Albert Bourla: Pfizer CEO | Lex Fridman Podcast #249
the following is a conversation with albert berla ceo of pfizer if you would like to skip ahead to our conversation the timestamps as always are below but if not please allow me to say a few words about truth and human nature specifically about two groups of people throughout history that seek to lay claim to the truth the first group will tell you that only they possess the truth and that the government will save you the company will save you the science the authorities the experts the institutions will save you the second group too will tell you that only they possess the truth that the government will hurt you the company will hurt you the science the authorities the experts the institutions will hurt you both groups have the benevolent and the malevolent their heroes and their charlatans and i think the hard truth is that no one in this world can tell you with absolute certainty which is which you have to use your mind this is the burden of being human of being free don't blindly follow any leader neither the emperor nor the martyr who points out that the emperor has no clothes and then there's the lessons of history vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives in the past century and in general the advance of medicine has saved billions of lives if you ignore the power of science you're not being honest with the lessons of history and if you ignore the corrupting nature of power and money within institutions including governments and companies that led to the suffering and death of hundreds of millions in the past century you are once again not being honest with the lessons of history i announced that i will be having this conversation with albert berla pfizer ceo and a lot of people wrote to me i would like to say that i was and am and always will be listening and learning with an open mind from everyone my own opinion worth little as it is is that the development of the coveted vaccines is one of the greatest accomplishments of science and recent history for the rest from safety and efficacy to policy and economics i stand humbled before a complicated world full of fear and anger a small number of malicious people from all walks of life will use that fear and anger to divide us because the division makes them money and gives them power i took two shots of the fisa vaccine this was my decision i don't ever want to force this on anyone and i certainly don't want to dismiss your concerns or worse you as a person if you choose not to get vaccinated i can assure you one thing in this conversation and in any conversation the choice of questions i ask and words i say is mine and mine alone when my words fall short as they often do it is only because of the limitations of my mind and of my speaking ability it is not due to pressure or fear i'm not afraid of anyone i cannot be bought by anyone with money power or fame i hope to prove this to you and to myself in the coming years this life is short and to me without integrity it is not worth living people sometimes talk down to me call me naive perhaps they are right but it is who i am i think this life this world this our human civilization is beautiful and as dostoyevsky said beauty will save the world this is a lex friedman podcast and here's my conversation with albert berla the development of the coven 19 vaccine was one of the greatest accomplishments of science in recent history no matter what this should give people hope for the future and yet it is more of a source of division i hope we can discuss both the inspiring and the difficult ideas in this conversation so that we can do our small part in healing this division i hope so take me through the day of november 8th 2020 when the pfizer team were waiting for the results of the phase 3 clinical trials we had assembled in a very small office that we are having in connecticut very few people there were five i think and in in another place what we call the data monitoring committee which is a group of experts independent experts they're on pfizer we're going to have the opportunity to unblind the data and then tell us if the study needs to continue or if it is successful or if it fails and we were waiting for their call so the call came a little bit later when what was expected which created a lot of anxiety to all of us but came around i think two o'clock you're just sitting there waiting what were you feeling sitting there waiting and teasing one another drinking coffee making jokes so what how did you feel like when you heard the results the successful results free liberated and happy like if a huge weight that was on my shoulders was lifted i heard you uh said i love you to the team i did you know this is how we speak in uh in the mediterranean listen maybe it's the russian thing too i i i love love so i appreciate that kind of uh celebration so looking back from that moment to before how much did it cost to develop the pfizer biontech vaccine what was it like making the decision to make that investment when the risk is very high and you don't know if it's going to be successful you know we do a lot of that anyway this is what we do in our daily work we are putting money we are investing in research which is highly risky the difference in that case was that within the risk at all we put it all in we put everything in one go so that we don't lose time usually we'll spend 50 millions and then if that goes well then we will spend another 50 and then if it goes well then 100. here we put all together a little bit more than 2 billion dollars 2.3 billion dollars and it was a significant decision but it was a very easy decision to make in the context of what we were living at that time it was pandemic people were scared we were scared we didn't know how tomorrow looked like we were living unprecedented situations and we knew that we have capabilities that may help so there was not a second question or choice we go all in when you make decisions like that you're the ceo of a company that needs to make money and that hopes to do a lot of good in the world how much of both of those things are part of the calculation so when you said it was a obvious choice um i think you've said a bunch of things of the kind of saying we need to go all in instead of very boldly diving in how much was that that the world is facing uncertainty and fear and potentially destructive pandemic in the early days just when you're seeing the full uncertainty before us don't know how it's going to unroll and how much of it is this may also be a good financial decision to take this risk yeah i think about it all the time and i know very well that if you focus too much on making money you will never make you should focus in what is the real value driver and the real value driver it is to make breakthroughs that change patients lives if you don't do that you will never make money if you do that don't worry things will fall into place and also