good morning thank you all thank you all for being here. i'm really honored.

be here with sally susman, whom i will make a very brief introduction and then she will speak very well for herself and for for book. so sally is the evp chief corporate affairs officer pfizer. she is the author as, you know, of breaking through, communicating to open minds, move heart and change the world. she spent her early career in government and industry, and she started at the bottom. american express and eventually held senior positions in communication roles with amex, with the sd lauder companies. and for the last 17 years at pfizer as a young girl, she wanted to be either an investigative journalist or the mayor of her hometown of saint louis. there's still plenty of time to do to do those things. when she left for college, she notes in the book, her dad gave

her a letter and it said, your reputation is most important asset good thing for your child to be thinking about. they head off to school for the first time. her dad was a lawyer. former vice chairman of citi, citigroup global. a big fundraiser and. 2009 was appointed by president obama to be the us ambassador to the court of st james, which is kind of a big deal. i think she has a wife, robin carter and a daughter, a grown daughter who lives in new york city. seven blocks from her, which she describes as being perfect and. i have a daughter who lives 1.1 mile from me and i think perfect as well. sally spend a little bit of time in the clinton years ago and so i my former boss donna shalala about her and she said if you've

ever those you've ever communicated with donna shalala, you get like it's very few words, punctuation. it's just and so said, she's smart and savvy she's a player with two exclamation points so welcome sally and sally susman. so it's one of the first questions i asked sally when we spoke a couple of ago, and then we're sitting down earlier today was how did you find the to write a book, right? she got this position that one of the most important companies in the world certainly that's been in the news and she's published the book several months ago. so how sally, how did you come to do that? and and find a way to do it? thanks, joe and first, let me just please thank you for joining me today and to say that it is an honor of a lifetime to be at the miami book fair. so i feel really excited to be

here today. the question, how did i find the time to? write the book is something my boss asked me repeatedly because candidly, i'd always wanted to write a book. it was a burning ever since i was that little girl you mentioned in saint louis wanting to be a journalist. and i'd written small pieces, had something in a magazine here or there. but it wasn't until the panda nemec hit that i had two things that made it possible me to write my book. the first was the crisis of covid and working at pfizer on the frontline of trying to roll out this new vaccine in was crystallizing you know i was in the cauldron of all this pressure and you know working every day months on end and yet the ideas that had been just sort of tumbling around in my head they clarified that my book

my story was going be about leadership. the leadership i was witnessing during pandemic and the leadership that i had witnessed over four decades working in and in business. the second thing that made it possible, joe, to write the book was i was locked down, i was at home and i would start my day with a long walk. i would work and then i had time. and so i realized that outside or before the pandemic had wasted a lot of time running here, running there, going to wherever i invited to. and one of the things i've tried to take forward is to hold to my time, to hold on, to focus, to be disciplined, even without the horrors of the pandemic. so these two things combined to help me write this book. great. and we're grateful you had that

opportunity. you know, the book starts with an from your time at quite recently of the russia of ukraine and albert bourla, the ceo of pfizer saying to sally i really to rethink how we react to this typically companies involved in health care had really gotten a pass on taking a position on global events and so forth in the health care business. they got it. but but he wanted to step back and reconsider and asked you to do that. would you talk about that a little bit? yeah, sure. and of course, you know a lot about health care. so it's an inside question. but one of the most interesting things that i do in my work is help people decide when to weigh in on social and how to weigh in and i suspect we'll get into that a bit more later. but during the ukraine well, the invasion of ukraine, if you remember all the big companies

were rushing out of russia and making very bold statements against. and as joe rightfully points out, if you're in the medicine business, you have a traditional humanitarian because a kid in russia with cancer is a kid with cancer and need and deserve their medicine as as anybody else. so we're sitting there with our humanity an exemption but we didn't right. as if we were just in a business as usual mode or as if we're as that people would think we were profiting during this difficult time. so we as you say, albert, my boss, albert ceo, pfizer said we need to think more deeply. this isn't good enough. and so over the course of a weekend, we came with the plan that every penny every rupal that we earned in russia, we would donate to ukrainian

