The Covid Conqueror: Nobel Prize Winner Dr. Drew Weissman on God, Israel & Anti-Vaxxer Antisemitism

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[Music] do you think it's possible for a scientist to believe in God what people don't realize is that he makes his money suing drug companies for madeup vaccine reactions have you ever felt that like exclusion they'll say that Jewish vaccine that's going to hurt a lot of people in March of 2020 the world was struck with a devastating and deadly pandemic covid-19 Corona virus The Rona Coco roro took 7 million lives and brought all others to a standstill less than a year and a half later the first vaccines were introduced allowing life to return to normal and today what was once a dangerous killer is now more like a common cold and amazingly we have my guest today to thank a couple times on this show we've talked about how Jews have won 22% of all Nobel prizes despite being only about2 % of the world's population today I am thrilled to welcome one of those 22% to the show he's a globally renowned clinician and researcher a family man and works at Penn Medicine where I was once brought in an ambulance my first week of freshman year after blacking out at the entrance to the quad during new student orientation please welcome Dr Drew Weissman Dr Weissman thank you so much for being with me today I really appreciate it oh of course a little over a year ago you won the Nobel Prize what was the moment like when you found out you'd won the Nobel how did that go down it was actually a bit funny I got a a a text from Katie at 400 a.m.

eastern time Katie's your partner yeah Katie Caro who who I won it with and it said we won and she said you should be getting a call soon and I didn't get a call so I I spoke with her a few minutes later and she said they called her they told her that we had won and they asked if they if she had a better phone number for me because they had tried to call me and couldn't reach me and the first thing I thought of is well this is some you know Annie vaxer playing a joke on us and thank you for giving them my phone number right we waited till 5:30 I got a call we still didn't fully believe it until 6 when we saw the video of the the Nobel presentation and then we believed it what's the process like like do you know you're in the running or it comes out of the blue or how does that work we knew we were in the running because you know the the covid vaccine was such a big thing otherwise it really comes out of the blue other Nobel laurates will put your name in and say we think think you should get it and we'll tell you about it uh but it's you know you really there is no you know this is the list they're going to choose from when you told your parents about you winning obviously that that video went viral how meaningful was that to you to be able to share this news with your folks to me that was probably the most important thing all morning the funny part is they left out one sentence from that phone pH call my daughter had been married in August before the announcement and my parents came down and we all went to the wedding and my daughter was with us when I called my parents so I I when I got my mom on the phone I said you Rachel's here we have something to tell you right she screamed Rachel's pregnant and ra Rachel of course turned red and and head but luckily they cut that out that's hilarious I mean that's that is you know where the Grandma's head would be at and makes sense who had the best reaction to the news probably my younger daughter we called my older daughter who hopped on a train from DC and had it up my younger daughter lives in Philadelphia we we called her she didn't answer we kept calling her she didn't answer we called her boyfriend we called her friends we finally got a hold of her and she said what the hell do you want we we told her she said fine I'll see you later and hung up come on yeah so she she had been out partying late the night before and I guess wasn't in the mood to be woken up I mean there's certain things you get woken up for one would think yeah I also read that your wife Mary Ellen won't let you keep the award in the house is that true we've gotten a lot of awards and none of them are in the house where are they now they're at my work in in my office we're moving to a new house in this summer and she agreed to let me put the Nobel Prize out mazeltov that's a good one yeah how if at all has your your life changed since winning I mean you said you know generally your day-to-day is obviously the same but like has it opened new doors or people buying you drinks at the bar is is there any discernable difference I think the big thing is that I can now do things that I couldn't do as well you know in in addition to basic science research which is my full-time job I've also spent my career working on Equity working on getting drugs vaccines technology to Regions that don't have access so if you look at the covid vaccines it took over a year for the RNA vaccines to make it into subsaharan Africa Asia Latin America so that's a year after the rest of the world had been vaccinated three times already to me that's always been a big problem you also moving on from the Nobel won the Harvey prize from the Israel Institute of Technology also known as the techon what did that award mean to you so that that was fantastic because it it brought me back to Israel but it it it was a great recognition