#34 Gregory Zuckerman - How Covid-19 Vaccine was Made in One Year
Bold Conjectures with Paras Chopra
English - May 31, 2022 03:00 - 56 minutes - 38.9 MB - ★★★★★ - 5 ratingsScience science physics consciousness reality economy psychology evolution Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
I interview Gregory Zuckerman, who is a journalist with The Wall Street Journal and author of several award-winning non-fiction books.
His book on The Man Who Solved the Market profiled Jim Simmons of Renaissance Technologies which is perhaps the most profitable quant fund ever. The book was the #1 best-seller on the NY Times list and won the 2019 FT/McKinsey book of the year award.
His most recent book - A Shot to Save the World is a behind-the-scenes account of how covid-19 vaccine was developed and launched within a year of the pandemic’s start. This achievement is unprecedented in history as vaccines generally take many years and sometimes even decades to get developed.
What did we do differently this time? Well, that’s the topic we’re going to explore today.
== What we talk about ==
0:00 - Introduction
1:15 - How do you select the topic to write a book on?
4:15 - Do you seek a challenge in finding out what does not exist in the public view and getting it out in the public?
6:10 - Can you give a high-level history & timeline of the covid-19 vaccines?
10:56 - What is that startups (and not big corps) ended up creating the vaccine?
16:41 - What did you observe about human nature during vaccine development?
21:06 - Is it ethical to make a profit during the times like pandemics?
24:30 - Academics do all the fundamental R&D but they don't get to share the profit. Is it fair?
27:27 - What are the three types of vaccines basis on how they are different?
34:20 - Is the adenovirus approach different from previous approaches?
35:24 - In terms of vaccines do you prefer putting investment in one project or this diversity is helpful?
40:02 - Do you think there was anything we could have done to accelerate the clinical trials?
42:00 - What are your views on what led to the anti-vax movement, particularly in the US?
47:31 - Are we better prepared to handle the next pandemic?
48:52 - The journey of writing this book
53:08 - Did you have several endings in mind about how the vaccine approval would have turned out?
56:39 - Closing of Podcast