Welcome to Plenary Session.

I'm your host, Dr. Vinay Prasad.

I'm a practicing hematologist, oncologist, and I'm associate professor of medicine.

I'm interested in issues at the intersection of medicine, oncology, and health policy, and that's what you're going to get on this podcast.

Welcome to Season 2.

This week on Plenary Session, you're in for a real treat.

I'm joined via Google Meet by Dr. Andre Vandross, and you're not going to want to miss this discussion about Twitter, the online world Twitter diets, and career switches.

You won't want to miss this. But first,

I have just a few thoughts on recovery. Stay tuned. This week we got something that we were all excited to get. We got the preprint and supplement of the recovery trial looking at the Dexymethosone

arm. And of note, everything that was stated in the statistical analysis plan, the protocol,

and the press release was also confirmed in the preprint.

And there was nothing so fundamentally important in the actual manuscript that it altered the take-home message for who benefits

and who does not benefit from dexamethazone with COVID-19.

Now, I noticed a bit of an irony.

There was a New York Times story that pointed out that in the subgroup of hospitalized patients

who did not require O2, that there was not in fact a statistically significant benefit,

and if anything, a trend towards harm.

And they said, see, this is a great example of why you need the full paper rather than the press release.

When you have a full paper, you get to see things like this that you wouldn't have seen in the press release.

The argument goes.

Well, I thought it was a bit of astonishing hypocrisy, because it reveals that the people

who claim they need the full paper to read don't even have the time or energy to read the press

...