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I am a physician and a scientist. Over 12 years, I had the privilege of serving Presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden as the director of the National Institutes of Health. Before that, I led the U.S. component of the Human Genome Project.
I am amazed by the medical progress that has been possible in the past few decades, both in alleviating suffering and saving lives. But I am also deeply troubled by the growing distrust of science in our society, just at the time when its insights are most needed. No recent experience highlights that disconnect more starkly than the last five years of the Covid pandemic. From my vantage point on the front lines of that battle against a dangerous virus, let me highlight both the triumphs and tragedies, and propose some actions that we can all take to re-anchor our troubled society to truth, science, faith, and trust — and put us back on an individual and collective journey that might be called the road to wisdom.
Go with me back to early 2020, as the worst pandemic in more than a century was spreading across the globe, and deaths in the United States were in the thousands every day. For me and hundreds of scientists who joined together during Operation Warp Speed, the most hopeful strategy was to develop a vaccine. We all worked to be sure the large-scale trials were scrupulously conducted, and that they involved a wide range of men and women of different racial and ethnic backgrounds.
What would success look like? The Food and Drug Administration had set the threshold for approval of this effort at 50 percent efficacy, about what the flu vaccine achieves most years. My colleague Tony Fauci and I frequently discussed our hopes for the outcome. Maybe it could be possible to reach 70 percent? I confess that I was fearful of failure. I also prayed a lot.
The results were revealed in late November 2020. For both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines, there was 90 to 95 percent efficacy in preventing illness that caused respiratory symptoms and close to 100 percent efficacy in preventing severe disease and death. Side effects were minimal in the tens of thousands of volunteers who had taken part in each trial. It was a moment of profound relief, of gratitude toward all who had made this possible, of answered prayer. As I tried to speak to the dedicated team about the significance of what had just happened, I could not find words that could fully express the emotions of the moment. I was unable to hold back the tears.
Future historians will judge the development of safe and effective mRNA vaccines for Covid in 11 months as one of the greatest medical achievements in human history. We felt that at last we were on a path to conquering this disease and stopping the terrible death toll. And to a major extent, that came true: Current estimates by the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit foundation supporting research on health care, are that more than three million lives were saved in the United States between December 2020 and November 2022 by Covid vaccines. If you were vaccinated, you might be one of them. I might be also.
Yet ultimately more than 50 million adult Americans declined vaccination — even after the shots were made widely available at no cost. Though medicine and public health make poor bedfellows with politics, one’s political party was a strong predictor of resistance. So was religion, with white evangelical Christians (my own group) the most resistant of all. Public distrust, driven by social media, cable news and even some politicians, reflected a host of concerns: whether Covid-19 was real, whether it was really all that serious, whether the vaccines were rushed, whether there were common and serious side effects that had been hidden, whether the mRNA would alter the recipient’s DNA, and whether companies had skirted the rules about safety. More outlandish conspiracies also circulated on social media: that the vaccines contained microchips or cells from recently aborted fetuses, for example. People of faith were particularly hard hit by misinformation.
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An artwork from the series “Let no one say we were not here,” 2020-23. Credit…Lydia See
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James' World 2 
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