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1) When it comes to COVID, there is no plan. There never was any.

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2) On the 1,000 person sample size: a) challenge trials fix this b) safety can be determined with ~1000 people; either you think COVID death >> 0.10% or the whole thing is stupid c) efficacy was strongly expected d) fine pay for 40k, it's a tiny fraction of the delay cost

3) On politics: Both parties get failing grades here. They both flip flopped (remember the immigration wars a year and a half ago?). We transitioned from incompetent to poorly-thought-out.

6:38 AM · Jun 17, 2021Twitter Web App

4) This was fairly predictable in many ways. The one thing that surprised me: I assumed people would give up on social distancing after a few months. I was wrong on that.

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5) Even just the fact that we got the vaccine right on our first try is strong bayesian evidence that we didn't really need the trials and already knew it would probably work

6) It's not like the trials helped perfect it; it's still overdosed and needing two injections makes it way harder to get adoption and the rollout still sucked even though we had 9 months to prepare for it

7) Also to be clear I am not advocating any conspiracies here, just incompetence and lack foresight.