infectious diseases, including HIV in the 1980s and 90s and now probably the most knowledgeable infectious disease physician in the world and also a really good communicator is out there telling the truth about where we are with SARS-CoV-2 to certain political figures who don't want to hear it and who are therefore determined to discredit him. And that is disgraceful.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“EPP only applies to agents that are known human pathogens of pandemic potential. These were all bat viruses derived in the wild, not shown to be infectious to humans, just looking at what happened if you took four different bat viruses and you tried moving the spike protein gene from one into one of the others to see whether it would bind better to the ACE2 receptor. That doesn't get across that threshold. And let me also say, for those who are trying to connect the dots here, which is the most troubling part of this, and say, well, this is how SARS-CoV-2 got started, that is absolutely demonstrably false. These bat viruses that were being studied had only about 80% similarity in their genomes to SARS-CoV-2. They were like decades away in evolutionary terms. And it is really... Irresponsible for people to claim otherwise.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They did not. And anybody who's willing to take the time to look at what EPP means and what those experiments were would have to agree with what I just said.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Example of a potential pandemic pathogen? Absolutely not. So nothing went on there that should not have happened based upon the oversight. There was an instance where the Grantee Institution failed to notify us about the result of an experiment that they were supposed to tell us where they mixed and matched some viral genomes and got a somewhat larger viral load as a result, but it was not EPPP. It was not getting into that zone that would have required this higher level of scrutiny. It was all bat viruses. These were not human pathogens.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of stringent oversight. I want to be really clear about that because there's been so much thrown around about it. Was it gain of function? Well, in the standard use of that term that you would use in science in general, you might say it was. But in the use of that term that applies to this very specific”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most of the time it's not worth the risk, only three times in the last three or four years I have experiments been given permission to go forward. They were all on influenza. So, I will argue that if you're worried about the next pandemic, the more you know about the coming enemy, the better chance you have to recognize when trouble is starting. And so if you can do it safely studying influenza or coronaviruses like SARS, MERS, and SARS-CoV-2 would be a good thing to be able to know about. But you have to be able to do it safely because we all know lab accidents can happen. I mean, look at SARS where there have been lab accidents and people who have gotten sick as a result. We don't want to take that chance unless there's a compelling scientific reason. That's why we have this very stringent oversight. The experiments being done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a sub award to our grant to eco-health in New York did not meet that standard of requiring that”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm happy for that gain of function. So that's where a lot of confusion has happened. The kind of gain of function which is now subject to very rigorous and very carefully defined oversight is when you are working with an established human pathogen that is known to be potentially causing a pandemic and you are enhancing or potentially enhancing its transmissibility or its virulence. We call that EPP, enhanced potential pandemic pathogen. That requires this very stringent oversight worked out over three years by the National Science Advisory Board on Biosecurity that needs to be looked at by a panel that goes well beyond NIH to decide are the benefits worth the risks in that situation.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We support a lot of cancer immunotherapy at NIH right here in our clinical center. There are trials going on where people's immune cells are taken out of their body, treated with a genetic therapy that revs up their ability to discover the cancer that that patient currently has, maybe even at stage four, and then give them back as those little ninja warriors go after the cancer. And it sometimes works dramatically. That's a gain of function. You gave that patient a gain in their immune function that may have saved their life. So we've got to be careful not to say, oh, gain of function is bad. Most of what we do in science that's good involves quite a bit of the hat. And we are all living with gains of function every day. I have a gain of function because I'm wearing these eyeglasses. Otherwise, I would not be seeing you as clearly.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can. And first, let me say this term gain of function is causing such confusion that I need to take a minute and just sort of talk about what the common scientific use of that term is and where it is very different when we're talking about the current oversight of potentially dangerous human pathogens. As you know, in science, we're doing gain of function experiments all the time”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very unfortunate. Pasteur said science knows no one country. He was right about that. My whole career in genetics especially has dependent upon international collaboration between scientists as a way to make discoveries get things done. Scientists by their nature like to be involved in international collaborations. The Human Genome Project, for heaven's sake, 2,400 scientists in six countries working together not worrying who is going to get the credit, giving all the data away. I was the person who was supposed to keep all that coordinated. It was a wonderful experience. And that included China. That was sort of their first real entry into a big international, big science kind of project. And they did their part. Different now.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we might know if we find that intermediate host. And there has not yet been a thorough enough investigation to say that that's not going to happen. And remember, it takes a while to do this with SARS. It was 14 years before we figured out it was the civet cat that was the intermediate host. With MERS, it was a little quicker to discover it was the camel. With SARS-CoV-2, there's been some looking, but especially now with everything really tense between the US and China. If there's looking going on, we're not getting told about it.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't exclude that. I think it's fairly unlikely. I wish we had more ability to be able to ask questions of the Chinese government and learn more about what kind of records might have been in the lab that we've never been able to see. But most likely, this was a natural origin of a virus probably starting in a bat, perhaps traveling through some other intermediate yet-to-be-identified host and finding its way into humans.”
2021-11-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #238 – Francis Collins: National Institutes of Health (NIH) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source