Thank you so much. Thank you for that kinder introduction and thank you all for joining us.

I'm going to be talking about updates in COVID-19 and I'm going to try to talk for maybe 40, 45 minutes, which will hopefully give us plenty of time for questions.

I am a professor here in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at UCSF, and I'm in clinic two days a week and maybe three months or four months on service.

So I do a blend of research and clinical duties throughout the pandemic.

All right, I want to talk to you about just five things.

I'm going to talk about vaccines, vaccine policy, masking, long COVID,

schools and immunity debt, which is what we're dealing with right now,

and then just some thoughts on Paxlovid.

So let's see what we can get through.

The theme across all these domains, the take-home message, if you get nothing else, is that

there is far more uncertainty than experts, uh, CDC officials, Ashish Jah, acknowledge.

There is far more uncertainty in all of these questions and we acknowledge.

And the purpose of medicine, the scientific portion of medicine,

is to reduce the uncertainty with good studies.

We should be reducing the uncertainty, but we have repeatedly failed to do so,

and we still could be doing better.

And unfortunately, I think political considerations have occasionally trumped evidence,

no pun intended.

And as this talk proceeds, you will see that I am mostly critical of decisions that occurred after the vaccine rollout in 2021, which means by definition I'll be critical of the left,

but I want you to know that this criticism is coming from someone who is left of center politically.

So I'm criticizing my own tribe in what's to come.

I think it's important to remember that the experts that are being venerated and hailed on television

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