A long talk with Anthony Fauci's boss about the pandemic, vaccines, and faith. jebediahreed reports
National Institutes of Health director Dr. Francis Collins. Photo: Andrew Harnik/POOL/AFP via Getty Images We’re committed to keeping our readers informed.
Well, this is an unprecedented global pandemic in the lifetime of any of us. This virus has the ability to be transmitted even from people with no symptoms, which has made it extremely difficult to manage from a public-health perspective. We have seen now more than 125,000 deaths and millions of people infected just in the United States, and we’re not done with it.
Some of that might be genetics. Some of that might be the initial exposure. Did you get a heavy dose or a light dose of the virus? But the variability is really quite striking from person to person in terms of what the consequences are. It’s all pretty hypothetical. There are a couple factors that will relate to whether immunity lasts a long time. One is whether the antibodies that somebody generates after infection are around for years afterward or whether they fade away. There hasn’t been enough time yet to be able to say that. The other is whether the virus itself changes its biology and then evades the immune response that people have had.
Those trials will have to be conducted in areas where the virus is actively spreading because that’s the only way you’re going to know whether it was protective. With four different vaccines with four different approaches, we’ve kind of hedged our bets against putting too much emphasis on one particular strategy. That’s good — because vaccines are really interesting science, but every new virus presents surprises in terms of how the vaccine turns out to work.
So that has to be planned for, even if it means throwing out the doses of the vaccines that failed. We’re prepared to do that. On top of that, the NIH works particularly well in this situation by linking up with our colleagues in the private sector, because the industry has a huge investment in this area that we want to be sure is tightly coordinated.
All of the sudden you have arguably the most famous doctor in the world, Anthony Fauci, now reporting to you. What’s the emergence of Fauci as a global celebrity been like from inside the NIH? What’s your broad assessment of the American response to this pandemic — spanning federal government, state governments, local governments, and just us as a society?
Again, I think most Americans have been appropriately sacrificial, but it’s time to renew our attention to how you need to wear a mask because you might be the person who has the virus and is spreading it around without realizing it. That mask is not for you. That’s for everybody around you. If you care about your neighbors, your family, the people that you encounter in the store — wear that mask.
On a happier note, what was it like to recently win the Templeton Prize, the prestigious annual award recognizing individuals for their efforts to bridge the gap between science and faith? That must have been a nice surprise. Those are uncomfortable questions for an atheist 23-year-old, but ultimately they became totally compelling and required some investigation and some answers. Ultimately, out of that, it came to me that it makes a lot more sense to believe in God than to deny God’s existence. A scientist isn’t supposed to make assertions that you would call universal negatives, because you can never have enough evidence to do that, and yet that’s what atheism calls you to do.
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