Being Jewish with Jonah Platt

The Covid Conqueror_ Nobel Prize Winner Dr. Drew Weissman on God, Israel & Anti-Vaxxer Antisemitism
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Jonah Platt: [00:00:00] Do you think it's possible for a scientist to believe in God?

Drew Weissman: What people don't realize is that he makes his money suing drug companies for made up vaccine reactions. Have you ever felt that, like, exclusion? They'll say, that Jewish vaccine, that's gonna hurt a lot of people. In March

Jonah Platt: of 2020, the world was struck with a devastating and deadly pandemic.

COVID 19. Coronavirus, the Rona, Coco Roro, took seven 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 percent of all Nobel prizes, despite being only about 2 [00:01:00] percent of the world's population. Today, I am thrilled to welcome one of those 22 percent 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. 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?

Drew Weissman: It was actually a bit funny. I got a text from Katie at 4 a.

m. Eastern Time. Katie's your partner? Yeah, Katie Carrico, 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 spoke with her a [00:02:00] 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, anti vaxxer playing a joke on us and thank you for giving them my phone number. We waited till 5 30. I got a call. We still didn't fully believe it until six when we saw the video of the Nobel presentation, and then we believed it.

Jonah Platt: 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?

Drew Weissman: 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 laureates will put your name in and say, we think [00:03:00] 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

Jonah Platt: 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?

Drew Weissman: To me, that was probably the most important thing all morning.

The funny part is they left out one sentence From that phone 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 know, Rachel's here.

We have something to tell you. Right. She screamed, Rachel's pregnant. And Rachel, of course, turned red [00:04:00] and hid. But luckily they cut that out.

Jonah Platt: That's hilarious. I mean, that's. That is, you know, where the grandma's head would be at. It makes sense. Who had the best reaction to the news?

Drew Weissman: Probably my younger daughter.

We called my older daughter who hopped on a train from D. C. and headed up. My younger daughter lives in Philadelphia. 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?

What 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

Jonah Platt: 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 [00:05:00] the house.

Is that true?

Drew Weissman: We've gotten a lot of awards, and none of them are in the house. Where are they? They're at my work, in my office. We're moving to a new house in the summer, and she agreed to let me put the Nobel Prize out.

Jonah Platt: Mazel tov, 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? Are people buying you drinks at the bar? Is there any discernible difference? I think

Drew Weissman: the big thing is that I can now do things that I couldn't do as well. 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 [00:06:00] 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 sub Saharan Africa. Asia, Latin America. So that's a year after the rest of the world had been vaccinated three times already. To me,

Jonah Platt: 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 Technion. What did that award mean to you?

Drew Weissman: So that that was fantastic because yeah, It brought me back to Israel, but 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 [00:07:00] and started vaccinating pregnant women very early so that they were leaders in a lot of the. Vaccine uptake and vaccine

Jonah Platt: studying. When you receive 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?

Drew Weissman: Nerve wracking. Both Katie Carrico and I were invited and Katie ended up not going because she was nervous about the situation. You know, the Technion is in Haifa, which is towards the north, 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 made the commitment to go and I wasn't [00:08:00] going to go back on that. So. You know, there could have been fighting in the streets and I probably

Jonah Platt: still would have

Drew Weissman: gone.

Jonah Platt: What was the temperature like there? I mean, what was the vibe of the people you were interacting with while you were in the country?

That region,

Drew Weissman: the Haifa 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.

Jonah Platt: 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 Jew.

If you would give my audience the easy [00:09:00] 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?

Drew Weissman: 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 machine is called a ribosome. But what it does is it reads the code and makes the protein [00:10:00] that the code codes for.

So 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 [00:11:00] 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 percent protection, which you never see with a viral vaccine.

Jonah Platt: 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.

Drew Weissman: My dream for my entire life was to make a drug, make a vaccine, make a therapeutic that would save people's lives. And, uh, you know, whether it was one or 10, it didn't matter having the, the RNA put into my arm as a [00:12:00] vaccine that, you know, 55 years of dreaming, uh, had come to, uh,

Jonah Platt: 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

Drew Weissman: vaccines for most of my career. And in the past, there were always anti vaccine people. And 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 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 political [00:13:00] allegiance to go against the vaccine. I had never seen anything like that before.

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 healthcare 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 [00:14:00] go against something that everybody

Jonah Platt: knows.

We'll help. Where are you hoping to advance your technology to next? What's the next frontier for what you're working on?

Drew Weissman: 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 in clinical trials for norovirus, for C diff, for malaria, for dengue.