relief. thank you. and and in doing so and we got out and talked it because in this world you have to explain yourself if you're not out on tv or radio talking and explaining yourself, you can't assume people will understand. we explain this and it very well received, but takeaway for me and really relevant my book is that you can usually find way if you are willing to be create give and current courageous. it's not always a yes or black or white. there are nuance ist answers to very tough questions. and sally, let me build upon this. you say in the book that, senior executives are expected speak out based on their values and lead with purpose and use their platforms to, steer the global discussion. we've had our own history in the

state of florida in recent years, where with the loss of one of the largest employers in the state, the walt disney company and its former ceo spoke out then spoke out. and then there was a reaction within state government. it, which is still playing out now. so how senior executives, when should they went, should they speak out? this is such an important, relevant question and the last several years, social issues are coming. business leaders fast and furious lee things we've never had to think about. and in my company, it's a very metric driven company. we know what do we need to see to advance a compound, our pipeline or what kind return on investment do we need to further invest? but when it came to whether not we should speak out on a social issue and we didn't have a metric and i thought i feared that people in the company would

say well it's whatever thinks and i assure you whatever sally thinks is not a metric and a good place that i want to be. so i spent a lot of time thinking deeply. i gathered my colleagues, my team, and we came up with a five question framework and it's detailed in the book, but i can go through it very. the first question is, does it relate to our purpose? you know, most organizations have at pfizer, ours breakthroughs that change patients lives, that gives us a wide berth to speak out on. most issues about health care, human health. but not every issue. so there's important issues like the deforest of the amazon, which important but not relevant to purpose and we lose agency if we speak out on everything. so does it relate to your purpose number one.

number two, how does it impact your most stakeholders? so for us, that space agents and employees, but you had to think about who is your particular audience? question three is how does it relate our values and our values at? pfizer are courage, excellence, equity and joy. please know, didn't say how does it relate to our politics? because companies aren't political or they shouldn't be in my in my values driven. yes paul is politically no the fourth question this one might be my favorite is what are our choices here? because often people very reactive and defensive. you've got a reporter calling deadline. you have somebody shoving a petition in your face. you have to sign by 5:00. all the other companies are signing. i reject and i've taken to when

there's an issue that's relevant for us sitting down and writing out our own view, in our own, sharing it with employees, posting it on our website. i don't feel like you have to give up control and then the fifth and final question is what is the price of silence? because i do believe there's some issues violence in schools that silence is deafening and it's just not possible for large public that's my framework and it's not perfect and i'm open to interpreting. and it's a great it's a great framework. sally one of the points you make throughout the book is that communications is hard skill. it's sometimes times, it's seen as being or it's of soft. but you say, no, it is just as hard and important as manufacturing sales. so what do you tell us more

about what you mean by that? oh, thanks joe, you've actually hit on the sentence. that's the entire thesis of the book that i've had the privilege, the honor to to nine ceos, a couple of cabinet secretaries, senators in my career. and they're all great. i mean, they're all smart. they're hard working. nobody's into the corner office. you get there because you have really skills. but a few of them have been complete game changers, people who totally shifted paradigm. you've got leonard lauder at the day lauder companies, ken chennault at american express and albert bourla at pfizer and in my view the difference maker for those is that they valued as seriously as any other skill or discipline in their portfolio so that it's not an afterthought

it's not something they just you know rolled into last minute they practiced they think about it. they they value it and so it is my belief it is my argument that it's a big mistake to. consider communications soft skill that in fact it is a rock hard competency. all right. let me ask you let me ask you about pfizer and the pandemic, which to be one of the more intense interest periods in anyone's career. certainly was for me at about self. so all right. so albert bora bora bora became pfizer's ceo in october. of 2018 so a couple of years before the pandemic 2019 2019 and in short order issued new purpose for the company he wanted to see breakthroughs that change lives. and i would say when he made

that the mantra, he had no idea how important breakthroughs that change patient lives were was about to be so beginning about three and a half years ago, sally lead quote one of the most urgent highest stakes public dialogs of the last century. your job was to, quote, build in new life saving technology because the goals of the company at the time were find a vaccine and build confidence in big pharma that it was safe to take the vaccine. so tell us about that time. oh, so much to say about this. give me a couple of minutes. this one i actually went to work at pfizer because i believe that life saving, the company that makes life saving medicine, had such a terrible reputation. and i knew that big pharma had really troubled reputation.

