A Former Surgeon General on the Coronavirus Pandemic

scientific and medical authorities in particular. It also has very much to do with a deep partisanship that we're encountering in the middle of this pandemic. To discuss trust, how it can be rebuilt, and what indeed needs to be done to get an efficacious vaccine to the American public. I'm joined by doctor Vaveck Murty. Doctor Murty was the Surgeon General of the United States from twenty fourteen to twenty seventeen during Barack Obama's presidency. Is now advising Democratic

presidential candidate Joe Biden on his coronavirus response. Vic, thank you very much for joining me. I want to start with a question that you've spent a huge amount of time focused on, and that's a question of trust, public

trust in science, public trust in medicine. And what's particularly driving me to ask you this question is that as we move through phase three trials for potential vaccines with respect to COVID nineteen, there's a lot of uncertainty about how the public will react if and when there's an emergency use authorization for these vaccines, or if there's publicity around these vaccines. It seems to be politically motivated, and that, of course is a question that science. It implicates medicine,

it implicates approvals, and it implicates politics. So there's a lot to be said about this, but intervening it whatever you would like to start. So this is a timely question, and I think the issue of trust is one that has been growing frankly during this pandemic response. Let me just say a word about why this is so important. It's not just about a vaccine during pandemic responses, and I saw this when I served a surgeon general during

the Zeka outbreak and during Ebola as well. Public trust is one of the most important resources you have and you have to cultivate it at all costs. That means being honest with people even when you've done something wrong. It means being open to hard questions, even when you don't know the answers to them. It means communicating openly, transparently, and regularly with people. And in this moment, it also means allowing them to hear directly from the source of information,

which are scientists. You know, science hastic guide pandemic responses, and scientists aren't allowed to speak directly in an unfettered way with the public. It's so stubt. What's happening here with regarding a vaccine is that we have an unfortunately confluence of factors. We have Number one trust, which has been I think badly injured over the last several months. You have a political cycle which is coming to a culmination with this presidential election, and you have a pandemic

that has not gotten better. In fact, we have the most number of cases in the world. We have had nearly two hundred thousand people at this point when you and I are talking today who have died from COVID nineteen to the United States, and we do not see a sign of this ending because our response has been poor. And so all of these are coming together to make people nervous about a decision around a vaccine, and I think there's great danger to rushing a vaccine approval or

an emergency authorization in this environment. The damage is not just that people may not take the vaccine. In fact, right now from September Kaiser Family Foundation poll, we know that fifty four percent of people are saying that they would not take the vaccine if it was offered today. That's a staggering number, just given the toll that COVID has taken, how much it's turned our lives upside down, how much people so desperately want this pandemic to be over.

Yet fifty four percent of people are saying they wouldn't take a vaccine if it was approved before the election. So what does that tell us? That tells us that people are worried about the process, and they have good reason to be, because we've seen a couple of processes in the FDA which have been driven by politics, the issue of an emergency use authorization for hydroxy chloroquine being one.

The way in which the convalescent plasma emergency authorization was issued with false numbers and hype that was political and not scientific. So if the administration really wants to ensure that people have faith in an emergency authorization. Here's what they need to do. They need to, number one, make sure that they estab and communicate clearly an explicit standard for safety and efficacy that will be met before an

emergency use authorization is approved. The second thing they have to do is they have to make sure that the FDA scientists and very importantly it's external Advisory Board which is known by the some a clunky acronym VERTPAC which stands for a Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee. Both of these groups of scientists must be able allowed to communicate directly with the public and share their assessment

without a political filter. And finally, the data itself from the trial needs to be made available to the public so that the external scientific community can assess it, can come to their conclusions, and can share their opinions with

the public. Only when these are done you should have a vaccine be considered for emergency authorization, because again the consequences is not just people won't take the COVID vaccine, but if we allow hesitancy and doubt to be sown about the process itself, then people will doubt vaccines, and after COVID is over, they'll worry that politics and arts science is driving the process, and that will ultimately hurt

all of us. I have to say, when I heard those poll numbers about the number of people who wouldn't take a vaccine, at first I felt shocked, but then I realized that I myself had a conversation in fact with my own parents, who are you. My father's eighty and my mothers in her late seventies, and they had

similar skepticism. And I was actually horrified in the conversation, and I took it upon myself to try to convince them that, given their age and the bad outcomes that happen to people in that age group, if they do actually develop a case of COVID, that they were getting it rationally wrong. They ought precisely to be prepared to take a vaccine again and provided some emergency used to authorization. And I think of my parents is superrational and cautious

and sensible around medical issues. And that leads me to ask, even if the administration, the current administration, the Trump administration, did all three of the things that you just said, if they actually specify clear protocols for what counted his safety. And then they left the scientists at the FDA and on the advisory committee, the Vaccine Advisory Committee speak directly to the public, and they publicized what data existed from