from Israel that was one of the earliest uh countries to take up the vaccine right they were the first country to identify the bad status of covid in pregnant women and started vaccinating pregnant women very early so that they were leaders in a lot of the vaccine uptake and vaccine studying when you received the word you went it was June of last year 2024 what was it like being in Israel at that time given what has been going on there nerve-wracking both Katie Caro and I were invited and Katie ended up not going because she was nervous about the situation you know the techon is in hia which is towards the north yeah which at that time there was a lot of bombing from Hezbollah in the north so people were nervous about that sure we we talked to a lot of friends that live there and we felt very safe most importantly I I made the commitment to go and I was n going to go back on that so you know there could have been fighting in the streets and I probably still would have gone what was the the temperature like there I mean what what was the vibe of of the people you were interacting with while you were in the country that region the the Hyer region the all of the faiths get along incredibly well the the Jews the Muslims the Christians uh all of the different faiths really work together play together uh live together very well there really wasn't the you know the the blatant in your face you're a Jew go away kind of attitude all right so everyone out there has heard of Bill Nye the Science Guy we're going to do a little five minutes with Dr Drew the science [Music] Jew if you would give my audience the easy TV digestible version of what is RNA what is mRNA and what was the Breakthrough that finally allowed for the creation of the covid vaccine after your Decades of research on this mRNA is kind of like the middleman in our cells um the DNA has the codes for every protein for every biologic function for everything that allows us to live the DNA has to communicate with the rest of the cell and the way it does that is messenger RNA mRNA makes a copy of one of those codes in the DNA and then it transports it to a machine the the machine is called a ribosome but what it does is it reads the code and makes the protein that the code Codes for so it's it's the middleman and what our vaccine did most vaccines up until this point in time would give the inactivated virus right or sometimes the live virus what our vaccine does it gives the code the RNA the cell takes it up reads that code and makes lots of the protein so the covid vaccine had the spike protein which is the surface protein that allows it to infect cells and when you make an antibody against the spike protein it stops the virus from infecting and because the RNA is so efficient and what Katie and I did is we made the RNA better we made it non-inflammatory so people could tolerate it and we made it produce a thousand times more protein so it's much more efficient and that combination made the vaccine incredibly potent the initial results were 95% protection which you never see with a viral vaccine thank you Dr Drew the science Jew for this segment we appreciate it how did it feel for you to get the vaccine and be like it's we've done it here it is and now I'm you know it's in my body and and we've reached this threshold my dream for my entire life was to make a drug make a vaccine make a therapeutic that would save people's lives and you know whether it was one or or 10 it didn't matter but having the the RNA put into my arm as a vaccine that you know 55 years of dreaming uh had come to an end it's unbelievable what would you say is the most or was the most or is the most uh frustrating misunderstanding that people have about your work or the vaccine I've been working on vaccines for most of my career and in the past there were always antivaccine people and you we would joke about it and say well you know they're the California hippies who don't believe in anything and you know there was a small number of people and you could figure out how to get around them and and they didn't impact the level of vaccination needed to protect the rest of the country when it became a political fight a marker of of political allegiance to go against the vaccine I had never seen anything like that before yeah and it was so incredibly frustrating because in my view our leaders are supposed to help us are supposed to make us healthy make us live well uh make sure there's food and health care and other things available and here we had a huge amount of our politicians saying the vaccine is bad it'll give you cancer it'll integrate into your DNA it'll make you magnetic I mean uh Bill Gates is putting chips in just the massive amount of craziness and you expect that there are crazy people who do that you don't expect our politicians and such a large number of them to go against something that everybody knows will help where are you hoping to advance your technology to next what's the next Frontier for what you're working on yeah so we've got a lot we have a bunch more vaccines uh influenza and RSV have already been FDA approved we have vaccines for HIV and clinical trials wow for neuro virus for C diff for malaria for Deni my dream is someday to go anywhere in the world probably starting with subsaharan Africa with an Igloo cooler full of RNA vials and giving people injections of RNA to cure their sickle cell anemia how far away do you think you are