money will follow but the mentality of the company needs to be how to help the pace and that's what the management was that the shareholders want because that's the only way that we can create value in this particular case we're not thinking at all about what are we going to make when we sell it or if we not sell it because what we were focusing 100 was how to bring a solution to the world that will help all of us change the way the fear that was bring hope to the world and as always when you do that you will have good returns as well on a philosophical level on a human level do you ever worry that the pressure to cover the costs that were invested to develop a new drug to develop this vaccine harms your ability to conduct unbiased studies ah not at all because the studies are highly regulated everybody knows what regulators and when i say regulators fda european authorities uk authorities israeli authorities japanese authorities canadian authorities want to see how the study needs to be conducted and what exactly they need to see to approve it or not so clearly everybody takes into consideration how much money i'm going to invest and what is the chances that i'm going to to lose them but what you can do is to change the rules of the game so that you won't lose the money there are very well established methodologies that would say with very high precision if your medicine is effective if your medicine is safe and those are there for all and are playing with the same rules do you have an intuition about why is the fda trying to get 75 years to release the pfizer data they're trying to request that it will not be released for 75 years and then maybe the broader version of that question is do you think people should have sort of um full transparency and immediate access to the data immediate you know on the scale of weeks not years i think the relations with with regulators they have been always very transparent and there are a lot of laws that they are forcing regulators to end companies to put out there their interactions and what exactly was discussed now to to go into specific details of of some discussions i don't know what is the reason that fda wants to take the time and but i'm sure they have very good reasons well let me just say my side of it it doesn't look like a good reason it looks like maybe it's because i come from the soviet union now this is not you saying this this is me saying this um is there seems to be a bureaucracy that gets in the way of transparency that's always the challenge with government so government is very good at setting rules and making sure there's oversight over companies and people and so on but they create they slow things down which is a feature and a bug and in this case they slowed down so much i think the reason they said it at 75 years is because they set a rate of being able to only review 500 pages of data a day or something like that and that's a very kind of bureaucratic thing where in reality you could just show the data and it's not like something is being hidden but in the battle to win people's trust to inspire them with science it feels like transparency is one of the most beautiful things one of the most powerful things that the fda has fda is has the potential to be one of the great institutions of our country and uh this is one example that it feels to me like a failure so in your perspective you're saying i'm sure they have a good reason so to you the fda is this black box that you submit things to once they approve you know that those are the rules it's approved that's it but this is not a black box we know very well what is the process everybody knows very well what are the processes the review process also it is very detailed they have scientists of very very high caliber not every regulator in the world but the europeans the the bridge the fda clearly they have very very high caliber of scientists that they are going into a lot of details and also basically everything for a study is really released by law in the specifications of the product but it's a very detailed document yeah but it is issue and has basically the essence of everything was discussed i don't know about specific documents if take them time to release but clearly this is not a black box type of process a lot of this stuff is how do you effectively communicate to the world about the incredible science that's been done about the processes that were followed and i agree with you and sometimes it's just ineloquence in communication it's not that there's a failure process it's ineligible to communication and silence silence in the moment when clearly a lot of people are bothered and have questions this is when you speak out and you explain exactly why as as opposed to letting the sort of distrust build up and linger because the result is there's a very large percentage of the population that just um i mean it divides people and science suffers i think and also the effectiveness of solutions suffers like the vaccine and so on i asked a few folks i know if they had challenging questions for you i'm sure many of them answer your call uh yeah uh yeah yeah you know many friendly folks out there uh by the way i'm sweating not because um this is a difficult conversation it is but it's also hot in here for the record so one of the folks is mr jordan peterson i don't know if you know who that is he's a psychologist and intellectual and author he suggested to me that i raised the concern that there is a close working relationship between pfizer fda and cdc so we we talked about fda do you worry that this affects both positive and negative uh pfizer's chances of getting drugs approved the fact that there's people you know that worked at the fda that now work at pfizer pfizer fda that there's a kind of pipeline does this worry you that it affects your ability to do great unbiased work i have zero doubts that this is not affecting at all their ability to be unbiased and regulate and in order to for this the system also reinforces that by creating significant time barriers if someone moves from an industry to fda she won't be able to deal with topics for a period of time and then for even an enhanced period of time with topics that are related with the company he or she may come from i think these regulators they are very very strict uh rightly so if anything i feel sometimes that maybe they should be a little bit more open-minded particularly when it comes to new technologies rather than trying to judge and implement the same framework of variation of new technologies to all they are always as regulators in the conservative side but always always they are unbiased and they are trying uh the best and it's not only one or two people they have processes to make sure that their self checks and balances within the agencies both in cdc and in the fda difficult decisions they bring external experts that they should express easy decisions they are internal experts that