Phase three trials. And let's just imagine in the scenario that sometime between now and the time of the inauguration of the next president, that all of those things pointed in the direction of an emergency use authorization. Is there any credible way that we could get a lot of the public, even under those circumstances, to trust the vaccine or is the damage that's been done already so deep that we couldn't credibly imagine that certainly in any Trump

authorized emergency use. Well, Noah, the damage that has been done is deep and it will take years to repair. Because people had a very high degree of confidence across the population in the CDC before COVID nineteen, and we've seen their credibility damaged. The FDA's credibility has taken a hit. Even people like doctor Tony Faucci, you know, who are very highly regarded by the scientific community and by the

majority of the public. You know, even doctor Faucci's credibility has taken a hit because of smear jobs and other criticism that he's received that has been politically directed, and so there's been a lot of hits to trusted sources and it will take years for that to recover. Let's just say in your scenario that there is in fact a good worthy data that tells us that vaccine candidate meets the standards for safety and efficacy, and an emergency

use authorization is issued. What would happen to happen if you wanted people to actually be open to taking that vaccine as you would need number one, members of the scientific community across the country, and not just you know, nationally known scientists, but deans of medical schools, doctors and local communities who are trusted and respected, nurses who are

known and respected. He would need them speaking out in local communities to help people recognize that people I know, people I recognize, institutions that are local to me trust is vaccine. The second thing that you would need to see is you would need to see community organizations get behind it. People would need to hear from non medical voices that they trust as well, whether that's the faith leader you know, their community, they're church leader, their synagogue leader.

They would have to hear from friends and family who are getting the vaccine. They would have to hear people are getting this and they're not having significant side effects. All of this mobilization, if you will, all of this messaging will take time, and it will take regardless of who wins the presidency. One of the most complicated and challenging vaccine rollout efforts that this country has ever seen.

So that is why I often say that while developing a vaccine for COVID nineteen is extremely challenging, actually rolling it out and administering it to people, getting that shot in the arm of a sufficient number of people that we can achieve herd immunity, that will be just as

if not more challenging. You've been advising Joe Biden on COVID related issues, and that means that if Joe Biden would be elected president and to take office in January, you're one of the very small number of people who will be in line for the single hardest, most thankless job imaginable in the Biden administration, and that would be spearheading the actual operation of doing exactly what you're just set of, actually getting the vaccine to people So let

me start by asking you about what plans you have been developing. You and the Biden campaign have been developing for how to begin that process. Should keep be elected and should a vaccine become a safe and available Well, no, the Vice President has been really focused on developing and thinking about plans. He never takes for granted that he is going to win the election, but he wants to be prepared to act on day one if he does.

And what that has meant is not just going about the usual process that you have on transition teams, where you think about the structure of a department and you think about personnel, but it's involved thinking about some very specific areas that are going to require a whole lot more planning. So, for example, how do you actually expand testing sufficiently so that we have enough testing so that

everyone who needs a test and get one. How do we ensure that we actually have enough contact tracing capacity in our country. We don't right now, but we really need that we have any hopes of getting this under control. And of course it involves how to think about the deployment of a vaccine. So these have been the topic of countless discussions that I and others have had with Vice President Biden where he asked very specific questions. He's

thinking about very specific plans. But a key parts of these plans, certainly for the Vaccine Distribution Fund, include thinking about who the trusted partners are that we will need in communities, like for example, if you think about the partners, it's not just a medical establishment, but it's also schools and employers. We know that schools and workplaces or sites where a vaccine could be administered, and having partners in

those spheres is going to be absolutely essential. We know that local government and states are going to be extremely important partners. But here's the way I think the Vice President would approach that partnership differently. In the early part of this COVID response, what we saw is a transfer of responsibility from the federal government to the states, saying, you take care of this, and we will lead behind

lead from a different place. We will step back. I think the Vice President realizes that you need to give states the ability to craft their own response, but you also have to lead as a federal government, and one of the places in which you have to lead is in the allocation of resources. So just think about the following question, how do you decide how much vaccine goes to Georgia or Florida, or Massachusetts or California. You can't have that driven by politics. That has to be driven

