Right.

And, and I never felt poor growing up.

But my dad's "no condition is permanent" became for them a way to make new meaning of the suffering we'd experienced.

And the way they did that very practically was to double down and invest, not in the short term, which they couldn't control, but in the long term, one element of which they could control.

How educated are their kids gonna be? And so my mom demanded a lot out of me.

[laughs] As a k- she was a tutor as well, a math and science tutor, and that was her passion.

And I'm so grateful for it, because, uh, she invested in my education, my sister's education, and, and, uh, that's what ultimately allowed me to become a physician, go back to the country that I'd fled and serve, teach at Harvard Medical School, and eventually, I think, you know, serve the country that had given my family a second chance in, in the White House during the pandemic.

[laughs]

[laughs] Yeah

... [laughs] you know, on it.

And it was a void.

And so, uh, risk would be, "Hey, we're gonna get on that ship and charter that sea that no o- and get to that land no one's been to." Risk would be, "Hey, there's a storm.

There's clouds coming.

Our ship may sink, or we may go, uh, go through, you know, a very difficult journey." It's high or low.

There's a high chance of it or low chance.

Hmm

... switch idea.

Yes.

Yes.

It's either the risk is on or off, and actually it's a dial more than anything, first of all.

It's way more fluid because a-as we found out in the case of mpox, the LGBTQ plus community, specifically gay and bisexual men who have sex with men, the disease was clustered in that community.

About 90, if I remember correctly, 97% or so of the cases were there.

They, again, were not limited to that community, but the transmission dynamics were such that they were spreading more in that community.

And so maybe as you walk us through a few of the moves, tell us, tell us how you used or, or the overall team used that history, that infrastructure, that sort of learned, that learned system and made, made use of that in, in, in big and small moves.

I think before we even get into the responses and how dangerous this is, if we could take a step back here, what exactly is, if this is a case of pneumonic plague, what is that? How possibly could this worker could have contracted that, and how dangerous is this all?

The things that would keep me up at night in the Situation Room at the White House would be not the clear emergencies, but the ones that had ambiguous signal.

And so when that happened, and I write about this in, in my new book, Safer, uh, we would actually articulate three very simple questions.

Uh, so let's walk through them here.

Number one, how fast is this threat moving? There's been one death.

There's been nearly two hundred contacts being observed for about a week, and there's thankfully, at least as far as we know, no secondary cases, meaning those contacts, no one's fallen sick as far as we know.

The second question we ask is, whom is it most likely to harm? Now, r- right now, it would be the clinicians who cared for that initial patient who died and the colleagues who worked with her at the lab.

So you tell us.

I think before we even get into the responses and how dangerous this is, if we could take a step back here, what exactly is, if this is a case of pneumonic plague, what is that? How possibly could this worker could have contracted that, and how dangerous is this all?

The things that would keep me up at night in the Situation Room at the White House would be not the clear emergencies, but the ones that had ambiguous signal.

And so when that happened, and I write about this in, in my new book, Safer, uh, we would actually articulate three very simple questions.

Uh, so let's walk through them here.

Number one, how fast is this threat moving? There's been one death.

There's been nearly 200 contacts being observed for about a week, and there's thankfully, at least as far as we know, no secondary cases, meaning those contacts, no one's fallen sick as far as we know.

The second question we ask is whom is it most likely to harm? Now, r- right now, it would be the clinicians who cared for that initial patient who died and the colleagues who worked with her at the lab.

So you tell us.