they are debating a lot and if there are disagreements they elevate them so i think it's we are lucky to have good regulators i think i agree with what you said before as with all governmental agencies there is bureaucracy and the bureaucracy needs to be addressed and by saying the rockets is not relaxing the the bar the bar needs to remain high but uh being uh focusing on what matters rather than on the on the detail so you don't you know i've been reading quite a bit about history you don't worry about human nature and corruption that can seep in you're saying institutionally there's protections against this i think there is always the the fear of corruption particularly when you speak about public servants but uh clearly the risk is very different country by country and speaking about and agencies by entrances i think the regulatory agencies have a very good track record and history of the us of europe of england of a very very good track record of integrity it's uh something i think about so i grew up in the soviet union and um i need to perhaps introspect this a little bit but when i was growing up ethically there was a sense that bribery is the only way you can get stuff done that that was the system of the time uh like you get pulled over by a police officer like obviously you need to bribe them i mean it was like the way of life um and then so coming to this country was is beautiful to see that the rule of law has so much power and ultimately the rule of law when enacted when uh when it holds up it gives people freedom to do the best work of their lives but they're still human nature and that that worries me a lot here and again it goes back to the perception the communication when there's people that have worked at pfizer and an fda at the cdc you know you look at their resume they have those things on their resume it worries people are these great leaders that we are supposed to see as authorities are they playing a game on us i would say that uh i recognize what you said about what happened in uh or what i'm sure that what you describe in the country that you're coming from it was how you experienced it and i know that there are other countries that you need to do these things to do your job i don't think is the case in this country particularly when it comes to those agencies that you mentioned i think they have a very high track record and also i don't think that there are a lot of people that they are worried about it or doubt i'm sure like everywhere there will be a minority but the vast majority of the americans the vast majority of the europeans the vast majority of the brits the vast majority of the israelis they trust what fda or ema or cdc or mhra will say still there is currently a distrust of big pharma in the public maybe this is something i'd love to hear your comment on there's the stress of science when it's tangled up with corporations and government institutions like we've talked about but you have they have to be entangled to achieve scale oversight and to achieve the kind of skill that pfizer has been able to accomplish how can pfizer regain the public trust how can you regain the public trust do you think not regain but sort of take steps to increase the public trust reputation is something that you can lose in buckets but you can earn it back in drops and once you lost it you are going to take a lot of effort to bring it back and the pharmaceutical industry lost it it's clear that the reputation of the industry in the last decade was on the lowest that we have seen ever and for there are many reasons for that but clearly there are reasons that are related also with the behavior of the industry that needed to change and i'm hopeful that very few will disagree that the industry is a very different industry right now that being said i truly believe that uh if there is one lesson that stands out from the main lessons that we learned here in covet is the power of science in the hands of the private sector i think it was the private sector that came with solutions with diagnostic tests when we didn't have solutions with respirators when we didn't have solutions with treatments solutions with vaccines and i think that demonstrated very clearly to the world the value of a thriving life sciences sector private lifestyle sector to society that also affected very positively the reputation both of the sector and of pfizer i'm not going to make the mistake to consider given i'm not making to make the mistake that because our occupation is high that will remain so we need to earn it every day every day with everything we do with everything we say with the way we behave and i hope that we'll rise to this occasion and we'll do that you've been in pfizer for 28 years time flies when you're having fun and you've become ceo in 2019 it is the company you love a company you believe in it's a company that has developed drugs that has helped millions of people so let me ask yet another hard question on this topic of reputation in 2009 pfizer pleaded guilty to the illegal marketing of arthritis drug bextra and agreed to 2.3 billion settlement how do you make sense of the fact that this happened to a company you love and that you believe in yes the dextra case in 2009 was related to things that happened in 2003 and the things that happened in 2003 were things that basically several of our apps did off-label promos so they spoke about with the physicians about off-label use of the product and they shouldn't and can you clarify so off-label are things that the fda didn't approve extra stuff you basically say this drug does extra stuff that the fda never approved correct and this is something that it is allowed when physicians are speaking to physicians but it is not allowed for the pharmaceutical companies to refer to this studies because usually our studies that are happening of labor and apparently several of our reps in 2003 they did it and we had to [Music] to settle in 2009 and we paid a very big fine as you said the fine was related not to the severity of the contact but the size of the revenues so this the fines are if dexter was a small product we would get a small fine vector was a very big product and we got a very large fine very bad what happened in 2003 i don't think that these things happened since then we have a stellar record from 2009 until now of complying with every single regulation and rule we have internal processes to make sure that these are not happening by individuals that may have an interest for example to get a promotion they may try and do things that they are not the right things and we have more importantly a culture in this company that really sets aside people that they think differently so i didn't like what happened in 2003 but i believe a lot has changed in the 20 years that followed almost 20 years so you're developing drugs you're developing solutions to help millions of people but there's risk involved and so there will be lawsuits