Thoughts on Lex Fridman's Interview with Pfizer CEO | Hacker News Reader

Thoughts on Lex Fridman's Interview with Pfizer CEO

mleverything.substack.com

23 pointsbko18 comments

>"Imagine you went to a seafood restaurant and asked about their food safety, and the owner told you they follow all applicable food safety rules. Yes, I’m sure they do, but I would hope the owner puts thoughts into his process to ensure safety beyond the reach of regulators. That should be the starting point, yes, but to not even consider your company’s role in the process is surprising."

Not really sure I see the problem here. Of course they have internal mechanisms to make sure that things work as intended but if you already don't believe them what's the point of using that as an argument?

I think it's a straight forward answer to say you comply with regulators in a highly regulated industry. If a restaurant tells me they follow standards I'm good, at least in a country with reasonable ones.

The entire article is basically a hatchet job because a pharma CEO gave bland answers to questions, including complaining about the fact that he didn't have a take on the social impact of pharma advertising. Of course he doesn't, he's a pharma CEO, if you want that fixed elect people who will get it done, I think the CEO was just mostly honest in the sense that his answers are obviously biased so he wasn't going to give one on a question were you wouldn't believe it anyway.

He didn't say anything meaningful. He showed no humility or thoughtfulness in the policies of his company. The fact is his company is helping shape the policy of nation-states across the world. And it's obvious from his responses he has no interest besides checking the boxes the regulators give him and turning a profit within the bounds of the law. He doesn't even take the threat of corruption seriously or undue influence seriously.

> if you want that fixed elect people who will get it done

Unless his company donates to politicians that oppose any kind of regulations that could hurt their business. But don't worry, their super PAC ads are heavily regulated and will state the party paying for it ;-)

There is a symbiotic relationship between large corporations and their regulators that should be examined. And it's especially pervasive when it comes to public health.

I didn't expect him to do an interview, and I would have been fine if he didn't but please don't piss on me and tell me it's raining.

> the fact that he didn't have a take on the social impact of pharma advertising. Of course he doesn't, he's a pharma CEO

"Of course he doesn't" or "Of course he can't say it outloud?"

CEOs are generally not going to take on any risk to the company -- especially one that exists in a highly regulated segment of the market -- for the purpose of an interesting interview. I would be surprised if the author genuinely expected to get an honest answer from the Pfizer CEO about whether the FDA is doing a good job.

I watched the whole thing. It was just irrelevant and boring. And did not read the much of the OPs article. Either.

How about the known fact that Covid variants live in nasal cavities for 3 days and then slowly move to lungs on the 10th day and cause problems?

I have been practicing only Povidone (aka Betadine) - flushing for two years and I feel just fine: https://twitter.com/P_McCulloughMD/status/147511291206694912...

WDYM by "practicing only"? Are you unvaccinated (not trying to witch hunt, asking to contextualize) and have you had consistent large social gatherings (reasonably high chance of exposure)? I'm vaccinated but always down to try easy additional protection

Well. I have been practicing nasal flushing for 50 years. I was hanging around Hippie communities in Gothenburg and they used Hindu "Naso" bottles. It seemed sensible practice at that time.

I have had Common Cold only once ever since. This was because I wanted to read one Knut Hamsun's book and it was not available on Pirate Bay. I did not realize I was quite receptive to a virus on a book.

I also invented the use of some kind of anti-viral agent all on my own. I read about amoebas entering the brain in India, so I started to use a drop of household bleach. But I later resorted to to Betadine-Povidone because you cannot have all sorts of stuff in your backpack.

This seems kind of like taking antibiotics to help with stomach bugs. I wonder how the nasal microbiome [1] is affected by this and whether chronic prophylactic treatment would be more harmful than helpful on a large scale. Early on there were papers [2] suggesting oral and nasal rinsing to reduce COVID prior to vaccine availability.

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7074508/

[2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7436790/

I have been using nasal flush "as needed", not all the time. Which means that everytime there is slightest irritation in nasal cavities, I start flushing. So no common cold for 50 years.

But in this Covid-era I have been flushing everytime I been exposed to humans in tight spaces. Luckily I have in my neighborhood very unpopular and expensive food market with no other customers.

You invented huffing bleach?

Never heard. Googling "Huffing Bleach". And indeed it really seems to be a thing.

Anyways in Finnish Army Guerrilla Book you need only one drop of bleach for every 250 ml, and 24 hrs, to make it totally safe for any kind of use.

The linked tweet isn’t about preventing contracting the virus.

Since so much of this post examined spoken words, it was dismaying to see such a jumble of miss-transcription. You are left to guess at what was really asked and answered.

I could see using a voice-to-text tool as a starting point, but if you are going to go through the trouble of writing and posting this, would it be too hard to review it while listening to the podcast so you get the transcription correct?

I tried to link to the youtube timestamps for most quotes. You can also see the full aws transcribed transcript here [0]

[0] https://gist.github.com/breeko/384174b3d6e628ec77c52498a9d92...

Is it an artifact of the transcriptions that Pfizer is replaced with "fighter?" It is really distracting.

Yes! I used aws transcribe and didn't scrub that. I just fixed it on substack.

You can see the whole transcript w/ all the AWS transcription errors here [0]

[0] https://gist.github.com/breeko/384174b3d6e628ec77c52498a9d92...

Thanks!

  00:37:27: Lex Fridman Well I don't like the word misinformation because you know again back to the soviet union, anyone who opposes the state is spreading misinformation. So you can basically call anything misinformation. That's the unfortunate times we live in is you can call anyone, you can basically call anybody a liar and say I'm the user sole possessor of the truth. And just no offense to me. Just because you wear a tie, it doesn't mean you're any more likely to be in the possession of the truth and anyone else. So
  00:38:03: Albert Bourla I wouldn't disagree with that at all. I don't think that somebody who's not wearing a tie. And as you can people can see that I'm not wearing a tie and you are but it's not about uh huh being able though that they have the power two to impose on the others the stigma that you what you're saying is missing formation. But there are few things that the society we have accomplished and science is one of them. And data Is an analytics of data is another one. And to say that something which is highly scientific by people that they are not scientists. I think that it is not what you're describing, what used to happen in the soviet union or in any other autocratic regime in the world right now.

from: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/breeko/384174b3d6e628ec77...

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