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April 4, 2021 1:58 pm

CBS Sunday Morning,

CBS Sunday Morning / Jane Pauley

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April 4, 2021 1:58 pm

In our cover story, Susan Spencer talks with experts on why conflicts arise, and in what ways conflict can be good and productive. Tracy Smith talks with Hunter Biden about his new memoir, "Beautiful Things. Lesley Stahl interviews retiring Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron. And Conor Knighton checks out vaccination efforts for rabbits against a fatal virus,

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Let's partner for all of it. Learn more at edwardjones.com. Good morning and happy Easter. Jane Pauley is off today. I'm Tracey Smith and this is Sunday morning. Easter is a day for rebirth and new beginnings, and new beginnings are what many of us hope for when it comes to the disagreements, large and small, that seem to divide us at every turn. So a question, why not just agree to disagree?

Susan Spencer has gone in search of answers. From social media, to family fights, to partisan politics, doesn't it seem like conflict is everywhere these days? Conflict is any friction between humans. Well, you say anytime there's friction between humans, and I think, well, there's always friction between humans, right? There is always conflict. Agreeing to disagree.

Ahead on Sunday morning. Then I'll have some questions for Hunter Biden, the president's son. As you'll see, the younger Biden has much to say about the controversies he's faced. So how often do you talk to your dad? I talk to him at least once a day.

It seems that for years Hunter Biden has been making news for all the wrong reasons, but now he's trying to set the record straight about his addictions, his business, and his personal life. I mean, how could you not have foreseen that this was going to look bad? Because I really didn't. I'm being as honest with you as I possibly can. Our candid conversation coming up. Carrie Underwood is an American Idol winner who's gone on to a hugely successful career of her own.

She's talking with Michelle Miller for the record. Carrie Underwood's a superstar, but she says still a small town country girl at heart. I was just a little girl from Oklahoma, you know, small town.

I love to sing, but lots of people love to. I have a door. I'm so blessed and so grateful.

More than anything, I want to use those gifts to get back. A prayer of thanks from Carrie Underwood later on Sunday morning. We're in conversation this morning with journalist Marty Baron, who's just retired as the executive editor of the Washington Post. He'll be talking with Leslie Stahl. Marty Baron, the editor of the Washington Post, is packing it in. Baron took over eight years ago, a few months before Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the place.

What you have accomplished over these last eight years is extraordinary. We need fresh ideas, and he came in with fresh ideas. And money. We'll talk about the money, but I think the money wasn't the most important thing.

No, the money was not the most important thing. Marty Baron ahead on Sunday morning. Connor Knighton watches veterinarians hop to it to protect bunnies from disease. Plus, a musical mystery with Seth Doan, holiday thoughts from Steve Hartman, and more on this Easter Sunday morning, April 4th, 2021.

We'll be back in a moment. Can't we just agree to disagree? Even in these divisive times, shouldn't we be able to diffuse our disputes before they get out of hand?

Susan Spencer looks at all sides of the argument. Billy Moore was born and raised on the south side of Chicago, where growing up meant growing up too fast. Chicago has a community that is heavily rooted in street gangs.

It's a heavy street gang culture. That culture pulled him in after his father's death. Billy was just 15. My mother, as a single parent at that time, was working to support me.

It left me a lot of time just to be doing things that, without that type of support, just to be doing things that, without that type of supervision, led me down the wrong path, so to speak. It happened yesterday on a Chicago street, an act of violence so common that it would ordinarily pass notice, except it involved an extraordinary young man. That young man was Benji Wilson, a star high school basketball player. On November 20th, 1984, Billy Moore says Benji bumped into him on the sidewalk.

You know, when I asked him, was he going to apologize or say excuse me, in no uncertain terms, he just turned around and told me, you know, he didn't owe me no excuse, so now what? And at that point, I felt threatened because he wasn't bagging down. And what I did at that moment, I felt like I had to do to protect myself. And I pulled the gun out and shot Benji.