heading back your way because there's a lot of lawyers in the world partially how do you put that into the calculation of of how you tried to do good in the world um that some of the causes the lawsuits how do you uh not fall victim to thinking that it's just the cost of doing business and then some of the losses might actually represent real pain that people are going through you know i i think that we try always to do the right thing and that's as i said very well embedded into our culture if you don't do the right thing sooner or later you will pay for it one way or another yeah and right now for us doing the right thing it is being able to find innovations to issues that are real diseases that they do not have good coverage good treatments right now we try to find treatments that significantly surpass the current standards of care and we try not only to comply with what regulators are asking us to do this is what you need to do to prove the safety or the efficacy but exceed them no matter what we do on that i'm sure that people will find opportunity because as you said there are a lot of lawyers to sue us but we believe in the justice system and we believe that eventually if you are doing the right thing you will be on the right side of the history i'm really glad you say that because um focusing on doing the right thing no matter the money i believe is the best way to make money just exactly and also in another way in other realms creating a product that people love is the best way to make money so focusing on the on the core of the thing that makes people feel good that brings value to people's lives so i'm now in austin texas my good friend joe rogan he's been highlighting to me this aggressive uh marketing on mainstream media channels by pfizer so let me ask the general marketing question do you see this as a conflict of interest is it my bias the reporting of news that a lot of us a lot of people me included look to these mainstream channels of news for kind of authority of like what the heck's going on in the world and if pfizer is sponsoring uh many of these shows there's a worry it may be a perception thing but there's also natural worry that it would influence what they're talking about because they're afraid of losing the sponsorship it's subtle but at scale it might have a serious impact do you worry about this i think people could go one way or another because of multiple reasons from our perspective we i don't think we have aggressive marketing what do we do we go on tv and we are having ads about our products and they are highly regulated i think it is the right of people to know to learn that if there is a product like that it's very clearly that we cannot say things that they are off-label that have not been approved we need to have every time we go on tv as you know fda is forcing us to say also the bad things that can happen for a medicine sometimes that takes more time than the good things and i don't think that we are doing aggressive marketing no people could be influenced in and can be biased in in the podcasts or in the other type of media activities that they have for multiple different reasons yeah i know but it's still it's pressure it's human nature i mean i i if it's one of those perception but i i worry about you i think i have a ton of sponsors for this podcast for example and none of them ever asked me to anything they're just you know i think likely that kind of pressure is not happening for pfizer but there's implied pressure sometimes and i worry about that a lot because um you know i look at academia like i i look for the good in people i tend to believe most people are good or have the capacity to be good and desire to be good when i came to mit i i was a little bit disappointed maybe heartbroken how much pressure i think unjustified pressure people felt from financial constraints especially at mit when there's i think a lot of money people still felt constraints and they weren't it wasn't bringing out the best in them they weren't supporting each other they weren't loving each other like celebrating each other's successes i don't want to blame money on everything money constraints but when you have sponsors it just um i personally worry that it doesn't bring the best out of people and so i feel like i want to put some responsibility on sponsors and and great big companies like pfizer to to kind of uh not get in the way of the best of human nature whether it's sponsoring uh podcasts mainstream media like i don't know athletes whatever yeah you need to know that we are so so careful with sponsorships first of all we have very few very very few we have a team that for every single one could be two thousand dollars they will try to see if there is a conflict of interest in the way we do it and also what is the reputation of the of the the persons or the programs that we are sponsoring so i don't think our friend i think was from texas uh yes yeah i don't hear rogan yes yes i don't think he got it right that we do those type of things we don't oh in terms of manipu like having a negative effect on not even having aggressive sponsorships we have very few yeah when you clip them all together and most of the sponsorship that we have it is more on patient related organizations right rather than we are very careful not to sponsor other things that can be perceived not even influenced but perceived that we may influence so we are very very careful on that this is not the case with us so with the incredibly fast development of the vaccine could you tell me the story from the engineering to the science to the human story of how you could do it so fast by november you even had the ambition to do it by october it was in the initial days how do you eight days later in that time how do you show that the vaccine is safe and effective uh given that i think previous vaccines have taken years to do that yeah the vaccines take years to do that and the the time that it takes it is basically the vast majority the time to conduct the final phase 3 study that is the confirmatory study and you do that because the phase 3 study cost a lot of money in our case cost almost a billion so you don't want to go and risk a billion in blind data normally before you do a lot of experiments to make sure that the product that you're putting in the phase 3 is the right one we didn't have the time so we risked all the money so we went into we condensed all the time towards this phase three but the phase three study had to follow all the rules that any study follows when you do this trial could you just briefly describe the basics of what is phase one what is phase two what is phase three let's say that there are so many phases when you try first of all to find what is the right vaccine we tried from 20 different vaccines we nailed down to four and for those four we selected eventually two and then eventually one once you have those selections what is the dose you're going