Welcome to Season 4 of Plenary Session.

I'm Dr. Vinay Prasad. I'm an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics, and I'm a practicing he-monged doc here at UCSF.

If you like this podcast, follow us on Twitter.

Email us at plenary session podcast at gmail.com, and you can back us at

patreon.com. And with that, let's start the show. I'm back in plenary session, real-life edition.

I'm joined by Dr. John Yonidis. John, it's a pleasure to see you again.

The pleasure is mine, Vinay. Thank you for coming. Thank you so much for allowing me to interview,

the third time, I think, that you've been on this podcast. So much has happened since we last spoke.

But first, I should introduce you to the audience. Of course, you're a professor at Stanford

University, and you're a specialist

in meta research and meta research is booming these days. And of course, we're going to talk about,

I think, COVID-19 policy as well as maybe a little bit of meta research or some new updates.

I wonder if we could start by talking about the new variant, Omicron. How do you pronounce it?

You know better than me.

Yeah, it's another Greek word.

It's Omicron indeed.

And, well, I think that what we know changes every day.

So by the time that you show this video, probably things have changed, and I will seem like

a complete fool. I'll try to post this video today probably things have changed, and I will seem like a complete fool.

I'll try to post this video today, actually. So hopefully I'll keep it timely. Even that might be too

late. Okay. Okay. So clearly, you know, it's one of these circumstances during the pandemic where the

landscape of evidence is shifting sand and things change very rapidly. But what we know at the moment is that it's already pretty widely spread in terms of the

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