My dream is someday to go anywhere in the world, probably starting with sub Saharan Africa. With an igloo cooler full of RNA vials and giving people injections of RNA to cure their sickle cell anemia.

Jonah Platt: How far away do you think you are from that dream of the of the cooler full of vaccines?

Drew Weissman: Yeah, I'm going to guess a year, a year and a half.

[00:15:00] We'll start

Jonah Platt: 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?

Drew Weissman: So 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 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 anti vaccine fanatic. What people don't realize is that. He makes his money suing drug companies for made up vaccine reactions.

So [00:16:00] people say, oh, well, you know, 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. Yeah. Politicians aren't known for their honesty.

Jonah Platt: Yeah.

Drew Weissman: And I can't imagine. That he's going to suddenly give up on his anti vaccine 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 anti vaccine 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 [00:17:00] 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 led 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 percent of our children didn't become adults. They died before becoming adults. Right now, it's 4%. The major reason for that is vaccines.

Jonah Platt: Yeah.

Drew Weissman: Vaccines save more lives than any other medical

Jonah Platt: intervention.

It's so frustrating. It's such a self inflicted wound. It's just, it's such a head scratcher. Throughout your life and [00:18:00] 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 Fauci.

Were you guys in touch during COVID at all as you were working on what you were working on and he was in his role?

Drew Weissman: 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.

Jonah Platt: 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 worked together at Penn for many years. How did you guys initially meet and begin collaborating?

Drew Weissman: The stories of the photocopier are true.

Yeah. When [00:19:00] I started at Penn, that was back at a time when the only way you could read a journal article was to 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 M. R. N. A. So I look at it as one of those old Reese's moments, the chocolate and peanut butter coming together. Uh, and we just started working together and have never stopped.

Amazing.

Jonah Platt: It's like a medical Lennon and McCartney. You and Dr Curry co met a pen. Just as a sort of [00:20:00] little side note here, have you been aware while you're at Penn 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 your field of view at all?

Drew Weissman: No, it has. I mean, I would pass by the demonstrations on most days when I was walking across campus, uh, Liz McGill, who was the previous president who was Got into a lot of trouble, was a good friend. And Larry Jameson, the current president is a good friend. So 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 [00:21:00] Israel's support of the Jewish religion. And the demonstrators didn't separate those two things. The demonstrators said, Oh, we support Hamas because we have to fight back against what we think the Jews are doing to the Palestinians.

And that's just a 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.

Change their way of thinking, and that caused a lot of difficulties.

Jonah Platt: Have you [00:22:00] felt or seen a difference in the temperature on campus from last spring to where we are today? Larry Jameson, the

Drew Weissman: 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 think the temperature has come down quite a bit. I know other universities are still having some problems.

Jonah Platt: 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.

Drew Weissman: So I, I've encountered it. Not amongst my collaborators and other positions that I work with, there are a lot of anti vaccine people [00:23:00] that they often will send me threatening letters, emails, messages, uh, that they threatened my family, uh, they threatened my life, uh, And, and something that's not uncommon is they'll say that Jewish vaccine.

So 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 there's certainly a lot of hatred of vaccines combined with hatred of Jews. Uh, that has only

Jonah Platt: increased over

Drew Weissman: the

Jonah Platt: past years.

One more crucial partner in your life is your wife, Mary Ellen, a PhD herself. You met at Brandeis University, which is of course a renowned, largely Jewish university. How did the two of you meet? [00:24:00] She was a couple of years behind me.

Drew Weissman: She was a, a psychology student. And one of the things that Brandeis 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's how we met. And a couple years after that, we started dating, uh, and ended up getting married.

Jonah Platt: What happened in those interim years between tutoring and dating?

Drew Weissman: 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

Jonah Platt: back together. What role did Judaism play in, in raising your kids and starting your family?

Drew Weissman: We're cultural Jews, um, and we, we [00:25:00] always have been. And both of my daughters went to Hebrew school. They were both bat mitzvahed.

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 as cultural Jews and let them make the choice of how much. religion they wanted to incorporate into their lives.

Jonah Platt: You yourself, you were raised with a Jewish father and an Italian Catholic mother. Your father is a Jew, is, you know, [00:26:00] 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?

Drew Weissman: Probably the only time it came up. Was when I was going to marry Mary Ellen, her father's family is Orthodox. And back at that time in Memphis, there was one Orthodox synagogue, one conservative, and that was it.

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, [00:27:00] of course, I'll marry them.

And he told us, no way, uh, that I, I, I had been converted by a very conservative, conservative Jewish rabbi. I had blood drawn. I went to the mikvah. I did everything, but he didn't consider that enough and he wouldn't marry

Jonah Platt: us. Two follow ups there. One, you say that you converted. What, what process did you go through and when did you do that and why?

