@GovHowardDean  A few people getting mild COVID—essentially a cold—even after vaccination is to be expected—we do not have a single vaccine that doesn't occasionally suffer from breakthrough cases. However, when we can reduce the disease burden globally to another cold, the pandemic is over.

Sorry, *seven* medical interventions in placebo group, not 14. Looked at the wrong column. But the vaccinated group number is correct: ZERO. Zero deaths, zero hospitalizations, zero medical interventions after 28 days after one dose of this easy-to-store vaccine.

@WillOremus  @davegillisT  @mtaibbihe  speed and strength with which things flip from "prescient " to "obvious " in a blink, and then how most everyone forgets and denies the before, is probably my strongest pandemic conclusion and surprise. I knew it happened, of course, but wow... So dunno.

It’s not about formal peer review per se. It’s just that many eyes are always better than a few, even if those few are excellent because they’re still a few, and a bit of time is better than rushing unless there’s something truly urgent that can’t wait another day or two.

Yeay!

Otherwise, story goes out with too few people who see paper. Those few may be excellent, but nobody is infallible. A few is not enough. We've seen this happen. Not enough time to comment->few experts say something->big story->oops there was an issue->no way to undo public impact.

It's a pandemic & peer review has been shortened or even being skipped. That's fine if done responsibly. There's a robust & real preprint & post-peer review process going on. It's great, actually. But huge finding to big news story with no chance to digest/respond? That's not it.

Pfizer expects to *double* it's weekly US production and deliver 120 million doses just in the next 6 weeks. We have 600 million mRNA doses scheduled by end of July. J&J VRBPAC meeting today. Things can go wrong, but it's time to talk about and act on *new* challenges we'll face.

The pandemic is an unwelcome, tragic societal stress test. We should learn from it and work to fix the cracks that were revealed especially since the lessons apply broadly. New piece analyzing five key pitfalls that hampered us—and how to move forward.

TIL from @joshgans  response to my article: Medical community *opposed* teaching kids 1-4 how to swim because... it would make the parents complacent. Meanwhile, in real life, lessons at that age is associated with an ~88% reduction in drowning risk.