by science and by need. So which raises a second issue that he's been working on, not just partnerships, but thinking about data systems right for understanding where the need is and making sure that we can meet that need

right now. I'm worried that we don't have strong, robust data systems that are integrated in our country such that if we administered and rolled out of vaccine today, we would automatically know where it was being delivered, who was getting them, so that we could target our follow up

activities appropriately. We have to fix those data systems. So he's been thinking about a number of areas like this and bringing experts together, well beyond myself, you know, experts from really around the country who have done this before. He wants to assemble the best team possible because he knows this is going to be a once in a

generation challenge. Let me press you on this. I think you're right from what I know that the data systems that we presently have aren't sufficiently robust to even have a clear sense of what prevalence looks like. And that's before you get to the substantive question, which is, if you're new prevalence, where should you focus resources. Because it's not immediately obvious that you want to focus a vaccine

immediately on the heartest areas. There are actually arguments for beginning in more moderately hit areas, and so forth and so on. So, I mean, this is a complex topic in its own right, But given that the data systems almost certainly are not in place, how is it realistic to think that a Biden administration could take the time to build up these data systems in order to then make an informed decision. I mean, if you are doing this, you and a team and people are doing this, you

are going to be doing it in media's race. You are going to be inheriting the mess that you have inherited, and you will be under enormous pressure to act quickly. Again, assuming that there is a safe and available vaccine. So I guess I want to say that sounds nice in the abstract, like let's solve the data systems, but there's no way that there's going to be the time that it would take to do that. So how do you

make decisions under radical uncertainty without the data systems? So it's a great question, and you're right, we can't wait until the perfect systems are built. You can't wait until all the partners are assembled around the table either, because if thereccine truly is safe and effective, that means that every day you lose our lives that are potentially lost.

So what we would have to do is we'd have to do the best we can in the beginning to use the data we have and go to areas that we have great need and start to point the vaccine through existing partners. We also have, thankfully, through the National Academies of Medicine, recommendations on what the priority population should be that we should target. So we know that healthcare workers and other workers in the front line are critical.

We know the people at higher risk because of their age or other medical conditions they have, are at higher risk. So we can go to nursing homes, we can go to other locations where high risk populations are and preferentially vaccinate there. There is a lot of low hanging fruit, if you will, in terms of actions that can be taken in the very beginning, even while you're trying to

build up systems and build up partners. But all of this is going to be infinitely harder if people are skeptical, if they're doubtful, if they don't trust what you're doing. And that's why the other plank of this so essential that we've been talking about is the importance of communicating openly honesty about what our plans are and what progress we're making from day one. This is a kind of crisis communication that has been deployed by Republican and democratic

administrations alike in prior pandemics. It's not the purview of one party, but it hasn't been done well in this response, and that's why we have a lot of ground to make up. We'll be back in a moment. I'm deeply worried that, regardless of the outcome of the election, if a vaccine becomes available and safe under a Republican administration, a lot of Democrats won't trust it, and that if a vaccine becomes available and safe under a democratic administration,

a lot of Republicans won't trust it. In other words, my worry is that the profound political partisan differences that we have are fully bleeding into people's trust in scientific institutions and medical institutions. What's our long run societal solution to that problem. I mean, I'm not asking you to solve the problem of partisan division. Nobody can do that, and it's been with us in certain respects, although waning

and waxing throughout our history. I'm talking about the very concrete problem, much closer to your area of expertise, which is that people's trust in science and medicine is coming to be deeply inflected by their partisan views. How do we break that linkage no matter who's president. Yeah. And the reason to be concerned because we've seen that on a number of measures, whether it's people's views of the masks and whether they're appropriate or not and useful, or

people's view of other precautions related to COVID. There has been a partisan divide here. But what's interesting, as a side note, is if you look at this data on vaccines and specially the COVID nineteen vaccine. I mentioned that fifty four percent of people are saying they would not take the vaccine if it was available for election day. That actually includes forty eight percent of Democrats, but sixty

percent of Republicans. So in a very interesting way, we're finding that both Democrats and Republicans have deep worries about the vaccine. But the larger point around polarization and affecting how we take in information and what we trust is absolutely true and it will be deadly as it has been to date regards to coronavirus. I think one critical strategy, and there are many here, but the one I'll mention is that we have to go local in terms of