and i thought, you know, i'm pretty good at what i do. i'll be able to fix this in a year or two for more than a decade. i banged my head against a wall, a wall of cynicism, skepticism and really made very little progress. and so the pandemic came. i thought, this is really my and as you mentioned, albert bourla was a new ceo and right in early 2020, he to give a speech in greece and by the time he landed in greece the conference had closed because of covid. and i think you can all remember where you were as things were locking down. i sure do. i was in new york city and when albert flew back, he wrote on a little piece of that we still have in the office that he was going to do three things take of our 85,000 employees around the world because employee wellness

became a very big deal during the pandemic too that we would ensure the steady stream of medicine around the world. if you remember you couldn't buy a car or get a refrigerator, but the medical supply i think you agree mostly up pretty well all timer's cancer, all the terrible diseases didn't take a break during the pandemic and three, we would make a vaccine in months. and this is where i thought, oh, no, it's a pandemic. and my boss has his mind because this is a 12 year had been a 12 year exercise that were going to do in eight months. albert did something i've never seen any other ceo do. he looked around the group assembled to appoint a project. and this was going to be a terrible project. it was going to be night and day, every day for these eight months. and he appointed himself and

that's the moment i thought. huh, maybe we are going to do this thing and we set about working. i felt i needed an ambition as bold as his so my ambition became to break through to reintroduce this company to. tell the world who we are, what we really believe and what we care about. and i set about doing things very for example our most treasured asset is our intellectual property. i for the intellectual property relative to the pandemic we'd on our website the scientists they died when i told them this but we didn't have time to just to fight over issues of transparency. it usually takes three years to fill a clinical trial. we did it in three months because. all of these issues were being handled in a very different way. i also to embed media with us

along for the ride, so i had some street journal reporters and a network national geographic film documentary film crew going with us and many sleepless nights what i thought sally, you are filming the greatest corporate debacle of all time, but also knew that if pfizer failed, we'd have bigger problems than a bad news day. we might not even be sitting here together today. so as you know, how story ends that after eight months we did a successful vaccine and we did roll it out at the same time, there's a film now called mission possible that runs on youtube. and the day after we announced the vaccine, the wall street dropped six pages. and you're a former journalist. so, you know, six pages is a lot under the headline pfizer

vaccine craze, easy deadlines and a pushy ceo now pushy is not maybe the word i would have chosen, but it made the point that he was tenacious, is that he was focused and that it's all about leaders ship. the other thing that i just want to add to conclude this story is that today pfizer is a top ten global brand, according fortune magazine's most admired time magazine came out with a list of the most important companies, and we were number six. so we a scientific transformation we had a reputation transformation. and i had a personal transformation during time in being able to achieve a lifetime dream. to write this. but as someone who has had five pfizer vaccines, very grateful.

i thank you i thank you for that. let's move to a lighter topic. so you talk in your book about the the opportunity to use humor at times in communicating. you call it lighten up and with humor and tell the story through an interesting of your dad being named to be ambassador great britain. and so there is this moment where president obama's press secretary, robert gibbs, is standing at the podium and he's talking about these three appointees. ambassador. and they're all substantial individuals, you know, and supporters of the democratic party and so forth and so press starts to take press secretary gibbs on about kind of the spoils system of appointing ambassadors and and the press secretary says, well, you know, one of the there were three one of the three is is going to be the ambassador to france.

and he speaks french. and then he says of your father, you know, he's going to be the ambassador to great britain. and he speaks and. and then and the jaded audience sort of accepted that. and they went on to the next. so when is it appropriate to humor in communicating? you told this story very well. it was ambassador charles speaks french. ambassador phil murphy spoke german. my spoke english, but the book is divided ten chapters. each one seeks to solve problem with a simple idea. the chapter on humor was the hardest to write it almost out of the book a million times humor is scary these days. you can so easily be cancel old or you can find yourself in a very awkward place, in a very politically correct world.

