Jun 9, 2026 · 1 hr 19 min · 12 segments
**Much of Seth Berkley's career has been an attempt to answer the question: How do you get vaccines to people who aren’t well-served by an inequitable global health system?** **When the COVID-19…
Seth BerkleyGuest
Michael IgoeHost
I, I, I wanna make sure that we seize the successes, um, and also talk about where we are today, uh, versus where we were in 2020 and sort of the legacy, um, of the pandemic response in that sense.
The other point I was going to make is that, you know, in addition to, to not having a sort of international playbook that all countries have signed onto, it seems like there's sort of a strange, um, uh, logic issue, or I don't know what to call it exactly.
But you've got epidemiologists saying what's in the best interest of all countries [chuckles] is to, you know, contain this outbreak in the following ways, and yet, um, countries interpreting their own-- what's in their own interests differently than that.
You know, the sort of, um, uh, seizing as many vacci-- or, or, um, [lips smack] you know, holding onto as many vaccines as they can and, and vaccinating the whole population.
That just se- the combination of those two things, the, um, lack or, or kind of weakness of a norm-setting international architecture and the just sort of misperception of what the best thing to do is at a sort of national level, seems to add up to a really complicated geopolitical problem, and I'm just curious whether you see any way around that if and when this happens again.
Well, well, the first thing to say is, you know, you gotta, you gotta stick with the science.
If, if you're just gonna make stuff up, you know, um, and you know, then you have a real problem and, and because, you know, then you're not dealing with truth.
But you know, first of all, when you start a pandemic, you know, you know zero and, and therefore, one of the reasons you wanna go to an expert is you wanna talk to the person who has worked with coronaviruses.
You know, what do we know from other coronaviruses? How can that help us? In the time when we don't know about the particular virus we're talking about, it can give you some lessons.
You wanna make sure that you understand what's happened with other hantaviruses.
What do we know about it? It's never gonna be perfect, and you have to have some humility, because you might say, "Look, this is what I think," and then you might have to go back and say, "Well, actually, you know, the, the science we're doing, the observations we're doing, the studies in animals we're doing show us that this is different, and here's what we're learning." So you gotta give your...
People say, "Oh my God, what do we wanna do?" You can't just say, "Well, you're on your own." You have to give people the best advice from the best information from the people that are most knowledgeable, but then you have to be able to adapt and adjust.
So during COVID, we had, once we had some of that science, you know, worked out as best as we could, we had on one extreme countries saying, "Let the, let the virus rip.
Let's just let everybody get infected, you know, because that'll be the fastest way to get to herd immunity and, you know, and we won't, we won't hurt the economy," et cetera.
"We're gonna lock down whole cities if we need to, close things down and have not a single infection anywhere." Those are not, um...
Of course, turns out we didn't get herd immunity for the, you know, the science reasons we did, but and it was almost impossible as we got, uh, more transmissible strains to have a completely zero strategy and, you know, ever go back to life.
I, I, I wanna make sure that we seize the successes, um, and also talk about where we are today, uh, versus where we were in 2020 and sort of the legacy, um, of the pandemic response in that sense.
The other point I was going to make is that, you know, in addition to, to not having a sort of international playbook that all countries have signed onto, it seems like there's sort of a strange, um, uh, logic issue, or I don't know what to call it exactly.
But you've got epidemiologists saying what's in the best interest of all countries [chuckles] is to, you know, contain this outbreak in the following ways, and yet, um, countries interpreting their own-- what's in their own interests differently than that.
You know, the sort of, um, uh, seizing as many vacci-- or, or, um, [lips smack] you know, holding onto as many vaccines as they can and, and vaccinating the whole population.
That just se- the combination of those two things, the, um, lack or, or kind of weakness of a norm-setting international architecture and the just sort of misperception of what the best thing to do is at a sort of national level, seems to add up to a really complicated geopolitical problem, and I'm just curious whether you see any way around that if and when this happens again.
Well, well, the first thing to say is, you know, you gotta, you gotta stick with the science.
If, if you're just gonna make stuff up, you know, um, and you know, then you have a real problem and, and because, you know, then you're not dealing with truth.
But you know, first of all, when you start a pandemic, you know, you know zero and, and therefore, one of the reasons you wanna go to an expert is you wanna talk to the person who has worked with coronaviruses.
You know, what do we know from other coronaviruses? How can that help us? In the time when we don't know about the particular virus we're talking about, it can give you some lessons.
You wanna make sure that you understand what's happened with other hantaviruses.
What do we know about it? It's never gonna be perfect, and you have to have some humility, because you might say, "Look, this is what I think," and then you might have to go back and say, "Well, actually, you know, the, the science we're doing, the observations we're doing, the studies in animals we're doing show us that this is different, and here's what we're learning." So you gotta give your...
People say, "Oh my God, what do we wanna do?" You can't just say, "Well, you're on your own." You have to give people the best advice from the best information from the people that are most knowledgeable, but then you have to be able to adapt and adjust.
So during COVID, we had, once we had some of that science, you know, worked out as best as we could, we had on one extreme countries saying, "Let the, let the virus rip.
Let's just let everybody get infected, you know, because that'll be the fastest way to get to herd immunity and, you know, and we won't, we won't hurt the economy," et cetera.
"We're gonna lock down whole cities if we need to, close things down and have not a single infection anywhere." Those are not, um...
Of course, turns out we didn't get herd immunity for the, you know, the science reasons we did, but and it was almost impossible as we got, uh, more transmissible strains to have a completely zero strategy and, you know, ever go back to life.
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