YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Gottlieb

lines on the record
10
first
2021-09-20
most recent
2021-09-20
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1
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podcast

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  1. “Scott, to me, you've made a compelling case that nothing you said was going to happen. We're not going to be any more effective the next time around. We're going to relearn all the lessons we learn this time. Specifically, we're going to have incredible private company response. Restaurants are going to know what to do. The private sector is going to know exactly what to do, and the government is going to be as just as it is this time. I don't want to only be the little black rain cloud. Is that just way too cynical or is that like a real possibility?”

    2021-09-20 · a16z Podcast · Uncontrolled Spread: Science, Policy, Institutions, Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Restaurants, keeping people six feet apart. You know, the other one is touch base transmission. There was early concern that COVID would spread through touch and then it was relatively quickly kind of realized that that wasn't a real threat. You need to get a viral load in the nose throat and you're not going to get that bite by touching your face. And yet I can tell you in schools all over the Bay Area still cleaning every week for basically no reason. It seems to me like something is fundamentally broken in the transmission belt between even high quality scientific research and then implementation through public health and into policy. Would you agree with that or is that dark of a conclusion? Or if you agree with that, what do you take from that?”

    2021-09-20 · a16z Podcast · Uncontrolled Spread: Science, Policy, Institutions, Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “So then let me brush from that to kind of this intersection of sort of science and public policy. I'll pick on two things in particular. So, social distancing in the form of six foot separation. When that first came out, I was like, oh, that's interesting. Where'd they get the six feet from? And if you dig into that, what you find is the six feet thing was from a droplet spread study done, I think, at MIT on the order of 100 years ago with state-of-the-art scientific equipment that they had 100 years ago. It shows when you sneeze or cough droplets. Let's go six feet. You know, there are two kind of big issues with that for COVID. One is when MIT reran that study last year with modern imaging technologies, they discovered that droplets actually travel 25 feet. And so if you want effective social distancing with droplets, you need 25 feet, not six feet. And then, of course, there's the other thing, which is we discovered spring of 2020, we knew that COVID was no longer just droplet-based transmission. It was airborne. And so it spreads through circulating air. And so it doesn't need droplet spread for the virus to spread. But yet all over the country, there's still the little footprints on the sidewalks everywhere. There's still all the separators. There's still all the stools from bars and rest.”

    2021-09-20 · a16z Podcast · Uncontrolled Spread: Science, Policy, Institutions, Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yeah, so Scott, from a science standpoint, you look at a lot of the science in the way that this world policy, and I'd be curious, like, what have you learned about the institutional kind of science that we do in this country and then its translation through to public health measures? What surprised you, if anything, versus kind of the way that you thought science worked and the way science would contribute to this kind of problem?”

    2021-09-20 · a16z Podcast · Uncontrolled Spread: Science, Policy, Institutions, Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Guess if we knew we couldn't execute the merchonian measures, did that actually have more merit than it appeared at the time? And should we have just considered an approach that just said let it rip?”

    2021-09-20 · a16z Podcast · Uncontrolled Spread: Science, Policy, Institutions, Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “On that exact point, there's a spectrum of different kinds of responses from governments, and we've seen this around the world. On the one hand, you had these sort of extremely draconian responses. You have high state capacity to be able to do all the stuff that you just said. On the other hand, you've got this equally radical laissez-faire kind of idea, which was just, look, let it rip through the population, rip off the band-aid, as it were, like take the losses. And of course, that's a very brutal thing to say. you know, basically get through it. But my analysis is we could neither do the draconian controls on the one hand. We also couldn't do the blood at rip on the other hand. And so somehow we therefore ended up in the messy middle and has resulted in, you could argue the worst of both worlds. The messy middle has still resulted in and controlled spread and the messy middle has led to all of this disruption, which by the way continues, right? Like we may only be halfway through this today with just enormous societal and political and economic disruption and devastation and people continuing to die. And so it was the messy middle of the right place to end up, or if we knew we were going to end up here.”

    2021-09-20 · a16z Podcast · Uncontrolled Spread: Science, Policy, Institutions, Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “If you were president at that time, would you have rolled out the National Guard nationwide to implement Trace Ice Lake quarantine so forth and so on?”

    2021-09-20 · a16z Podcast · Uncontrolled Spread: Science, Policy, Institutions, Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “For people who haven't seen it, this is a movie Steven Siderberg movie from about, I think, a decade ago about a respiratory pandemic. And it's a very chilling movie. But there's sort of an assumption in the movie, which basically is that the CDC sort of on behalf of the United States federal government is this incredibly competent organization that basically is coiled like a snake, ready to strike at the moment of pandemic and basically take control of the country and like, you know, implement all kinds of public health measures. It's like an instrument of state power. It's an execution machine. And I think that flags a general assumption that people have had for a long time, which is this is the function of these federal agencies. Did that movie just have like a naturally high expectation for what the government should be able to do? And I bring that up not just because of the movie, but because I think that's what a lot of us thought the government was going to be able to do. And then like, are you as shocked as I was at the delta between that and then sort of what happened in reality in terms of ability to execute?”

    2021-09-20 · a16z Podcast · Uncontrolled Spread: Science, Policy, Institutions, Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “So, I'd like to open the door on a topic that I've been thinking about a lot. We all watch you on TV all year, especially for 2020 with all of these great ideas of all the things that we should do and the quote-unquote we met in the country, the government, the states, the cities. And very few of those things actually happened. I have a long list of things that people talked about that didn't happen. I'm sure you have a long list of things that people talked about that didn't happen, starting out with closing down flights from China, extending through to test trace, isolate, you know, broad-based serological surveys. So the question is, what have you learned about the ability of the American government at its various levels and across parties to actually execute? And then the second question, which is your recommendations of what we should do if and when we go through this kind of thing again.”

    2021-09-20 · a16z Podcast · Uncontrolled Spread: Science, Policy, Institutions, Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Is amazing technologies that we have, it's breathtaking. You know, them RNA technology and their effectiveness and the speed with which they were developed for people who don't know, at least the Moderna vaccine, the story goes, was actually developed in two days in January of 2020 based on having the genetic sequence for the virus without even a live sample, the virus, just the genetic sequence. It took about what another took 11 or 12 months to kind of start to get put in arms. But there's this technique for testing vaccines called challenge trials. You know, had we done challenge trials with volunteer subjects, we potentially could have had the vaccine rolled out six months sooner. And so, in theory, we could have had the vaccine out in the summer of 2020, and maybe we could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.”

    2021-09-20 · a16z Podcast · Uncontrolled Spread: Science, Policy, Institutions, Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source