from that dream of the of the cooler full of vaccines yeah I'm going to guess a year a year year and a half will start treating patients amazing speaking of what's coming down the pike we talked about your technology we also have a new presidential Administration how do you anticipate that this new Trump Administration may affect your work if at all so I I'm in a lucky position where it probably isn't going to affect me very much uh I have lots of sources of funding I don't rely on the Govern government or the National Institutes of Health it's going to affect most other researchers the big fear is you know RFK Jr yes has a long history of being a an antivaccine fanatic what people don't realize is that he makes his money suing drug companies for madeup vaccine reactions so people say oh well you know that that that's what he believes well it's not it's how he makes his money and now he's going to take that to the NIH where the majority of vaccine research is done he he tells Senators I'm not going to touch vaccines I don't believe him you politicians aren't known for their honesty yeah and I can't imagine that he's going to suddenly give up on his antivaccine Crusades the only way he can get major things done though is if Congress goes along with him but there's more and more far-right lunatics in Congress who are part of this antivaccine Crusade so it's possible that NIH May reduce its vaccine research and that's going to hurt a lot of people where it's going to be a much bigger problem right now all 50 states have laws that say your kids have to be vaccinated against a bunch of different diseases in order to go to school I think a lot of the Republican Le states are going to get rid of that we're already having outbreaks of measles from people not getting vaccinated what people don't realize if you look back 250 years 40% of our children didn't become adults they died before becoming adults right now it's 4% the ma the major reason for that is vaccines yeah vaccines save more lives than any other medical intervention it's so frustrating it's such a a self-inflicted wound it's just it's such a heads scratcher yeah through your life and career you've had some important Partnerships along the way one you mentioned just now the National Institutes of Health you did a fellowship there your supervisor was none other than Anthony fouchy were you guys in touch during Co at all as you were working on what you were working on and he was in his role we've always spoken you know not every week but but fairly often we we we would meet at meetings uh and talk once the NIH became interested in RNA vaccines we spoke more and I spoke to all of his staff about using RNA vaccines for covid uh so we've kept in touch another crucial partnership that we have touched on lightly but I want to hear more about is with your Nobel co-winner who you call Katie you work together at Penn for many years how did you guys initially meet and begin collaborating the stories of the photocopy are true yeah when I I started at pen that was back at a time when the only way you could read a journal article was the photocopy the journal when it was shipped to you and Katie and I would essentially wait for each other to finish on the photocopier because we both read a lot and you had a photocopy to read so we started talking and as it turned out I was interested in vaccines and I needed somebody who could make mRNA and Katie knew how to make mRNA so I I look at it as one of those old Reese's moments the chocolate and peanut butter coming together uh a and we just started working together and have never stopped amazing it's like a medical Lenin and McCartney yeah you and Dr curo met at pen just as a sort of little side note here have you been aware while you're at pen recently over the past year or two of some of the anti-israel demonstrations going on there and is that something that's been in in your field of view at all yeah no it it has I mean I I would pass by the the demonstrations on most days when I was walking across Camp campus um Liz Miguel who was the previous president who got into a lot of trouble was a good friend and Larry Jameson the current president is a good friend so I I would talk to both of them about the anti-israel sentiment and what was right and what was wrong what I hopefully got them to understand is that how Israel deals with its external Partners is very different from being Jewish and Israel's support of the Jewish religion and the demonstrators didn't separate those two things the demonstrator said oh we we support Hamas because we have to fight back against what we think the Jews are doing to the Palestinians and that's just the completely crazy approach and the way it happened is that outside Hamas organizers came into the universities and met with these students and organized these students and built up this this thinking I don't think the students themselves started off with that idea and that approach but I think the outside organizers changed their way of thinking and that caused a lot of difficulty have you felt or seen a difference in the temperature on campus from last spring to where we are today Larry Jameson the the current President helped get rid of those uh destructive uh fights that they still go on they're not sleeping on campus they're not attacking other students I I think the temperature has come down quite a bit I I know other universities are still having some problems