to use and then we tried multiple different doses to see which one we think is the best what does trying entail in those early days you go first of all with smaller doses in humans and then after you have done a lot of experiments in animals so that you can feel that it is safe enough to go to humans and then go with very low dose and then you gradually increase the dose and then you monitor those humans to make sure that there are not any let's say reactogenicity to what you are giving them at the same time you start to measure what is doing in terms of immune responses so you do that with multiple vaccines and you do that with multiple doses and you do that with multiple ages of people young people all people and eventually from the 20 vaccines to multiple doses to multiple schedules is it after three weeks the second dose or is it after four weeks or after six months all of that will inform you that i think this is the vaccine this is the dose this is the scheme that i believe will give me the best results and when you have that then you go to do what we call the phase three this is a very big study with thousands of people where you use the vaccine that you think is the right one and a placebo the placebo in the vaccine they look identical nobody knows if is injected the placebo or vaccine the physician that makes the injection the doctor doesn't know if he's injecting placebo or vaccine he knows a barcode only the computer knows in order to go into this computer there are keys and there are at least two people that needs to put their keys so that someone can see the data and there's those people they have legal obligations never to do that right so before a certain point so all of that is blinded the idea is that when you go into this study you need to make sure that you are going with the right one that's why it takes so many so much time but the study is the study you need to have a significant number of people that will give the two and then you let them live their lives and then you see how many of them will get the disease and then you see if there are differences in percentage of infections for the vaccinated compared to the non-vaccinate at the same time you're monitoring all of them to see if there are differences in the safety profile if those that go to placebo have the same let's say heart attacks with those that they didn't they got the vaccine because heart attacks will happen if you have 50 000 people that because it's part of life these are the all these processes are very very very well established and since years what we did the last one was exactly the same as we did always we just didn't lose time we didn't we were not careful with money instead of recruiting 50 000 people over a year because we had let's say 30 hospitals doing the recruitment we went with 150 hospitals doing the recruitment that cost a lot of money but instead of recruiting them in a year we recruited them in three four months so i did this type of things by taking return on investment taking cost out of the equation and we were able to achieve this result but it's not the process believe me it is the heart of the people people don't know what they can and what they cannot do and if anything they have a serious tendency to underestimate what they can do and always when you ask them something that is seemingly impossible they will think out of the box to be able to deliver we discussed about the timing instead of eight years we then asked them to do it in six we asked them to do it in eight months our normal manufacturing yearly production files was 200 million doses of vaccines every year that was we are doing in the last 10 years we didn't ask them to make 300 million dollars for a new vaccine we asked him to make three billion doses for a new vaccine the discovery phase of a new molecule like the treatment that we have now the pill against coffee takes four years we then ask them to do it in three we ask them to do it in four months which is what they did when you are setting this type of goals they know immediately they cannot just think within the box and immediately this is where the human ingenuity and the heart comes and this is how they surprised all of us so there's incredible science and engineering going on here this time absolutely this is what's bothering me that the conversation in the in public is often not about that you know it's about politics unfortunately politics so i spent the day with elon musk yesterday he works with rockets uh similar situation as with pfizer in the sense that there's nasa and then there's this private company and that's a source of incredible inspiration to people no politics very little politics um so this is part of the thing i'm trying to i'm hoping to do our little part in this conversation to help untangle a little bit just reveal the beauty and the power of the thing that was done here especially with vaccine but other things that are being done with the with the antiviral drug let me just kind of linger on the safety what can you say there's a lot of people that are concerned that the fisa vaccine by the way of which i took two shots no booster yet is unsafe what do you say to people that say that no they should not fear something like that it's completely wrong there is no medical product in the history of humanity that have been tested as much as this vaccine has been administered to hundreds of millions of people and because of the importance of covid they have been scrutinized those people constantly right now healthcare authorities are looking for every single signal around the world of people that they got the vaccine and try to see if it is vaccine related or not there are electronic medical records that will tell us when and what happened to a person when he did got the vaccine and we know now more we have so high certainty that it is so safe exactly as the datasheet says about this vaccine more than any other product they should not be afraid of something like that and they should not listen to information but it is misinformation but it is spread on purpose well i don't like the word misinformation because you know again back to the soviet union anyone who opposes the state is spreading misinformation so you can basically call anything misinformation that's the unfortunate times we live in is you can call anyone you can basically call anybody a liar and say i'm the sole possessor of the truth and just no offense to me just because you wear a tie doesn't mean you're any more likely to be in the possession of the truth than anyone else so i wouldn't disagree with that at all i don't think that that's somebody who's not wearing it and as you can people can see that i'm not wearing a tie and you are but it's not about um being able those that they have the power to to impose on the others the stigma that you what you are saying is misinformation but there are few things that the society we have accomplished and science is one