Well, thank you all for, thank you all for coming back after lunch.

I'm going to talk about the COVID-19 pandemic.

And the subtitle of this is when scientists abandoned science.

We've had a couple of questions over the last two days about trust in science.

And to me, unfortunately, the pandemic has probably set us back many decades and led to deep distrust.

We've only seen, I think, the tip of the iceberg.

So I'm going to walk you through some things from the pandemic, some considerations.

And who am I? Of course, just as a background.

I'm a professor in epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco,

and I'm a practicing hemong doctor, just like John, see everything from benign hematology to

rectal cancer or working clinic in the hospital.

And I teach several classes and run a research laboratory. Okay.

So I think one of the main points I want to make of this talk, there are two concurrent

themes.

One is on a number of important questions around the pandemic, scientists did not express uncertainty

adequately. We took drastic actions, we extolled

those actions, we didn't express the underlying uncertainty. That went hand in hand with we didn't

permit or foster debate. The debate was actively squelched and prevented on social media channels,

and even at universities. I cannot think of any debate at any of the premier US universities,

Harvard, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, University California, San Francisco,

on whether or not we should have closed elementary schools.

We went the entire pandemic, we made one of the biggest health policy decisions

...