but i stuck with it because i don't know about you, but i don't want to live in a world humor without joy, without the ability to laugh. thank you so i thought hard about it. it really isn't about standing up and telling jokes. it's not about shtick or, you know, being a comedian. it's more creating opportunities. lighthearted moments create opportunities to happy in our lives and to together. as i mentioned, one of my companies for values is joy, which i tell you is, unusual for a fortune 50 company to have joy as one of the four values. and when we ourselves. what does that mean? we say that we want to take our work seriously, but not ourselves. and even that laughter is good medicine to.

so we're trying to live in this culture that's a little more human, a little more approach, both and in my own team, we have something every year called i guess it's a comedy club night, and we put a in our room and. we try to make it look cool. we do it after work and everybody up and shares their biggest goof, the greatest mistake they've made recently. you know, somebody left a confidential on the subway. there's all kinds of things we do that are mistakes that ashamed of and we feel shame about making mistakes. but when you share them with others and you realize everybody else is making mistakes, too, and that if can be open about and learn from it, it builds an important resiliency. and we have really great time doing it. i remember now we call it open

mic night and open mic night is just a chance to laugh at ourselves. so you had a a senior intern at one point. this was sort of similar. if anyone seen movie the intern, robert niro, anne hathaway. it's one of my one of my favorite movies. i love i love the beginning of it, you know, so de niro retired, comes back working at working at a startup. his first day, the ceo gives him no work and it's like 7:00 at night he's still sitting there at his desk and one of his coworkers comes over and, says, why? why you don't i mean, why are you still here? and he says, you don't leave till the boss leaves. and i remember my father telling, me, that, you know, almost years ago when i first started to work, don't you get in before the boss. you stay until the boss. so but you hired you hired a senior intern, a fellow named paul of vietnam. vietnam vet, spokesperson for -- thornburgh when he was the

governor of pennsylvania during, three mile island, and went on to be really an iconic figure in the community, in the communications. and you had him working as an intern what was that like? what led you to do that? thank you. so i feel it's very important. remain curious and, creative, but it's not easy. and sometimes people are intimate created to be creative because lots of companies, they have people over in the creative department and, you know, they they're very special people, they're divinely touched by creative ideas. and the rest of us are just suits. and then i read a book, twyla tharp called the creative habit. and in this book, she's a dancer, choreographer. she talks about scratching and the idea of scratching is that you can scratch the surface and find great ideas everywhere by simply reading a book a different type than you might usually, or walking down a different street in miami that

you've never been down before. and you get sparked with ideas. so one night i was flying home from a business trip and. i was on delta airlines and i'm really tired and. i'm too tired to to work. i'm too tired to even read. so i reel a movie and i read see the intern. i'm so glad some of, you know, the premise and. there's this older guy, de niro, helping businesswoman anne hathaway. she's lonely at work, she's uncertain. she needs friend. and by the time the plane lands. i'm crying because i want this, too. i want it for me. and the next morning i went into the head of human resource guys and i said, i think this summer i'm going to hire an older person to be my intern. and he's like, whatever, or just do your thing. and so i paul critchlow to lunch

and as joe said, he decorated vietnam vet star football player a spokesperson for thornburgh head of communications at merrill lynch which was right downtown during 911. ultimate lee retired as vice chair bank of america so is a big deal guy in my world and someone i respect a lot. so i go to lunch. i'm kind of nervous at chit chat and towards the end of lunch i said, so have you seen the movie the intern? he goes, no i said, okay. i explained the whole thing. and then i said, so would you be my intern next summer? and he goes like he starts that, you know, adjust his hearing because i think he thinks he's misheard me. so i explain and he said he had to go home and think about it, which i knew meant he had to ask his wife and i was so happy. he came back the next morning

and said that, yes, he would be my summer intern. i said, well, you're so senior, i need to pay you like a retainer something to get you to come. he asks, what do the other interns and i said $18 an hour? he says, take it. i said, but me give you an office. where do the other interns sit? in the bullpen in the media area? he says. sit there and over the course of this summer, my dream came true for what? this could be. the interns loved him. we all learned a lot. he a lot. he learned how to use facebook and. the staff appreciated him and i him very very much people kind of heard about this intergenerational experiment that we were conducting and fast company reached out to us and in the end they wrote a cover story about the senior intern.