of them and data is and analytics of data is another one and to say that something which is highly scientific by people that they are not scientists i i think that it is not what you are describing what used to happen in soviet union or in any other autocratic regime in the world right now but i definitely do think that uh the scientists the public science communicators i've listened to over covet have really disappointed me because they have not spoken with empathy they haven't sufficiently in my view have put their ego aside and really listen to people yes people that don't have a phd people have not really you know maybe not even taken like a biology course in college or something like that but still they they they have children they they worry they fear they don't know who to trust they don't know if they should listen to the ceo of pfizer who might have other incentives in mind who might just care about money and nothing else and so they just use common sense and they ask questions and i think to them talking down to them as if they're not intelligent so on is something scientists have done almost like rolled their eyes and that disappoints me because i think that's kind of what's is the source of division look humility is a virtue yes and yes the fact that you are educated doesn't mean that you are having either humility or empathy or you have good human qualities this was never and will never be a metric of judging this type of virtues those that they do this they're wrong and actually they they are not doing good service to the public health because they are undermining people aren't stupid they see if you're not be respecting them and if you are not respecting their need to learn because that affects their health the health of the mother of the kids so i fully agree with you that we should be very patient to explain again and again and again what is happening and the vast majority of the people that they don't get vaccinations right now is because they're afraid it's not for any other reason it's not that they have a an agenda what i'm saying it is there is a small number of people that they have make business for them to [Music] profit from this anxiety i'll give you an example i have been arrested by fbi this is what someone wrote i i read it i laughed i mean okay this is where they take it there was a reason why they wrote that the files you always are fbi because they want to create doubts in the minds of the people that they're afraid and say look if fdi arrested him likely i will not do the vaccine but i laughed a week later the wife of the physical ceo died there is a picture in this website of my wife someone sends to me now i'm pissed i'm not laughing i try to find my kids to tell them if you read something mom is fine don't worry then i remember that she has very old parents back in greece we start calling them to making sure because we know that that will be picked up by greek newspapers and they will publish it okay they are those people that wrote these things they know very well that my wife didn't die and died because she was vaccinated right so this is the narratives that they are on purpose forming to profit from the stress and the anxiety of good people and that's something i have to kind of people that listen to this that kind of dialed institutions i do also want to say that there's quite a few folks who realize they can make money from [Music] saying the man is lying to you the government is lying to you it's all corrupt it's all a scam big farmer is lying to you they're manipulating you i'm surprised that how much money can be made with that and it's sad so you have to just as people use their common sense to uh be skeptical when listening to politicians and powerful figures they should be skeptical to also when listening to sort of the the conspiracy theorists or not even the conspiracy theorists but people who raise questions about institutions think think on your own think critically with an open mind that everyone can be manipulating you but also everybody has the capacity to do good and i think uh science in its pure form not when entangled institutions is a beautiful thing and in the hands of many companies it is a beautiful thing at scale still you have a lot of incentive as having created the vaccine advisor this incredible technology to uh sing it praises so that there's a kind of you know people are skeptical like how much do we trust how excited uh albert is about this vaccine so for example i mean not to do a shakespearean analysis of your twitter but i think you tweeted something about a study with a 100 efficacy of the vaccine or in stopping a transmission or something like that do you regret uh sort of being uh like over representing the effectiveness of the vaccine technically saying correct things but just kind of like highlighting the super positive things that may be misinterpreted you know saying a hundred percent no i never said something hundred percent that every time i speak if a number is hundred percent i rushed to say that in biology there is nothing hundred percent because always there will be when you go to the millions okay they were in the study things that were 100 for example deaths or in south africa yeah when we tried it there was a hundred percent efficacy clearly in small numbers when the numbers will become much bigger the 100 will not hold but will be 95 96 so still the direction of this is the point so i'm very very careful how i what i treat and in addition to how careful i am i have people that they are looking at and they are having second or third opinions to make sure that we don't put why because i know that people are listening to me right now everything i say and i want to make sure that they continue not only not only being clear as to what i want to say so there are no misunderstandings but also i maintain the trust of the people i don't think that someone who only there picks information and only emphasizes positive things it's someone that it is the one to be trusted and i want me and pfizer to be trusted so many felt the vaccine was presented as a cure that wouldn't require regular booster shots was that something you believed early on did you always believe that many regular shots would be required it may be in a bigger picture how many do you think this will for the fisa vaccine is it something you see that's taking uh a booster shot regularly like annually yes in the beginning when we had the first months of the vaccine people would ask me do we need another one and i said we don't know i was very clear about it then around april may i started seeing the first data and i made statements that i think we will need a booster around 8 to 12 months after the second dose and then after that annual revaccinations this is what i said believe is the one of the most likely scenarios and it was based on the data that i had but then delta came and because i always making the the caveat that with absent