mobilizing information sources. Typically, people think, well, if you get somebody on a major network in terms of news, or a national radio station, that's how you get the message out. But I think increasingly in this polarized world where people are listening to their own sources, you actually have to go much more local. You have to think, how do I ensure that an individual's doctor actually knows that the

truth about this vaccine so they can recommend them. How do I ensure that other people who are trusted members of a community, like faith leaders, know the truth about this vaccine so they can advise people. Because when you have doubts about whether people are telling you to truth, all of us as human beings go to the people we know and that we have trusted for a long time, that our friends, our family, our nurses and doctors, are

faith leaders and other trusted populations like this. So I think if ultimately we want to convince people that the vaccines is safe and effective, if indeed the evidence backs that up, we've got to think about how to mobilize those voices, and I think those will end up being much much more important than getting people on cable news and on national radio. That raises the really hard question of how do you reach the local leaders that you're

talking about. We live in an era where local newspapers, which at one time would have been a standard way to reach people locally, because you can have a local newspaper article about the local physician or faith leader who says, you know, the vaccine is great, but they're in retreat, or in many parts of the country they're already gone. And one of the ways that people now increasingly communicate with their trusted sources, whether it's family or friends or

local leaders, is actually through social media. And in that environment, authority isn't quite as powerful as it once was in historical terms, and things can go the other way relatively quickly there can be a decentralized distribution of distrustful information. I agree with you that we want to get people to hear an important and true message from people who

may trust. But how do you at a national level think about reaching those people if it's not through going on CNN and MSNBC, which you do so frequently and so skillfully. Well, no, I think this is not easy work. It's a hard grind, if you will, because it requires a lot of conversations. This is I think why people have gravitated so much toward national news and national media. It has the illusion that seeming to be more efficient, right, you reach more people, Hey, why wouldn't that be better?

The problem is it comes with a heavy filter that people don't necessarily trust. And so the way that I would think about this is that we would need to reach out, for example, to local organizations that bring together faith leaders. We need to reach out to the YMCAs, to the rotary clubs. We'll need to reach out to associations of librarians. We'll need to reach out to groups where we can get in front of people, talk to them and then start engaging their local chapters. And if

that sounds like really tough, tedious, tenuous work. It is. It's not easy to do because what we're really talking about, Noah, even though we haven't used this word before, is we're talking about relationship building, right, and relationship building can take time. But I think that it doesn't mean that we'll never be able to get a vaccine out for months and months.

I think that there are enough people who believe that this is an urgent crisis and will understand the science behind it, that we will have some uptake of the vaccine. The question is how to sustain that and get to a sufficient level where we have her in immunity. There's one other point I want to raise here, though, if this is indeed about relationships, and if what we need our organizations that have a lot of relationships in the

local level. It's been particularly worrisome to me over the last many years that we've had a breakdown in those kind of community organizations over the last many decades, like in this country. You know, something that's been well documented by about Putnam, you know, I've been Harvard and by others, But this decline in participation in community organizations and affiliation with community groups leaves people with fewer sources that they actually trust that are easy to access in a crisis

like this, and I see that as deeply worrisome. It's one of the reasons why when I left my time in government, when I was thinking about what do I work on, what do I want to contribute to in the world. That's why I kept coming back to this idea of social connection as being such an important topic, because if you don't have strong connections in your life,

then you don't have people you trust. If you don't have people you trust, then you're reliant on social media, on cable news, on other sources for your information, and you don't have people to talk through doubts and worries with. And I think we are bearing the consequences of a deterioration in social connect in social organizations. But that said, we still have many organizations in our communities that we can lean on, and that's going to have to be

our priority in a new administration. Let me ask you about how deeply penetrated a vaccine would actually have to be to achieve her immunity. I mean, I realized there's not an exact number that one can define with respect to a particular pandemic, although there is some general guidance that we have from epidemiologists. And the reason I want to ask you about that is what sort of emerging in my mind as I listen to you is that a lot of us have been thinking, well, how do

we get out of this? Well, maybe the right way to get out of it is with a vaccine, But what I'm hearing from you is that actually getting a vaccine is not necessarily the way out. The way out is to have a vaccine and then have that vaccine be sufficiently trusted by a broad enough swath of population that when it is distributed and taken, it gets sufficient penetration to actually reach her immunity. And that may be a very very different thing. I'm letting that sort of

see through my thinking right now. So let's just walk through it. Start with what percentage do you think roughly we would need to reach for the vaccine to be efficacious? So, Noah,

