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1) A few further comments on COVID, in response to some comments:

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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

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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.

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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

6:38 AM · Jun 17, 2021Twitter Web App

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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

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

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8) and finally I don't want to really get into an argument about this one, but..... GAIN OF FUNCTION RESEARCH IS SCARY, YO. MAYBE WE SHOULD, LIKE, SPEND MORE TIME TRYING TO AVOID DOING THINGS THAT MIGHT KILL US. or at least like require an even higher level of security

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This isn’t code that doesn’t compile and you can fix later. We’re talking about life and death. If you’re 90% sure it’ll work, but you’re dead wrong, guess what you have hundreds of thousands of dead people. You cant just put “anything” into peoples bodies and expect it to be ok

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Not sure how anyone can judge the efficacy of a vaccine on a virus with a 99.85%survival rate. Once the most vulnerable have died that survival rate would continue to rise.

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What does this even mean? A sample size of 1 is meaningful? You know that trials aren't just for efficacy, right? It's not like testing in prod and you can rollback with impunity

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Exactly. It's weird people don't notice this. If the specialists made a proper vaccine design in sth like 2 days in January 2020, it's obvious it was not "research" or "science"; it was straightforward engineering. Also, vaccine's code seems trivial.

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Even if that wasn't true for a current vaccine; it's surely true now for mRNA vaccines. Just reuse current design with different code. Yet there's no way there won't be ridiculously long "trials" in the future. Without "emergency" it won't even be the pathetic ~year long.

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