and uvaria with everything we know with delta it was proven that we need the booster to move to the three to the six months and this is what happened and uh i still said i think the booster is six months and then i think it will be an annual re-vaccination likely we have to monitor to see the data but this is the likely scenario now we have omega and omegran says that the two doses might be challenging we don't know exactly yet but three doses work so clearly a lot of countries already started moving now the third dose not in six from six months to three so that they will reduce the period that people will not be protected with uh with the third dose i don't know with omikron if how long this will last and frankly i don't know if we will need a new vaccine taylormade to omicron based on everything we know so far we are monitoring and to know way more in the weeks to come if there is a need for a new vaccine we will have it and if there is a need for mass production of this new vaccine i can also feel very comfortable that we will not lose any of our capacity that we have developed right now we are running at one billion almost approximately doses per quarter four per year and if we have to switch and have half of that in the new half of that in the old we will do still four billion dollars so i think the world should feel very very comfortable but if there is a need we will be ahead of the virus yeah he did uh he delivered or produced three billion this year vaccines and you're on track to do four billion next year yeah i mean if we had uh uh a lot more time we would talk about how the heck you achieved that kind of scale it's truly incredible let me ask the policy question what are your feelings about vaccine mandates in terms of do you think the most effective way to vaccinate the population is to acquire it or do you go with the american way and give people the freedom to choose i think it is a very difficult topic in a very difficult decision who whoever needs to make it and clearly it's not me it is the public health officials of every country that they have to make this decision i have to make the decision for files employees and i had to to balance the fear of those that they work that they want to feel that the others are vaccinated and the fear of those that they don't want to get the vaccine and eventually i came to the decision that we will mandate advice we are flexible we are giving exceptions of course for health maybe some religions but we decided to to mandate it now at pfizer we when we did this decision we were at 90 vaccination rates when we said we are going to mandate it and that took it up to 96. it works right this 10 percent was never going to move i felt because no matter what you have a small number of people that really are scared and they don't feel comfortable to do it okay it worked in our case we took it to 96 i'm happy for those people a lot we're not disease and some will not die of of the of those people but it's not to me to say because the debate uh it's serious debate and there are a lot of pros and cons if you need to push people if you need to give them the freedom uh and uh it's comes with a territory if you are elected to run a country you should be ready to make difficult decisions and no matter what decision you make there will be fake stories written about you as we talked about arrows you will not be able to please everyone yes uh well let me just say that i think again coming from the soviet union i think at the public level at the federal level mandates is um it's a really bad idea even even if it's good for the health of the populace um there's something about preserving the freedom is really powerful about this country in like doing the hard work of convincing people to get vaccinated to choose to get vaccinated if they want but still have the freedom not to that's a really powerful freedom to me it's super lazy to mandate people should understand the science and want to get vaccinated do you think children need to get vaccinated i do i do think that they need to get vaccinated so age ranges 5 to 16 there's a lot of parents that um [Music] that fear for the well-being of their children can you empathize with those parents can you steal man their arguments against the vaccine for their children you know because people know who i am i had the opportunity to to interact with parents before that was let's say approved and there were so many way more that i had a lot of empathy because they were afraid for their kids because they didn't have a vaccine and they were the ones that were speaking at that time bring me vaccine when are you going to bring me vaccine i really fear i feel that this is unfair but i'm protected my husband is protected my old son is protected and my little sweetheart because he's below the age is not protected now that we have the vaccines i'm sure that those that they are afraid of the vaccine not of the disease which are smaller number admittedly also they will have if they are afraid of them i'm sure they were afraid even more about their kids because they love i would say more than they love themselves so it's going to be this situation and again the same how can we do to demonstrate to convince people to win the minds and the hearts of the people that this is the right thing to do what do you think about that calculation because the risk for kids is very low kids do die kids do go to the hospital from covid yes but the rate is very low the rate is lower but kids they do die and how can you say that i'm not going to i'm not going to protect a kid for something that it is likely to happen and it is not only that what happens in the school when they stop the education process because a kid got the disease and they don't have vaccines so that they can control it is such a big disruption and such a big risk for for the health of of the of the kids that it shouldn't be a debate look how many kids are having polio right now well fewer number than those that they're having covered in in the hospital but everybody's getting the vaccine it's um well polio was deadlier for kids but it's not now so why some a kid to do it now because needs to be protected well the unique thing about the covet vaccine is a new type of technology too so there's an extra concern [Music] choosing to vaccinate a child you're making a choice that can potentially hurt them that's the way parents that are hesitant about the vaccine think i think choosing to vaccinate children makes a choice so that something could not potentially hurt them which is the disease that's why we are doing vaccinations since ever i know that there are people that they are concerned for themselves and for their kids what i know it is that i'm a scientist and i'm a parent and i am telling you that vaccines is a very good thing for kids and thank god we were able to develop so we've talked quite a bit about the vaccine but there's an incredible new technology