that number depends on how effective the vaccine is. So if we had a vaccine that was one hundred percent effective, which would be exceedingly unusual, then we would have to vaccinate somewhere in their neighborhood of a seventy percent of the population, maybe a little bit less because you know, number of people have had the virus already, they may have some short term immunity, but it would have to

be around seventy percent. But if you start dropping that, if you get to a vaccine that's around fifty percent effective, which is a threshold in fact that the FDA set and it's June thirtieth guidance, then even if you vaccinated everybody in the country, you're not necessarily going to get to her immunity levels. Now, that doesn't mean that it's still not worthwhile. See, herd immunity is not a switch

that we flip on or off. There are benefits to be gained, you know, if we get halfway there, there benefits to be gained if we get three quarters of the way there. But what this means, given the fact that getting to hurt immunity levels will take time and will be difficult, is it means that many of the precautions that we're taking right now in terms of distancing and wearing masks and really upping our game in terms of personal hygiene and washing our hands, that those behavior

changes will be with us for a while. Certainly through twenty twenty one and very likely beyond that. It doesn't mean that we're going to have to stay in our homes for years and years. We will learn, as we have already in the last six months, safer ways to come together in smaller groups, you know, outside, or to even improve our current ventilation systems and other measures indoors

to make the risk of getting coronavirus lower. So we will find safer ways to re engage in our life, But our life is not going to go back to pre pandemic sort of ways until probably at least several years from now. I just want to make sure that everybody who's listening gets the full weight of what you're saying.

Even a perfectly effective vaccine, perfectly efficacious vaccine, which basically doesn't exist in the real world for almost anything that we think of being vaccinated for, would have to reach seventy percent of the population before we can say we're at her immunity and we can remove various forms of

social distancing and masks and separation. As you go down the efficacy numbers, you get greater and greater probability that a good number of people will still be getting the virus, and as you go down, you need more and more people to be vaccinated, And of course that's going to be actually inversely correlated in the real world. Right if we heard that the vaccine was one hundred percent efficacious, more people would be inclined to take it, and ironically,

what we need is the other way around. The less efficationous vaccine needs more people to take it. But if people say it's only fifty percent effective, a lot of people will mistakenly say, and therefore I shouldn't take it. I mean mistakenly in the rational sense that rationally you really should take it if it has any capacity to help you provide it that you don't think, the danger

is still great. So we could very easily get an extremely messy situation with like a ninety percent efficacious vaccine but lots of people not taking it. And then the upshot of that I'm hearing you saying is that masks are going to continue even after the vaccine is out there.

Social distancing measures, including not getting together with medium groups of people or large groups of people indoors, those restrictions are going to continue for at least twenty twenty one and maybe for several years longer, and that is, in a certain sense, a much more depressing picture than a lot of us have been imagining as progress towards the vaccine seems to be advancing. I mean, am I getting

it right? I mean, you're saying it very cautiously and very rationally, but what I'm hearing is actually a pretty striking rational conclusion that we're very, very very far from anything approaching normal life. So yes, no, I mean, you know, I try never to be alarmist about these things, because there's got to admit, there's a lot we don't know, and I'm always optimistic, hoping for major breakthroughs. But I think the realistic picture is that we are looking at

our life continuing to be changed for several years now. Now. I want to be clear by one thing, That does not mean that we're going to be in the exact state that we're in right now in a year. In fact, I think that we will be more able to get our children back to school, that we will find safer ways to do that. In fact, we know safer ways,

we're just not really implementing them right now. I do think they will see more workplaces actually up and running again, because again we will, hopefully if we have advances in testing, and if we have people more observant precautions and we get local prevalence of the virus down, we can have workplaces operating at least in a partial way or even close to normal, in ways that we haven't near these last several months. So I think we will make progress.

And even with getting together socially, I think we will find ways to get together in small groups indoors and socialize and see each other, but we'll do it in ways that are safer, just like you see some schools actually able to bring children together with masks, with distancing in indoor environments to learn. So we are an incredibly adaptable species. We've adapted a lot in the last six months.