and i had been trying to get pfizer into fast company for decade and. none of the innovations in health care, nothing in our pipeline them but this did so it was a cover story for fast company. it earned a spot on the main stage at south by southwest conference and i learned a big lesson which is there are great ideas around everywhere. and as long as you're willing to be open to and give credit, if you're borrowing or building on someone else's idea, there's so many to be curious and creative. it's a very it's a great story. i mean, i'm going to go i'm going to watch movie one more time. sally, you talk about traveling and learning. one of my dear friends is dave lawrence, who of you know, and we used to travel like our families used to travel together

on vacation. and dave's position was vacations are for learning i thought vacations were for laying at the pool. right. so we had a we had a compromise but you say you say that folks when they're traveling should push to see something real. so what you mean by that and will you the opportunity to see something real in miami while you're here there's so much real in miami so when i first started working at the de lauder companies, i was my late thirties and. i started working and traveling. a woman who was in her late, she was on the cusp, her retirement and. i had the great opportunity to travel with her to china and. i was really excited for this business trip and we fly in to to beijing and we hit ground running. we visit with beauty editors, we go to the stores, we meet with

regulatory government officials. and by the end of the day, i am exhausted. i'm dreaming of the hotel. i'm thinking about a hamburger from room service and a big bathtub. and she looks at me and she says, dear, what are your plans for the evening? i had no plans beyond what i just described and i had no, she said, what are going to go see anybody? i didn't anybody in china. so took me by the hand and we went to a friend of hers house for dinner. they stayed up all. we stayed up all night drinking champagne and telling war stories of opening new stores and that proceeded for four days, four or five days. this going around the clock, never stopping, stopping in at an art, stopping in at a shop and when we went to leave she looked over at me on the plane and she said, dear jetlag is

boring. and so since that time it is my requirement that whenever i travel i something out of the box interesting. i'm here with my chief of staff annika nordegren, who yesterday told me she was taking a page from the book and going to the miami botanical garden. so i in it i support it i do it it's great. that's great. thank you. i'll take one more page out of dave lawrence. i have and i know rick hersch, former colleague the herald for many years we both have in a file somewhere, notes from dave lawrence which were called referred to as dave raves right felt tip pen. i really like article or you did something good and so forth and we keep them. you talk about your time at at the with with lauder and that and you quote leonard as saying nothing makes me happier than writing a good you note to tell

us about that. absolutely when again when i joined the lauder companies which was a transformational experience for me, i'd never worked the beauty business. it was a big leap. and leonard lauder is an icon in the beauty business, was my boss and he very took me around to meet all of the powerful editors and most of them were respectful and deferential him. but one editor in particular was rude and she kept this waiting and she sat at her desk, hardly looked up. we were standing front of the table like supplicants she gave short shrift and sent us on our way. and as we were leaving the building, leonard looked over at me and he said, don't to write her a thank you note. i was like, really? he says, absolutely. that's how we roll. and what i came to understand is

when he and his mom started the business, they didn't an advertising budget. they weren't well-financed people and writing thank you notes became a big part of his business strategy he writes them would write to employees for a job well done. he'd write them to women who stood all day behind a counter selling product. he wrote them to buyers, the stores and i realized this is a really important thing to do. i've tried to make a ritual of it myself. i keep a box of stationery and fun cards by my desk and. i try most mornings at work to, take 15 minutes to look at my calendar from the day before and say to whom do i owe a thank you? i usually write one. maybe two, but it makes feel good. i believe it makes. them feel good and it's a

practice i've taken, you know, very much to heart. i, i just have to add that recently i went to leonard's 90th birthday party and. then i received a thank you note for going the birthday party. so he he's pretty over-the-top with it, but i learned a lot from him. you said that even your six year old daughter had gotten a thank you note from leonard lauder. yes. when she was a little girl, my daughter lilly, we over at their apartment and she made a little origami bird. that was her thing. and she one for him on his desk. and she also got a thank you note. i mean, i'm going to ask you one more question. and then and then the last one. but after this question, we're going to open it up we'll open it up for questions for for a few minutes. so, sally, you about the need to perfect your pitch and you mentioned an example where that was not the case the hillary clinton fundraiser in new york where, she family famously said that half of donald trump's supporters were in a basket of