Benji Wilson died hours later. Billy Moore, then 16, went to prison for 20 years. When you came out of prison, how were you different from the 16-year-old boy who went in? I just wanted to make sure that if I was ever given a chance to come from up under this, I wanted to be as productive as a person, as a citizen to my community as I possibly could.

You got to be there on time every day, bro. Now 53, and having lost his own son to a shooting in 2017, Billy Moore has been trying hard to make amends. He's reconciled with Benji Wilson's brothers, and he works for Chicago Cred, a group whose mission is to stop deadly street conflict. We're trying to identify the groups of young men who are actively involved in conflicts, and we're mediating these conflicts. Billy Moore is a conflict survivor, and now he works on systematically interrupting gang violence, trying to prevent that tragic mistake that he made. Journalist Amanda Ripley got to know Billy Moore while working on her own four-year quest to understand human conflict, personal and political.

One of the biggest surprises for me was how similar human behavior is in all kinds of conflicts, whether it's an ugly divorce or a labor walkout or a civil war. So talk to me a little bit about how you see politics through this lens. You know, when we are in two groups who are opposed to each other, we start to make huge sweeping judgments about each other, and we make big mistakes.

Ripley writes about those mistakes in a new book published by Simon & Schuster, part of ViacomCBS. Her recommendation for ending the political divide, how about another political party? The world doesn't neatly sort into Democrat and Republican. I mean, most people don't neatly fit into just one category.

On average, countries that have more than two political parties are less politically polarized, and there's more trust. But all conflict is not necessarily bad, right? Things might be pretty boring if we always all agreed on everything.

You're absolutely right. Conflict is essential. Columbia University psychology professor Peter Coleman says there is such a thing as good conflict. Every creative group, you know, the Beatles, Monty Python, all of these groups had a lot of internal conflict, and what they did with that conflict is oftentimes find a better solution. So conflicts can result in fantastic innovation.

Coleman heads up a conflict research center with a very relatable name. You run the Difficult Conversations Lab, which I think is, you know, a lab where all of us feel like we would fit right in. How do you study conflict? We wanted to try to get people in real time, in a space together, talking about issues that they had major differences on, like Trump, like gun rights, like climate change. And we study the conditions under which conversations over those differences go well or go poorly.

Things go well when he tells participants to remember one basic fact. Life is complicated. So let me give you an example. You may take a conversation over pro-life, pro-choice.

And so when they go into these conversations, they're armed for battle, right? But if you say to people, this is a complicated set of issues about health and about morality and about religion and about family. And if you do that, people feel less hostile, people think about it in more nuanced ways, and they ultimately feel better about their conversations. But clear communication is not something human beings are always good at. So somebody will say something and they may have met one thing, but you put a different meaning on it.

And what you're going to respond to is the meaning that you put on it, and which you can end up responding very, you know, either emotionally or with anger. Astronaut Dr. Jay Buckey, who circled the Earth 256 times in 16 days, says NASA realizes that avoiding conflict in such a tight space is a real challenge. Have there been instances where anything has actually gone wrong because people just couldn't get along? Well, I mean, the reports are in the Russian space program, there were three missions which are believed to have been terminated because of, you know, interpersonal problems. Really? That's significant.

Copy, Bob. Whether in space or on the streets of Chicago, resolving even the smallest conflicts can mean the difference between life and death. One of the first things they do when they try to interrupt gang violence is to ask, what is the root cause of this conflict?

Like, how did it begin? And many times, no one remembers. The people who started the conflict died a long time ago.

