Welcome to Plenary Session. This is an unusual episode. Recently I was invited to give a talk to a group from the community. This is a group of the lay public. And the talk's premise was, can you walk us through the events of the last two years, COVID-19, in about 45 minutes? And so what follows is most of that dialogue. This is my point of view about the last two

years, what we got right, what we got didn't, as succinctly as I could put it for an audience as

broad as you could imagine. So I hope you find this of interest. If you like this podcast,

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Until next time.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for that kind introduction.

And I don't know if they'll live up to all the billing, but I try to down some notes what to talk to you all about.

So, you know, when I was approached to talk today, I was kind of given sort of a broad coverage to really kind of walk you through, I think, the events of the last two years in 45 minutes.

So I hope I can try to do that, at least some of the broad strokes, but I guess I will say

my only real disclosure, which is I approach all of the questions about COVID-19 from my biases,

which is I'm a practicing clinician. I've had patients get sick with COVID-19.

I am a researcher, and I do research on the quality of medical evidence,

and I've also a student of medical history, and so I know that throughout history,

lots of people came along, very bright people from the top institutions,

who are very, very confident that they knew the perfect answer, the perfect solution.

But so often they were mistaken and that what they were endorsing turned out not to work exactly as they wished.

And so that's my bias that I approached sort of the events that occurred.

So I thought I'd walk you through. There's several big categories I want to hit on.

I want to talk about schools, and I think schools is, I have called it the greatest domestic

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