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For once, we have a choice to end a pandemic by vaccination, rather than millions — maybe billions — getting infected. Unfortunately, rather than face this reality and act accordingly, we are telling ourselves a comforting but false story.

New post with more on what I think went wrong with media coverage and public discussion last year about COVID origins, and what it says about the way the too tight media/Twitter feedback loop works to our detriment.

Not checking not facts. My latest:

Guest @Insight essay on why novelty means severity, and why so many questions about variants, children, Long Covid, endemicity and more revolve around that very notion by @dylanhmorris. Nothing in this pandemic makes sense except in the light of novelty.

Why I'm not concerned about the Yankees' Cluster (and how breakthrough cases are both inevitable but not the same as cases among the unvaccinated).

Vast majority of gas stations in North Carolina are reportedly without gasoline. What does this have to do with understanding the pandemic? Or with Battlestar Galactica? My new post for @insight.

New Insight post: to be better informed, we need to see the facts as pieces of a puzzle that don't make full sense until we find their correct place.

A phenomenal guest essay by @WhitneyEpi on how she navigated the uncertain early pandemic environment to decide whether to send her kids to childcare. A central tension in epidemiology, how to pick questions, observed vs. expected, sticky priors and more!

How did a small study (ironically, mostly good news) go on to cause a global, misleading panic over variants defeating our vaccines? I wrote of one example—of too many―highlighting a key issue: please read the methods section before writing an article.

New post on how polarization ate our brains. Part one of a series on what's fueling "our" misinformation trifecta: polarization, bad science and puritanism/moralizing.

RT @zeynep: I couldn't believe it at first, but yep, it's true. The White House Press corps did not ask a *single* question about the pande….

RT @ejames_c: I can’t recommend this enough. @zeynep takes apart the idea of “absence of evidence is evidence of absence”, and explains: we….

RT @zeynep: I wrote about my "favorite" pandemic theater example of the past year—an attempt to get students to exercise together, indoors🤨….

I wrote about something that's been bugging me: the argument for vaccinating the world because of variants that would emerge *over there* posing a grave threat to us *over here*. I think that argument fails morally, practically and scientifically.

Long Covid is a real issue that's increasingly sensationalized and turned almost into a type of moral panic. I wrote a post on why that's a terrible development: especially for Long Covid sufferers who deserve respect, proper studies and reporting.

And this is part two on vaccines and variants. The three vaccines approved in the US have differences, but does that lend itself to a meaningful reason to try to choose between them?

I wrote about how need for statistical power affects vaccine trial endpoints, what that means for "vaccine efficacy"—and why our layperson mental model of the immune system should *not* be a sea wall keeping the waves out, and getting overrun by tall ones.

I've written a (long!) piece for the Atlantic about the five key lessons from the Pandemic that I believe are valuable to study, especially since they apply broadly. I have an open thread on my newsletter (no sub necessary) to allow better back-and-forth.

(And yes, this is just an intro into the topic, and mostly bringing out something I had written ten years ago).

I wrote why the most interesting thing about @joinClubhouse audio app is that it may finally force us to reckon with oral psychodynamics and how it fits with our ruling but not dominant print culture: a tension that's been there since rise of social media.