Bob Bordone

It might be fun if one of us tries to be a person who hasn't read the book, and the other person maybe tries to actually model the skills.

What do you think about that?

Sure, that's fine.

Well, first of all, it sounds like you're stunned and surprised by this.

Am I right about that?

Yeah, so you're pretty angry about it.

And I'm curious if I can ask you, you know, you said that...

the disease is kind of still going on.

And of course, COVID still exists.

I am curious from your perspective, what do you think the benefits of spending lots and lots of money on the diseases at this point, since it's not at that level where it's killing a lot of people?

And what are the impacts?

I mean, clearly there's impacts of the pandemic broadly in our society, but what are the kinds of health impacts from your perspective that research would be helpful to from a medical perspective?

And how would you think about balancing whatever impact COVID has from all of the other funding choices

that need to be made given a shrinking research pool for funds?

Yeah, no, it's helpful to hear that.

And if we had more time, I'd ask you some more questions.

I mean, one thing that as I think about this is, given just the number of priorities out there, I worry that because COVID was in the press so much and is so politicized, that we overweight the importance of money in that direction.

And...

I would say that there's probably other things if we have a fixed set of money that kills a lot more people and has a lot more health impact.

And so I'd rather see the funds get placed there than just satisfy some kind of highly salient political issue.