The prisons and graveyards are filled with young men who died or are paying with their life because they was caught up in a cycle of ignorance that you give them a few more years to grow up and mature, they would never make those mistakes. Marty Baron has been one of the leading newspaper editors of our time, but now he's retiring, which is why he's In Conversation with Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes. Marty Baron, the editor of the Washington Post, and before that, the Boston Globe and the Miami Herald, is packing it in. Under his leadership, those papers won 17 Pulitzer Prizes for stories like The Repatriation of the Young Cuban Boy, Elian Gonzalez, Lawbreaking by the NSA, and Predator Priests in Boston, as seen in the Oscar-winning film, Spotlight. We need to focus on the institution, not the individual priests. Liev Schreiber played Baron.

We're going after the system. You were made famous in that movie, Spotlight. Right. You're a hero.

Well, my heroes are the people I work with. You're embarrassed. I'm embarrassed.

I know, I've embarrassed you. Look, I realize how much, look, this is not a one-person show here. When we visited Marty Baron at the Washington Post News-News Room in February, it certainly looked like a one-person show. I haven't seen another person outside of you in this building today. This is completely empty. This is COVID.

Absolutely. Everybody's been working from home. It's been that way pretty much since March 10th. Even before COVID, there was a sterile look to the new modern newsroom. The old newspaper offices had a lot of charm, history, dirt, grease, grunge. My first newsrooms were, they were Underwood manual typewriters, and we worked on that.

And you could hear people working. A lot of the old characters are, you don't find them anymore. You're not an old character?

Well, I am old, and I am a character, but I don't know that I'm an old character. Marty is one of the great ones. Since his friends and colleagues couldn't celebrate the 66-year-old character's departure in person.

What you have accomplished over these last eight years is extraordinary. They toasted him in a farewell tape. What should Marty Baron do next?

And we roasted him. You can't hang it up at 66. I mean, Marty, President Biden is 78. In spotlight, Baron was humorless.

But not in real life. I'm deeply moved. I'm incredibly grateful.

That was amazing. Marty, why are you retiring? Well, I'm 66. I have been in this business for 45 years. It's an exhausting profession. It's been particularly exhausting, let's say, over the last four to six years, and also just during the Internet era, where you have to be on duty all the time. Just, it wears you down.

Wears you down more now that we have the digital age. People expect to know information like right away. You have to be first?

We like to be first, yes. They're not first in digital subscriptions. That's the New York Times. But they are an impressive second, with three million subscribers, more than three times as many as the paper had when Baron took over eight years ago, a few months before Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the place. What about Jeff Bezos?

Is he the reason The Washington Post has increased its circulation to the extent it has? Well, there's no question that Jeff Bezos has been instrumental in our turnaround. We needed fresh ideas, and he came in with fresh ideas. And money. And we'll talk about the money, but I think the money was... The money wasn't the most important thing?

No, the money was not the most important thing, in my view. The most important thing was a fundamental change in our strategy. Up till that point, we were focused on covering the region around Washington.

And so when Jeff came, he said, this strategy that you have may have been fine in the past, but it's not fine today. And now we have the opportunity to become national and international because we don't have to distribute physical papers all over the place. We can do it digitally. Everybody anywhere in the world could read The Washington Post. I didn't realize that when he bought The Washington Post, he already had a strategy.

He'd studied this, he came to you with a plan. There's no question. I mean, he studies, he does his research. Over the last 15 years, over 2,000 newspapers in the US, that's one in five, have gone out of business. Local news is having a hard time. It's become a news desert out there. Is the answer for newspaper today to get a sugar daddy? Not every newspaper is going to get a sugar daddy, so that's not an answer.

There aren't enough sugar daddies. Should they try? Should they go courting? Well, good for them.

If they can find one, hey. There was an old saying in this business is that, you know what you call a billionaire who acquired a media organization? A millionaire. To turn The Post into a national and international paper, Jeff Bezos made a $250 million investment, allowing for a near doubling of its newsroom staff, from 580 to more than a thousand, and adding internet-friendly graphics and clickable videos. And the number one enabler of the Democrats is the fake news media.

Still, the biggest story in the last four years was a Washington story. They are truly an enemy of the people. The fake news, enemy of the people. They really are.