I did that after meeting

Drew Weissman: Mary Ellen. It was actually kind of funny because I was a resident at Beth Israel at the time and I went to the local conservative synagogue. And Mary Ellen and I walked in and Mary Ellen is blonde and light eyed 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 [00:28:00] and says, why do you want to convert to Judaism? And she said, no, no, no, no. I went to day school. I did everything. It's him. I have to talk to. So 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 still learned Hebrew. I learned all the prayers. I went through the orthodox version of conversion with the mikvah and the three rabbis and all of that.

Jonah Platt: 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?

Drew Weissman: I knew I was doing them for her family.

Jonah Platt: Because that that's what they required. Did she required of you or do you feel like it was just pressure from her family?

Drew Weissman: I'm not really sure. I mean, I think she [00:29:00] felt

Jonah Platt: the pressure from her family. What would you say forms the bedrock of your personal Jewish identity?

Drew Weissman: 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 antisemitism 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 we would help any way we could.

Jonah Platt: Are you familiar with the phrase to Kunalam?

Heal the world. Repair the world. [00:30:00] You're doing that very literally. Has, has anybody ever told you that before? Oh yeah. My wife tells me that all the time. That's special. It's very cool. I read in an interview that you consider yourself more of a Taoist. Do you still feel that way? And what does that mean to you?

And how does, how does that sort of belief system sit alongside or intertwine with your Jewishness?

Drew Weissman: The Taoist views are more of. My view of the world, the earth and the universe, I used to live out in the suburbs of Philadelphia and I was close friends with, uh, with our, our H rabbi, who's now moved back to Israel.

Uh, he, he was a very interesting man, but the rabbi came up to me at the end and said, so. Do you have any questions? And I told them, I don't want to ask my questions, but he forced me to. [00:31:00] So what, what my question was is, could you read the Talmud as Adam and Eve were actually bacteria and the way that, and what the Talmud 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 want reading it correctly was this is how life began. And that was, you know, my, my, my Taoist thinking of, of how everything began and how we need to, you know, revere the earth and everything about it, because it's, it's part of us.

Jonah Platt: It's so interesting. You know, I've heard. Sort of a version of that that people feel like maybe you know And when the Taurus as God created the world in [00:32:00] 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 Yeah, I recently watched an interview between Piers deGrasse Tyson And, and Tyson had this, this great line, and 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

Drew Weissman: about it, 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 [00:33:00] system to, to have currently have life. If you want to believe that there was a greater being that was involved with that, I don't have a problem with that.

And I think there were certainly. Greater beings that were involved in the creation of the universe. Now that those beings weren't a, you know, somebody who looked like God and

Jonah Platt: not a bearded guy sitting on a throne

Drew Weissman: who said, I decree this, that there were certainly many types of intelligence that were involved.

It may not be the type of intelligence people ascribe, you know, currently ascribed to God, but you know, I think we can certainly believe. That there are greater things involved in in everything. I love that.

Jonah Platt: And now the last thing to wrap it up. We do a little lightning round. Just some some quick pops for you.

It's quick [00:34:00] answers. Nothing too complicated. Is matzo ball soup really Jewish penicillin?

Drew Weissman: Well, you know, as a doctor, I tell people to To eat, um, chicken soup and matzo ball soup when they're sick. But that, that's mostly because of the nutrients

Jonah Platt: that

Drew Weissman: it has in

Jonah Platt: it. Good to know. Is there like a Nobel Prize winner group chat?

Like, is there a clubhouse? Do you guys interact?

Drew Weissman: 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

Jonah Platt: a pretty cool club to be in. Must be fun. Are you team applesauce or team sour cream?

Drew Weissman: We do both at my house.

My kids don't like sour cream. My wife and I do.

Jonah Platt: Do you double dip? Are you getting both on the same latke?

Drew Weissman: We don't double dip because that's not sanitary. Right, of [00:35:00] course.

Jonah Platt: 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?

Drew Weissman: I did. 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,

Jonah Platt: 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?

Drew Weissman: I guess it would probably be Albert Einstein just because Of his incredible creativity and

Jonah Platt: thinking, I would love to be at that dinner to and last we asked this of pretty much all our guests, the being Jewish special when you eat challah.

Do you rip it or do you slice it? I always rip it always. It's like the standard answer. Dr Weissman. Thank you so much for [00:36:00] taking time out of your dinner. 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 Laureate who saved humanity from covid 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 thrillifying episode of Being Jewish with me, Jonah [00:37:00] Plath.