Dr. Eric Topol

You're providing this important directing function.

And then you get the call to be the acting director of the CDC for two months, I guess, January to March.

And that's, of course, in the middle of, what, five outbreaks?

Oh, so that takes us towards the end of March after two months as acting director of CDC.

And then you were, of course, in suspension about being made the real director.

And this was the first time in history that this required Senate confirmation.

So you are the first Senate-confirmed CDC director.

Now, this finally led to your, at the end of July, you became the CDC director.

And of course, this led to, with our background, within a week or so, maybe eight or nine days, there was a shooting at the CDC, which as far as I know, might be the first shooting in the CDC in history.

Hundreds of rounds of shots were taken.

that must've been quite a thing to work through, right?

Science claims that this happened.

I mean, it's so sick, so imaginable that the CDC that's trying to keep people alive and healthy and then they're under assault by a madman.

So this is just hard to believe that this occurred.

Now, that was on the 8th of August.

We had a call on the 19th.

It was our first time that we had a chance to talk about anything.

And it was a call that actually got me pretty excited because you transmitted your vision, even having gone through this shooting, right?

even with the challenges you were facing, that you wanted to really take the CDC to a different place.

You said you have all this experience with AI and data science, and you have this experience that everyone needs to know that it's not just CDC, it's CDCP.