They are so bad. So let me ask what it's been like to walk around with emblazoned on your shirt, you're an enemy of the people. Well, the moment that Donald Trump said that was the moment that I realized that he would stop at nothing in his effort to destroy the free press in this country. But as the editor-in-chief of The Washington Post, did you not feel an obligation to answer him, defend, tell the public, that's wrong, that's not true? Absolutely. And we have done that.

Thank you very much. The usually soft-spoken baron decided to raise his voice. Well, democracy will not die in darkness with The Washington Post around. It was important for me as personally to get out and speak about the press, talk about our role, make clear what our mission is, and why we have a free press in this country, why the First Amendment exists. Facts and truth are matters of life and death. In a section of the newspaper called Fact Checker, the paper has documented all of the former president's false or misleading claims. There have been over 30,000 false misleading statements and some outright lies. Thirty thousand.

Thirty thousand, yeah. Thank you and the entire Washington Post team for your tireless efforts to uphold the tenets of a free press. Barron's office wall is plastered with thank you notes. You know, in our office, we only put up the hate mail.

It's true. So why do you put only the positive ones up? Our staff has received a lot of threats, a lot of vile emails, and I think it's important that our staff recognize that there's a huge portion of the population that appreciates what they're doing. What about you? Have you gotten threats, death threats?

I've gotten threats of various types, absolutely. We had four years of Donald Trump and we've had one year of the pandemic. In what ways do you think we are changed forever? I think we're more realistic about the nature of our country. There's a greater sense of vulnerability.

People never really thought about a pandemic before. In the same way, I think we're much more aware now of the vulnerability of our democratic system. I think we realize that the democracy can be threatened in ways that were unimaginable in the past. And if we start thinking of ourselves as vulnerable, everything changes.

Yes. Our very nature. I think that's right, but maybe it's a good thing. Maybe we should realize that these institutions are more fragile than we thought they were, and maybe it's a wake-up call for us as a country. A growing number of doctors have decided to hop to it.

And no, Connor Knighton tells us, it's not what you think. From the vials, to the volunteers. There's information about what to expect from the vaccine.

To the steady stream of vehicles. This clinic in Gig Harbor, Washington, looks like one of the mass vaccination events happening everywhere these days. And can you open the hatch so Dr. Joel can vaccinate for you?

That is, until you get a closer look at the patients. Who do we have here? We have Maisie and Gus. Oh, there's two in there? Yes. Yes.

Who am I seeing up front? That's Maisie. Hey Maisie. Maisie the rabbit isn't here to get a COVID shot. Thank you so much for coming down today, I really appreciate it.

We appreciate you. You're very welcome. She and dozens of other rabbits have come to get the vaccine for RHDV2, rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus. You need to fill out the date, the bunny's name. While humans aren't affected by the disease, this highly contagious virus is bad news for rabbits. First identified in China in the 1980s, the initial RHDV outbreak wiped out more than 140 million rabbits. This newer strain, RHDV2, popped up in France in 2010. In 2019, Washington got its first case.

We had people who were desperate, you know, calling our clinic repeatedly over and over again. Hey, we just really want this vaccine. Please, please let us get this vaccine.

All right. Dr. Alicia McLaughlin was the first veterinarian in the country to import the vaccine. Since RHDV2 has historically been a European disease, no American company has produced a vaccine.

She had to get special permission to bring it into the U.S. It is more than 90 percent effective, which as we know again from the COVID vaccine stuff, that's actually really good. We're really happy with that. Considering that the alternative is almost 100 percent fatality, it's really good. Today, cases of RHDV2 have been identified in a number of states. But since so few veterinarians have obtained the vaccine, finding a dose can still be an ordeal. How far away are people coming from to get this shot?