oh yeah what's the general environment in your medical research field right now towards Jews because you know I hear anecdotally from a lot of different people within medicine that it can be a very difficult environment and I'm wondering if you've encountered any of that so I I've encountered it not amongst my collaborators and other Physicians that I work with there are a lot of antiac people that they often will send me threatening letters emails messages uh that they threaten my family uh they threaten My Life um and and something that's not uncommon is they'll say that Jewish vaccine so that they're correlating my you know my help in developing the vaccine with Jews and with it being a bad thing both because it's a vaccine and because a Jew was involved in it so that there's certainly a lot of hatred of vaccines combined with hatred of Jews uh that has only increased over the past years one more crucial partner in your life is your wife Mary Ellen a PhD herself you met at brandise University which is of course a a renowned largely Jewish University how did the two of you meet she was a couple years behind me she was a a psychology student and one of the things that brandise did back then to sort of weed out the number of psychology people was to make them take calculus that'll do it we had a friend in common who introduced us and said that I would help teach her calculus and get her through the course so that that's how we met and a couple years after that we started dating um and ended up getting married what happened in those interim years between tutoring and dating I was in med school so I was kind of busy with other things uh and and it just took us a while to get back together what role did Judaism play in in raising your kids and starting your family we're cultural Jews um and and we we always have been and both of my daughters went to Hebrew school they were both B Mitzvah they have a lot of Jewish friends that they've maintained my older daughter has a Friday night dinner at her house she doesn't have any kids yet and she's part of an organization that brings a variety of different Jews together in DC to do Friday night dinners together just to share religion share uh the the culture sure and my younger daughter does similar things here so we we brought them up a as cultural Jews and let them make the choice of how much religion they wanted to incorporate into their lives you yourself you were raised with a Jewish father and an Italian Catholic mother your father is a Jew is you know what we call a patrilineal Jew embraced by conservative and reformed Jewish movements not so much by the Orthodox movement have you ever felt that like exclusion or has that something that's ever come up in your life probably the only time it came up was when I was going to marry Mary Ellen her her father's family is orthodox and back at that time in Memphis there was one Orthodox synagogue one conservative and that was it mhm and the the conservative Rabbi had just left because he had an affair with somebody's wife and the the the conservative synagogue was not in great shape so we Mary Ellen and I went to the Orthodox Rabbi in order to see if they would marry us and he told my father-in-law of course I'll marry them and he told us no way uh that I I I had been converted by a a very conservative conservative Jewish rabbi I you know had blood drawn I went to the Mikvah I did everything but he didn't consider that enough and he wouldn't marry us two follow-ups there one you say that you converted what what process did you go through and and when did you do that and why I did that after meeting Mary Ellen it was actually kind of funny because I was a a resident at Beth Israel at the time and I went to the the local conservative synagogue and Mary Ellen and I walked in and Mary Ellen is blonde and lyed and we walked in and sat down and he looks at us and he says Drew Weissman a doctor from across the street and Mary Ellen from Memphis Tennessee and he turned to her and says why do you want to uh convert to Judaism and she said no no no no I went to Day School I I I did everything it's him you have to talk to so we we talked for a little while and he basically you know I I had practiced every holiday growing up I had been to synagogue many times I I I knew everything about the religion so I I still learned Hebrew I I learned all the prayers I went through the the Orthodox version of conversion with the Mikvah and the three rabbis and and all of that that's a lot of Hoops to jump through for somebody who's already Jewish I mean how did that feel having to jump through those I knew I was doing them for her family because that that's what they required did she require it of you or do you feel like it was just pressure from her family I'm not really sure I mean I I think she felt the pressure from her family what would you say forms the Bedrock of your personal Jewish identity a lot of it is the recognition of the importance of the Jewish people and of maintaining Judaism for Jewish people to you know to to fight all of the anti-Semitism in the world as a community and to build their Community to be strong and resilient we we spend a lot of time in Israel because it's I think it's important to support Israel we spend a lot of time supporting you know uh even now but more in the past Russian Jews and Ethiopian Jews and Jews around the world who have difficult lives and and we would help any