deplorable remember that. and in this world of social and there's a recording of everything it went it went viral and it hurt her not having that tone, just hurt her. so how do you how do you perfect your pitch? great so let's just talk together for a minute about what is pitch because i think when people find a book written by someone whose career was largely in communications they it's like a pitch letter. you know, i'm going to pitch you on a story or the dreaded elevator pitch where you're supposed to tell whole life story. and however long it you to to rise a few floors. i'm really not talking about i'm talking about something deeper and more nuanced, which is the quality of sound, the way you leave people feeling the the emotion that you bring to your communications. and i do believe that what happened to hillary clinton, who i thought and still think is an enormously qualified, is that

she lacked pitch. and when you have pitch you people feel after they talk to you if you don't have pitch, you get driven down into feelings in the weeds. i like to talk about pitch in a more pause. it gives sense. i try to tell a good about other people and bad stories about, but i think of ken shenault, who was also a new ceo at american express, right at 911, and his headquarters is door to the world trade towers. ken was out of the city at the time that the terrorists hit the building he had to drive back from the west because were no flights, but he needed to get back and he had a gut feeling that he wanted to bring together all the employees from american express in what we call the tri

state region, new york, connecticut, new jersey and the office was shut down. so he rented out madison square garden and he invited everybody from express, about 5000 people to come and his communications wasn't me i had left the company then but his communications team gave him a speech that he read, but he set it aside and he walked into this arena full of people who were heart broken. some had lost family members, friends and he waded into the crowd. he hugged people. he spoke from the heart. and he said that american express is best days are ahead of them. and again, you know, my focus is on leadership and. to me, the ultimate job of a leader is to be a purveyor of hope and optimism and that

moment, ken had perfect what what a great example. are there questions from the floor if are please line up at that microphone and we'll take just a few minutes of questions. i don't think too people behind me, but okay. yes, sir. i two questions. one has no relationship, the other the first question is when ex-presidents got up and said that this the pandemic will disappear in the summertime or spring or whatever, he said okay, what was the position that adviser or your position with regard to that so i was really surprised by how politicized things about the vaccine and all things related to the pandemic in the fall. of 2020 in the presidential debate between then president

and then former president biden in. the opening comments president trump said i spoke the guy that runs pfizer and assures me we'll have the vaccine. a very special day in november. so the the point was trying to make was that we would have this vaccine ahead of the election and was sitting there watching that and. i love politics. and i was sitting there with a glass of wine, a bowl of popcorn, settling in for a great debate. and when i heard this, i spilled my popcorn, i jumped up. i called my boss and started writing a letter to our because we would never politicize our vaccine when it read out, had nothing to do with before or after the election. and we created a mantra which was that we would move at the speed of science. and i assure everyone that in

march of 2020, when my boss said, we're going to have a vaccine by the end of the year, he was not thinking about the american election. we never thinking about the american election. we were always thinking about trying to save lives. sir, can we go to like one question per customer in the. you can just ask the question. okay, thank. hi. first of all, thank you very much. i was very informative, wonderful. i have a question that i hope you can answer. rna vaccines were being since the seventies. kathy kariko work but pfizer didn't make a big point of that it sounded like you had suddenly come up with a vaccine, an rna virus vaccine. and those of us who knew the science knew that that wasn't the case. and i feel like i was working for pfizer by telling all my

friends and neighbors. no, no, no, this has been in the works for years. why weren't you making of a point of that as great question and your absolute right that pfizer had been in the vaccine business for a long time been working on money for a long our partnership biontech our german partner had been multi-year previously we've been working on pneumococcal pneumonia not on covid, but the science was the same. you know, i look at many things i have done better and differently. i thought that the science, the data and the official voices like dr. fauci and others would the day and they didn't. we ended up relying a lot on people like you and, stories that were personal narratives. the grandmother that got to see the grandkids, the college kid