Several hours. I haven't seen an upper limit for how far people are willing to travel to get the vaccine. This is Ruth Bunner Ginsburg. Ruth Bunner Ginsburg. Sue Brennan, owner of Rabbit Haven Rescue, has been the driving force behind the mass vaccination clinics. You're very welcome.

Thank you so much. Rabbits don't have a lot of champions. And somehow I connected soul to soul with them. And I do everything possible to make their life fulfilling, better, happy. Through a partnership with a local veterinarian, Brennan's group has administered close to a thousand shots. So what we're trying to do is kind of like they're doing with COVID, vaccinate everybody. You stop the spread, you stop the disease. People can go back to normal. Bunnies can go back to normal. Bunnies have been under an unofficial stay-at-home order. The virus can linger on surfaces, including grass, so they can't go out in the yard. They definitely shouldn't mix with other rabbits outside of their pod. Right now, the worst RHDV2 outbreak is in the West and Southwest, where a new variant has hopped from domestic rabbits to wild rabbits.

In California, the Oakland Zoo, in cooperation with federal and state wildlife agencies, has been testing and vaccinating endangered riparian brush rabbits, just in case the virus makes its way to this small population of cottontails. So far, she's looking nice and healthy. Better safe than sorry. There you go, baby. I know.

Is that itchy? Which is why, even though there hasn't been a confirmed case in Washington for more than a year, All done. So brave. What a good girl. What a good girl.

Dr. McLaughlin is still regularly vaccinating her patients. Perfect. When you administer those shots and you send a fully vaccinated rabbit on its way, what does that feel like? Oh, I love doing it. It makes me so happy.

And it's just like I'm kicking the virus in the face. Take that. You don't get to take this bunny away. Now, a matter of faith.

Here's Steve Hartman. At the start of the pandemic, Father Tim Pelk of St. Ambrose Catholic Church near Detroit had a problem. How in heaven's name was he going to sprinkle holy water on people's Easter baskets while maintaining social distance? As you're pouring the holy water into the water pistol, are you saying, Forgive me, Lord?

Yes, there's a form of absolution that would go on. The pictures went viral last year, much to the delight of most people. I know I had a couple of detractors in the clergy saying that this was sacrilegious to do it that way. And I said, Guys, we're talking about chocolate bunnies and sausages here. That's why this year he plans to go bigger.

No, not a bigger squirt gun, just more Easter baskets. And it's that kind of ingenuity we've seen across the country throughout the pandemic. From choir in your car, let my people go, to Zoom Passover Seders, I will not let them go. We saw people bundled up in beach chairs and lots of praying behind the wheel.

The drive-through has been a real godsend to folks of all faiths. But even those who stayed home found ways to keep it special, like 82-year-old Laverne Wimberly of Tulsa, Oklahoma, who still got dressed up to the nines every Sunday, always in a different outfit, just to watch her service on the computer. It's kind of a reverence.

You want to be respectful when you go to church, and primarily, that's the reason why I continue. You have all these clothes, and I see not one outfit is hanging out. Absolutely not. But Laverne says she is running out of closet space.

That's right. It cannot go another 52 Sundays, that's for sure. Fortunately, there is much more hope this Easter weekend compared to last. Thanks to the vaccines, the renewal we celebrate in all our spring traditions feels especially profound.

I felt that firsthand when my wife's parents, both fully vaccinated, came to visit us this past week. Look at you! It was the first time we'd seen them in over a year. I love you. I love you, too. And there's an Easter miracle we can all believe in. Group hug! And there's an Easter miracle we can all believe in.

Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, has known no shortage of controversy in recent years, which means there was plenty to discuss when we sat down to chat not long ago. You've said your dad always saw the good in you through all of this. Was there ever a time when you thought, OK, there's no way he's going to give up on me?

I've done it now. Never. Never. Not once.

Hunter Biden is the president's second son, a Yale-trained lawyer and a lobbyist whose well-publicized drug problems, personal scandals, and business dealings seem to have kept him in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. There's a current Department of Justice investigation into your finances. Yep.