way we could are you familiar with the phrase tun Alam yeah Heal the World Repair the world you're doing that very literally has has anybody ever told you that before oh yeah my my wife tells me that all the time that's special that's very cool I read in an interview that you consider yourself more of a Dost do you still feel that way and and what does that mean to you and how do how does that sort of belief system sit alongside or intertwine with your jewishness the dowst views are more of my view of the world the earth and the Universe I used to live out in the suburbs of of of Philadelphia and I I was close friends with uh with our our as Rabbi who's now moved back to Israel uh he he was a very interesting man but the the rabbi came up to me at the end and said so do do you have any questions and I told them I don't want to ask my questions but he forced me to so what what my question was is could you read the talmid as Adam and Eve were actually bacteria and the way that and what the tud was actually describing was the beginning of Life how bacteria formed how bacteria divided and that's how Eve came from Adam and what the talmud was really describing and we just didn't weren't reading it correctly was this is how life began and that was you know my my my dowst thinking of of how everything began and how we need to you know rever the Earth and everything about it because it's it's part of us it's so interesting you know I've heard sort of a version of that that people feel like maybe you know when when the Torah says God created the world in seven days that really that's you know seven eons let's say and that's just sort of how the the Earth was developing but I've never heard it on like the cellular level from Eve coming from Adam I think that's really interesting y I recently watched an interview between Piers Morgan and Neil degrass Tyson and and Tyson had this this great line in it he said God is an Ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance for a lot of people um if you believe that God is just sort of there to to explain the gaps that we don't understand do you think it's possible for a scientist to believe in God if you think about it the the the universe is an enormous space and the fact that life ever evolved anywhere is an incredibly likely rare thing I mean we're we're the only planet in our solar system to to have currently have life if you want to believe that there was a greater being that was involved with that I I don't have a problem with that and I I think there were certainly greater beings that were involved in the creation of the universe now th those beings weren't a you know somebody who looked like God and not a bearded guy sitting on a throne right who said I I decree this but there there were certainly many types of intelligence that were involved it may not be the type of intelligence people ascribe you know currently ascribe to God but you know I I think we can certainly believe that there are greater things involved in in everything I love that and now the last thing to wrap it up we do a little lightning round just so some quick pops for you quick answers nothing too complicated is matal soup really Jewish penicillin well you know a a as a doctor I I tell people to to eat uh chicken soup and mataba soup when they're sick but that that's mostly because of the nutrients that it has in it good to know is there like a Nobel Prize winner group chat like is there a clubhouse do you guys interact we interact when we run into each other uh when we have questions for each other I just ran into a bunch uh when I was at the the latest Nobel Prize ceremony it's a pretty cool Club to be in must be fun are you team applesauce or team sour cream we do both at my house uh my my kids don't like sour cream my wife and I do do you double dip are you getting both on the same lacka we don't double dip because that's not sanitary right of course I forgot who I was talking to but do you I mean do you get a scoop of each is what I mean okay there you go the combo did you get covid I did I I actually got covid with all of my family when we went to an award given to us by Harvard Medical School and luckily my parents came but they didn't get covid uh but all of my family did if you could have any person alive or dead over to your house for Shabbat dinner who would it be I guess it would probably be Albert Einstein just because of his incredible creativity and thinking I I would love to be at that dinner too and last we asked this of pretty much all our guests the bean Jewish special when you eat kala do you rip it or do you slice it no I always rip it always it's like the standard answer Weissman thank you so much for taking time out of your literal life-saving research to sit down with me today really really appreciate it and all of the insights and wish you all the best on behalf of Humanity on everything you're working on thank you very much thanks to Dr Weissman for taking time out of his literally world saving research to talk with me today and allowing me to Cross Nobel laurate who saved Humanity from Co off my guest bucket list pretty special stuff thanks to you for listening or watching if you're loving the show please tell your friends about it especially the ones who only watch our Clips on social media but don't watch the whole episode come on y'all see y'all back here for the next thrill aying episode of being Jewish with me Jonah plat [Music]