that got to get on campus because were vaccinated and, you know, whether it was just the fact it was perceived as new and novel had some upside, but admittedly it had lot of downside. and i'm often very reflective about how what could have done differently at the end of the day, 85% of americans got vaccinated. i don't think that's very good. i think it could have should have been better. in the end. i believe the science won. the communications did not take these two questions from these two gentlemen and then i'll do a last quick question and we'll call it a day. i've vaccinated six times with pfizer vaccines. thank you. my question is, what do you think about the anti-vaccination, which is very evident in florida? i can tell you that for thank

you, for the question and thank you for for your loyalty. i again, i learned a lot and i was confronted with a lot in rolling out the. i have a lot of time and patience for people who are misinformed it was a scary time it moved quickly as this said there could have been other ways to talk about the science and i really think that misinformation people who had legitimate questions i had all the time in the world for you know answering them. a lot of people have legitimate reasons feel cynical about the care complex not you but what i don't have for is disinformation people who are purposefully lies for their own gain gain in their

followership game, in fundraising, the cynicism is epic. people say that pfizer created the virus and it out into the wild so that we could make more money and that we're creating new viruses. and this is ludicrous and it's very sad that we live in a world that has this element. i not personally use the phrase anti vaccine because i think it's and negative, you know, finger pointing. i try to think of people who are legitimately hesitant and i try to help them, but i think as a society, we really need to differentiate between what is honest misinformation, confuse in that we can work against and what is really diabolical deceit that we have to unearth and work against. last question, how so? about three years ago, i read an

about you never haven't seen it anywhere else. there's something like 20 diseases around the world are just the neglected they're mostly in the tropics schistosomiasis things people get from being barefoot where maybe there's an millions of people having things that can be cured with some treatment. that's not that expensive. so i don't know whether pfizer's ever and throwing it out. a what did you say, creative of curious hey, here's idea. i love it. i love thank you so much neglected tropical diseases are a very serious thing that impact millions millions of people. companies like mine try to be helpful. so for are trying to eliminate blinding trachoma and we have made our our medicine for that widely available we again like

misinformation and disinformation there are things that we as a society can and should tackle. you know, we speak more at length about how that happens, but the medicine business is not a business. it's a it's a mission. it's a mandate. health care is, a human right, health care should be available to everyone regardless of where you live. you were talking about barefoot, whether you have shoes or you don't have shoes. whether your parents are rich or they're not, whether you live in a good zip code or a bad zip code, that health care has to become a human. i think it's one of the most vexing problems facing this country and the world. and i hope people like you keep good questions of people like us. okay, last question. and and then we will close. so i want to end on a high point. so the chapter in the book is on harmony. and you say that common ground and shared ambitions still

possible and that harmony requires intention, courage, preparation and reflection. so is there really hope for we can get to a place with harmony. well, absolutely. i'm an optimist. grew up in the midwest. so the last chapter in my book talks about seeking harmony and tries to answer the question why are we all so angry? and this was a lot my mind during the pandemic and the writer adam grant says that harmony is not the same. but the beautiful collection of different sounds. and so what i feel passionately about is that those of us who work in my field and all of us need to work harder at being able to live together with sounds, to listen to one another, not to ready our rebuttal, but for understanding, to be able to legitimize and say, you know what, maybe you're

right. and i'm wrong and i heard really disturbing statistic. it was created by the edelman barometer. they asked people if you saw another person hurt on the street, would stop and help them. if you think that they are different from you, that they have social views or political views. 70%. sorry. let me get this right. 30%. 30% of the people said yes, which means 70% of the people said no. and that is an untenable situation for us as a society. so my final chapter my big plea to you what i leave you with is, hopefully you will work with me to try to create a world where we can be more harmony, as i actually believe our democracy on it. we would you say so i'm going to

close us with a quick statistic. and one last anecdote. so the statistics in 2021, in middle of the pandemic, pfizer was ranked by fortune magazine as the world's fourth most adviser at company. so think that i think that is the ultimate scorecard on sally's performance in the middle of a pandemic. fourth and last i'm going to close with an anecdote. so february 20, 21, president obama's trip after his inauguration was to pfizer's kalamazoo to manufacturing plant, pfizer albert bourla introduced, salih to president biden by let me introduce salih in my administration she is the secretary of state and i thought that was a great a great way of introducing you. salih thank you so