What is it about? Can you say anything more? I can't, but I can say this, is I'm cooperating completely. And I am absolutely certain, 100% certain, that at the end of the investigation that I will be cleared of any wrongdoing. You're 100% certain you'll be cleared? I'm 100% certain of it.

And all I can do is cooperate and trust in the process. From the time he was a toddler, Hunter Biden and his older brother, Bo, were fixtures in Joe Biden's public life. And when they were both hurt in the 1972 car crash that killed their mother and sister, their dad, a newly elected U.S. senator, took his oath of office in a hospital room.

If in six months or so there's a conflict between my being a good father and being a good senator, which I hope will not occur, we can always get another senator, but they can't get another father. But as the Biden sons got older, their paths diverged. Bo was a war veteran and Delaware attorney general with his sights set on higher office. But Hunter, who was kicked out of the Navy Reserve after failing a drug test, grappled with substance abuse for years.

And after Bo died of brain cancer in 2015, Hunter says he was binge drinking vodka so heavily that his father intervened. He came to my apartment one time, and this is when he was still in office as vice president. And so he kind of ditched his Secret Service, figured out a way to get over to the house. And I said, what are you doing here? He said, honey, what are you doing? I said, dad, I'm fine. He said, you're not fine. He sought and got help in rehab.

But in time, he fell off the wagon and deeper into the abyss. You would wake up some mornings. I shouldn't even say some mornings because you slept for like 15 minutes at a time. Yeah. And be looking for crack and just smoke whatever was there.

Yeah. You know, I spent more time on my hands and knees, picking through rugs, smoking anything that even remotely resembled crack cocaine. And I probably smoked more Parmesan cheese than anyone that you know, I'm sure, Tracey. Because there'd be crumbs mixed in and you just... Yeah.

I mean, I went one time for 13 days without sleeping and smoking crack and drinking vodka exclusively throughout that entire time. Hunter Biden's struggle with his personal demons is a big part of his new book, from an imprint of Simon & Schuster, a ViacomCBS company. The title, Beautiful Things, is a phrase he and his brother shared to remind each other of the good in life. It was the last thing that he said to me.

Was? Beautiful things. And I held his hand and he took his last breath. Beau's death shook the entire Biden family. But the way Hunter dealt with his grief made headlines when he began dating his brother's widow.

After Beau died, you started a romantic relationship with Hallie, his widow. When the news of that broke, how did people look at you? I think people were confused by it. And I understand that.

I mean, I really do. To me, it's not something that is difficult to explain because it came out of a real overwhelming grief that we both shared. And we were together and trying to do the right thing.

And that grief turned into a hope for a love that maybe could replace what we lost. And it didn't work. It didn't work. I mean, you said you lost clients over this. You lost business over this. Yeah, absolutely. You had to step down from the World Food Program. Yeah, yeah. Well, I made a lot of decisions that I probably shouldn't have made.

There was a lot more compassion and understanding for the people that knew me. But it was a horrible time, too. And then there's this. In 2014, the younger Biden took a job on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma Holdings, at a time when his father, who was then vice president, had an active role in U.S. policy toward Ukraine. It raised eyebrows at the time, but by the 2020 elections, Hunter Biden was the center of a political firestorm. Hunter got thrown out of the military. He was thrown out, dishonorably discharged. That's not true.

For cocaine use. And he didn't have a job until you became vice president. Once you became vice president, he made a fortune in Ukraine, in China, in Moscow, and various other places. Looking back, did you make a mistake taking a spot on that board? No, I don't think I made a mistake in taking a spot on the board. I think I made a mistake in terms of underestimating the way in which it would be used against me. But you must have seen the optics. Even back then, you must have. I mean, how could you not have foreseen that this was going to look bad?