that pfizer is developing with the paxlovid the antiviral for covid where does that stand how does that work um and how are you able to develop in four months like you said and all of that in just a few minutes first of all what this is about this is a real game changer this is a course of treatment that you get only if you get the disease you get covered then what happens is that you will take for five days pills day and night and twice a day for five days and instead of ten people from those that dies is to go to hospital only one will go this is an end with all the caveats that the numbers are small no one died it was a hundred percent efficacy on deaths of course i'm sure that in real world when the numbers are getting very high we may have 99 instead of 100 but these are spectacular results for something that you can take home and stay home the biggest problem right now in europe in the u.s when we have surges every time that we have a search of of covet it is that the icus are full the hospitals are paralyzed they have to postpone electric surgeries they have to postpone other operations because they don't have the capacity because of that keeping people out of the hospitals home keeping people [Music] without dying it is something i didn't have before and this is a significant significant game changer i have to ask a controversial difficult question what are your thoughts about ivermectin has it sufficiently been studied has faisal considered it in its like i said incredible development of the antiviral um as like as a comparator that kind of thing just investigated in general the reason i bring it up because i've read quite a few criticisms of people there's been some comparisons of pax love with ivermectin and i think people should look up there is dr john campbell that describes that comparison and makes that claim and there's quite a lot of people that debunk or argue against that you can do your own research but there's a lot of people that kind of see this free drug without patents on it and say this could be the savior so can you just speak to that comparison and it's not the first time if you remember there were other compounds that were claimed that they are the the solution and to cover it and uh clearly they were proven that they are not there are compounds that there are solutions and composites that they're not i as a scientist and i discuss with our scientists they don't see any reason why a medicine like ever marketing which is a parasitic site to be able to act on covet and so they don't think that there's any connection and they haven't seen any paper that describes someone that used it that had any results i'm sure that there will be some people that will claim because people are claiming anything but i don't think that there was any paper in any peer review magazine and a reliable scientific magazine to to support this claim so we are focusing on saving people's lives we are not focusing on on craziness well the to push back there is quite a lot of papers but the studies are small so that so there's no conclusive evidence in this i haven't seen any that it is reliable right i don't know where are these small or big reliable i haven't seen any right well some of the big ones have been retracted which means they weren't legitimate yes yeah so uh you know so this is definitely something that people need to look and the people that kind of question all the effectiveness i've ever met and definitely um something to think about and i think it's the reason that pakistan was chloroquinol before yes for god's sake that's why how many people died because of that yeah this is the the this is this is the dangerous thing this is the sad thing yeah slovak has been studying thousands of people and will be under the scrutiny not only of uh regulators but as we will go into the implementation as it happened in many countries they will monitor to see what's happening with let's say that whatever with one cities out there within a few weeks they will know all hospitals if it works or not because they will see the statistics we've gone through uh one of the more difficult periods in recent human history over the past two years like as a society what gives you what gives you hope about the future for our human civilization you look into the next few years i think the human ingenuity i think although there is the world always is progressing although there are a lot of things that need to be fixed in the society of 2020. the site of 2020 is better at large than things 50 years back 100 years back in all different aspects from poverty for human rights from from science from quality of life from any aspect i am positive that humans can create and always create a better future and we'll continue doing so you have helped save the lives of millions of people help improve the quality of their lives but you yourself are just one biological organism with an expiration date do you ponder your mortality do you uh think about your death are you afraid of death that's a very interesting question i i was discussing with a lot of people that i was fearless of death i couldn't care less when i was young the first thing the first time that i started feeling that i want to be around was when i had kids and then i started feeling that oh gosh is it i hope i will be around to see their wedding i hope they will be around to see their their children so if there is something that scares me the possibility i will not be part of their lives anymore and i would not be watching i hope there is life upstairs so i will be able to watch them from there from upstairs get a nice overview let me ask the big ridiculous question and you only have two minutes or less to answer it what is the meaning of life what's the meaning of this whole thing you said ingenuity is the thing that gives you hope we seem to be all busy trying to help each other trying to build a better world why are we doing that i would repeat something that steve jobs has said death is life's biggest invention it eliminates the old and gives place to the new life is all about moving forward life is all about creating new things maybe everyone is a contributor but no one is the owner and always creating something new always adding something beautiful into the world maybe a little bit of love hopefully albert thank you so much it's a huge honor that uh you will go through some of these difficult questions with me today it and then you give your extremely valuable time for this conversation thank you so much for talking today thank you for your interest and i'm happy as i was telling you before but uh i can brag with my kids that i was in your podcast because you're their hero you made it i made it thank you thank you thanks for listening to this conversation with albert berla to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from oscar wilde the truth is rarely pure and never simple thank you for listening and hope to see you next time