We will adapt a lot more. But what I do think we should be realistic about is that when a vaccine arrives, it's not like tomorrow or even in a month or in six months that suddenly we'll go back to having full arenas at basketball games and having crowded concerts and having large groups get together for birthday parties and other festive occasions. That will come back eventually, but

it's going to take some time. The public pressure though the moment a vaccine is broadly available, a safe vaccine is broadly available to go back to normal at the basketball arena. It's going to be overwhelming. I mean, I wonder how any president, even a president informed by science and advised by the best advisors, we'll be able to resist the kind of pressure that's going to be associated with that. You know, I think it is going to

be increasingly difficult. But here's what I'll use this analogy. Like when you sprain your ankle, if you choose to arrest for a requisite period of time and then actually get your physical therapy, you will recover a lot faster than if you just continue to walk on it and never do any pt. If you think about our COVID response, we've been doing more the latter than the former. And

I attribute a lot of this to leadership. Like what we told people our political leadership was that we got to shut down for some period of time and then we opened up quickly, right before levels of the virus were truly low in communities, and we were reluctant to put in place mask mandates in many communities around the country. We were reluctant to push for bars and other higher risk indoor spaces to actually close down. And so what you saw was this stuttering response and a level of

infection that never truly got low. Like almost every other country, every other developed country was able to go up and come down to a low level, and now they're trying to keep that level low. We actually never got to a low level. We're still smoldering at a very very high rate of daily cases. And the thing is that public only has limited patients, and that's a risk of taking as long as we have to get it right. So the new president will have, yes a herculean task.

You know. I thought that President Obama and Vice President Biden had a massive task in front of them in two thousand and nine when they began the presidency at the time of the Great Recession. But I think the difficulty of this health, economic, and really a crisis of public confidence, I think will dwarf anything we've seen in

a few generations. I want to thank you back for joining me and I for one to hope that your participant in the process of rebuilding trust in institutions and in directing us to a rational and calm and efficacious way of addressing these problems. I appreciate those kind words. I do want to say that, as much as what we've talked about today is perhaps sobering and not know the message I think all of us would want in terms of like this thing is going to go away tomorrow,

I actually do feel optimistic overall about the future. And the reason I feel optimistic is, you know, I have been blessed in the work that I've been doing over the last six months to see the deep well of scientific and medical talent that we have in our country and frankly with collaborators around the world. So many of these extraordinary individuals are standing at the ready. They want to help, they want to do their part to address COVID nineteen, and we just need to bring them off

the sidelines. Listening to doctor Morte talk about the recreation of trust was a very sobering experience for me. As he spoke, I gradually came to see much more clearly than I had done before that just having a vaccine will not really be the end of the problems that we face. Even if a vaccine were completely efficacious, which doctor Morti emphasized is pretty unusual, we would still need to see some seventy percent of the population taking the vaccine.

That will not be a simple thing to accomplish, not merely because it's difficult to distribute a vaccine, but because some significant number of people may not trust the vaccine no matter who is president, and of course is also possible the vaccine will be substantially less efficacious than one hundred percent, perhaps as low as fifty percent, which is the threshold that the FDA has set for approving a

vaccine at all. The confluence of these factors, that is to say, our uncertainty about how effective the vaccine will be and our uncertainty about how many people will agree to take the vaccine, leads doctor Morty to conclude that we may well be in a situation where we have to continue with social distancing and masking measures for a good long time, even after the vaccine comes to be

in play. So, notwithstanding my fantasy that perhaps by the fall of twenty twenty one, things could be quote back to normal, the sense I got from talking to doctor Morty is that that is quite unlikely, and that normal, in fact is something that will be a new normal, and maybe substantially further off into twenty twenty two, or

perhaps even beyond. I wish that weren't the case, and I wish that my fantasy that we could all have a vaccine which we could all take and get everything back to normal by the fall of twenty twenty one, We're not just that a fantasy. But hey, that's why we speak to the experts on Deep Background, to make sure that the views we hold, including our fantasies, are to some important degree informed by what the experts have

to say and what they know. I promise they will continue to cover the question of vaccines and how and if and when we return to normal very very closely here on Deep Background. It remains at the absolute center of how we return our lives to some state of normalcy, even as we continue to talk about the election, the political environment, and the composition of the Supreme Court. Until the next time I speak to you, be careful, be safe, and be well. Deep Background is brought to you by

Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia Jean Kott, our engineer is Martin Gonzalez, and our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Theme music by Luis GERA special thanks to the Pushkin Brass Malcolm Clodwell, Jacob Weisberg, and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R Feldman. I also have a new book out called The Arab Winter, A Tragedy. I'd be delighted if you checked it out. I write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can

find at Bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original state of podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com slash podcasts and if you like what you heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. This is deep background