Because I really didn't. I'm being as honest with you as I possibly can. All I know is that not one investigative body, not one serious journalist has ever accused or has ever come to the conclusion that I did anything wrong or that my father did anything wrong. But the rumors lived on. In October 2020, a New York Post article said that emails purportedly showing shady dealings in Ukraine by Hunter Biden were found on a laptop computer that he supposedly left in a Delaware repair shop in 2019. The details were sketchy at best.

And last month, a declassified intelligence report said that before the election, the Russians had launched a smear campaign against Joe Biden and his family. It does not specifically talk about your laptop. Yeah.

Was that your laptop? For real? I don't know. I know.

But you know this. I really don't know what the answer is. You don't know yes or no if the laptop was yours. I don't have any idea.

I have no idea. So it could have been yours. Of course, certainly. There could be. Of course, certainly there could be a laptop out there that was stolen from me. There could be that I was hacked. It could be that it was Russian intelligence. It could be that it was stolen from me. And you didn't drop off a laptop to be repaired in Delaware? Not that I remember at all. At all.

So we'll see. Usually he calls me right before he goes to bed just to tell me that he loves me. Hunter Biden says he's rebuilding now and sober since he married South African film producer Melissa Cohen in May 2019. If his story means anything, he told us, it's that the only thing more powerful than a monstrous addiction or eviscerating grief is a family's love. Did you say you and your dad talk every night? Every night. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we talk at least every night. Yeah.

Sometimes. By the way, not only does he talk to me every night, he calls every one of my daughters and he talks to each one of them every day. And he talks to me. And I know that he talks to my sister.

The president of the United States. Yeah. Yeah. But by the way, he's always done that. I mean, always. He talks to each one of us. But I'll tell you why. Because he's lost.

Because he, like me, knows what it's like not to be able to pick up the phone and talk to your son. And he almost lost you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's hard.

I'm a Biden. We cry too much. Yeah.

But I guess one of the reasons that I'm crying is because beautiful things. We're here. We're here. Now here with a spiritual case for getting a COVID shot is Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Good Easter morning. In case you don't know us, the National Institutes of Health is the largest public funder of medical research in the world. I'm a physician, a scientist, and an evangelical Christian. I believe that science and faith are not in conflict.

They offer complementary perspectives, with science answering questions that start with how, and faith often better positioned to answer why. On Easter Sunday of all days, I find good reasons to hope, despite the tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic that has taken more than a half million American lives. We're pursuing ways to serve one another and love one another, while keeping our families and communities safe. Millions of Americans are now getting the vaccine every day. So hope is not just around the corner, it's here, but we are not yet at the finish line.

It will take all of us, with God's grace, to get there. Getting a vaccine and following public health measures is a service not only to ourselves, but to others, in preventing the spread of the virus and protecting the vulnerable from severe illness and death. So this is truly a love your neighbor moment. It's okay to ask questions to help make informed decisions about the vaccine, but as people dedicated to truth, it's important to use reliable sources of information. One resource I recommend is GetVaccineAnswers.org. Dear friends, on this Easter Sunday, as we celebrate our risen Lord, our best hope to end the suffering is to ensure that almost all of us have developed immunity to COVID-19. That's what these extraordinarily safe and effective vaccines can provide. They are a gift, an answer to prayer. Please do your part, unwrap the gift, roll up your sleeve, and say, I'm Tracy Smith.

We wish you and yours a happy Easter and hope you'll join us when our trumpet sounds again next Sunday morning. This is Intelligence Matters with former acting director of the CIA, Michael Morell. Bridge Colby is co-founder and principal of the Marathon Initiative, a project focused on developing strategies to prepare the United States for an era of sustained great power competition. The United States put our mind to something we can usually figure it out. What people are saying and what we kind of know analytically and empirically is our strategic situation, our military situation is not being matched up with what we're doing. Follow Intelligence Matters wherever you get your podcasts.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-01-29 01:07:19 / 2023-01-29 01:22:17 / 15

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