Pfizer CEO: Transforming Drug Discovery, Lessons from China and Leading with Optimism

Hi, everyone, and, welcome to In Good Company. I'm, Nikolai Tangen, the head of the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund. And today, I'm in particularly good company because I'm here with Albert Gorla, who is the chairman and CEO of Pfizer, one of the largest pharma companies in the world. Now, Alberto has been with Pfizer for thirty years, been CEO since 2019, and has led the company through a remarkable period of change. Warm welcome. Thank you very much. And so, you know, I'm with Pfizer thirty three years. I'm with my wife. I'm with my wife thirty. Alright. I I got it mixed up there, Evan. Yes. Yeah. Now a lot of stuff has happened since you took over as, CEO. What what are you most excited about just now? I think, I'm always excited, by by the future, like all CEOs. Right? They see the the opportunities ahead. And, science is at the highest levels we ever had it, and science is affecting our business, very big time. So I'm very, very optimistic about the scientific progress that we can see in the next, years until the end of the decade. You sharpened the focus on innovative medicine, sold off consumer health care and so on. Why did you think that was the right decision to make? I'm a believer about, you know, corporations' role is not to heads. It is, to be very good, a few things. Investors role is to head. So I believe that requires different culture for a scientific company and different culture for a consumer company and very different culture for an of patent generic company. So I felt that, we should choose to be good at what it is really important, and that was science. Now we're not going to spend much time on on COVID, but we have to just touch on the fact that you did an unbelievable job, put a a huge amount of your own capital in there and produced a vaccine in eight months. Just how was that possible? Well, you know, it was the possible, for several reasons, but the most important is was exceptional times. So everybody felt that this is the culture of society, our civilization is at it's at risk. So everybody gave everything. And when I say everybody, I mean the government, I mean the our people, I mean, our hospitals that corroborated. Mhmm. So it was not easy to be done without them being aligned. Why don't we continue to work this way at full speed? Because, we don't have this big need that, is driving people's behaviors and they have the tendency to go back to the old habits. I have seen that with regulators, but after being extremely, instrumental in being able to achieve what we achieved, they became back to more conservative. I have seen that with the government operations that were opening the ways to to us to be able to accomplish what we accomplished and now …