THE HASTE WAS THE KNOWN RISK: 2/8 A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of the Life-or-Death Race for a COVID-19 Vaccine, by Gregory Zuckerman Kindle Edition
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 6 October 2024
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Shot-Save-World-Life-Death/dp/059342039X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Few were ready when a mysterious respiratory illness emerged in Wuhan, China in January 2020. Politicians, government officials, business leaders, and public-health professionals were unprepared for the most devastating pandemic in a century. Many of the world’s biggest drug and vaccine makers were slow to react or couldn’t muster an effective response.
It was up to a small group of unlikely and untested scientists and executives to save civilization. A French businessman dismissed by many as a fabulist. A Turkish immigrant with little virus experience. A quirky Midwesterner obsessed with insect cells. A Boston scientist employing questionable techniques. A British scientist despised by his peers. Far from the limelight, each had spent years developing innovative vaccine approaches. Their work was met with skepticism and scorn. By 2020, these individuals had little proof of progress. Yet they and their colleagues wanted to be the ones to stop the virus holding the world hostage. They scrambled to turn their life’s work into life-saving vaccines in a matter of months, each gunning to make the big breakthrough—and to beat each other for the glory that a vaccine guaranteed.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a new book, a shot to save the world. |
| 0:05.0 | I'm John Bachelor with Gregory Zuckerman. |
| 0:09.0 | His new book is A Shot to Save the World, |
| 0:11.0 | the Inside Story of The Life or death race for COVID-19 vaccine. |
| 0:17.1 | All these men and women who are alerted in January of 2020, where do they come from? |
| 0:21.8 | We go first to Moderna, which is itself a combination of pursuits, |
| 0:26.4 | anxieties, pride, accident. We take Moderna and we come down to one man, Stefan Bancel, who's born in Marseille. |
| 0:36.0 | Gregory, this is an outsized personality. |
| 0:39.0 | He's not a scientist. |
| 0:41.0 | How is it that Bancel comes to run the company called Moderna? What is his life's ambition? What is his style? |
| 0:49.0 | So John, the reason I began writing this book is I became so fascinated by this guy, |
| 0:54.4 | Ben Sell and his firm, and how unlikely it was that Moderna should be the one |
| 0:59.6 | to step up and save millions of lives. So Stefan Ben Sal, as you say, |
| 1:04.7 | is not a scientist, he's an engineer, |
| 1:06.7 | Harvard MBA, he starts, he becomes the CEO |
| 1:10.0 | of the startup called Moderna, |
| 1:11.8 | and they're dedicated, they're focused on developing |
| 1:14.4 | messenger RNA this molecule using it to develop either drugs or vaccines or both and |
| 1:19.9 | for years they struggle and for years Stephen Bancel is hard on his employees. |
| 1:25.8 | He pushes them, he drives them to the point where people literally are collapsing. |
| 1:32.0 | I write about it in the book, the parking lot in the office at home hitting their heads being rushed to emergency rooms are trying to keep up with the guy and they're having difficulties. He fires people he's hard on people. He's not very especially complimentary. He fires people, he's hard on people, he's not very, especially |
| 1:44.0 | complimentary. He's got ups and downs. He becomes very emotional. So he's |
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