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Welcome to the commentary magazine daily podcast today is Thursday June 3rd 2021.

I'm John Poghord. It's the editor of commentary magazine with me as always executive editor Abe Greenwald Hyab.

John.

Sid, you're right. Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine. Hi, John.

Associate editor Noah Rothman. Hi, Noah. Hi, John.

And joining us today tech commentary columnist James B. Megz who not only has a column in the June issue of commentary as he does in every issue of commentary.

And this one on what we call citizen science about which more later. But he also is the author of our cover story.

Thank God for big pharma. And as it turns out, I think we are going to be able to bring these two separate pieces into a grand alliance as we discuss the story of the week the month and potentially the year, which is the growing sense that

we too re easily and readily dismissed the possibility that that the coronavirus the COVID-19 resulted as it came about as the result of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of virology lab.

And so Jim, just to we'll get to that, but just to get to the thank God for big pharma. A piece I have been wanting to do for years and that the, and that the

creation, simultaneous multiple creations of the vaccines to ward off COVID-19 may be one of the greatest stories in the history of science.

Not only scientific discovery, but the practical application of science to to save potentially millions and millions of lives and to put a put a world economy that had gone off the rails back on the rails.

And this, this was all done in the space as you as you relay of, I don't know, eight months, yeah, ten months, right, right, extraordinary.

And one of the most extraordinary accomplishments in the history of applied science and you know, when they were starting to look into vaccines, a lot of experts thought it would take, it would take a couple of years to get a vaccine approved.

And they said that they would happily approve a vaccine that was only 50% effective because even 50% could do a lot to slow down a pandemic. And then in the end, they got vaccines that were roughly 95% effective in in about 10 months.

And it was, it was, it was an extraordinary accomplishment even beyond what the experts expected. And in my piece, what I try to explain is this didn't just happen because a lot of people, all of a sudden got together and said, let's make a vaccine because we have a global emergency.

And because all kinds of investors had poured billions and billions of dollars into this research into this mRNA technology that allows the drug makers to insert little strands of RNA, which is the kind of the instruction partner to DNA into human cells.

So, you know, that cells can respond in various ways that would allow them to develop the, or your body to develop antibodies to some, or to recognize some foreign invader like a virus.

And this technology can be used for a lot of other good things too, but they couldn't have done this from a standing start. The only reason that Moderna and, and, here in the US and BioNTech in Germany were able to do this so quickly was because of this system under which all of these venture capitalist investors had poured all this money into this research.

And many of the different treatments that Moderna had been working on over the years had not worked. In fact, if this hadn't, if the vaccine hadn't worked as a good chance, the company would have gone bankrupt after raising billions of dollars in investment over over 10 years or so.

So, what I'm trying to argue is that we need to be careful not to short circuit this system in which people invest in drug companies with the hopes of getting filthy rich. That's very offensive to some people, but that's how this research happened.

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