Something unusual: a vacation.
Hello from Mexico. For the first time since March of 2020, I am taking a couple weeks off from publishing. (To those of you who just subscribed, this is an awkward hello!)
My plan for last and this week had been to publish a series of Inside Medicine newsletters covering major research in the medical and public health literature from 2023 that I had not yet gotten around to writing about and analyzing. Instead, I’ll plan to share those after the New Year. They’ll still be interesting in 2024, I promise!
While I’ll be spending most of this week with my family doing non-worky things, I’m still me. (Can’t stop, won’t stop.) So, I’ll use this time to think about the bigger picture projects I have going on. That includes continuing to study the Covid-19 pandemic so that we can be better prepared for next time, and finishing some other projects I strongly believe in—and which I am eager to share with you.
I’m also using this time to think about how to best serve the Inside Medicine community in 2024. Creating this newsletter is a joy for me and I am so grateful that 37,500 of you are here! To that end, I want this newsletter to reflect what you want. So, I plan to send out some polls/invitations for comments letting me know what you’d like to see more of here. I have exciting ideas but, to me, the most important thing is knowing what you’d want to land in your inbox. In fact, everyone is cordially invited to start sharing insights now! (Usually, the comments section is open to paid subscribers only; I’ll open it to everyone on this post so that any member of this vibrant community can share ideas or feedback on how to help Inside Medicine reach all of its potential.)
I look forward to increasing our engagement in the New Year so that we can continue to learn about medicine and health together. It’s complicated stuff, but that’s what makes it so darn interesting—and I know that’s why so many of you are here.
Above all else, Thank You so much for letting me into your inbox all the time! I truly hope you are having a wonderful holiday season and I am sending my best wishes to each and every one of you.
Until soon…
Yours,
Jeremy
Hi, hoping that studying the pandemic isn't focussed only on next time. Too many of us are still dealing with the effects of *this* time, and feeling vulnerable and unprotected by our communities -- plus suffering from the little-understood ills of long-COVID. Thank you for all you do!
I agree with some other commenters that dealing with COVID is still timely. I especially liked the discussion around your chorus -- it was a good example of how we can incorporate common-sense guidelines to do fun things, but not abandon all precautions. One thing that has been really distressing is how people have gone from maximal precautions to nothing, pretending that it's 2019 again--wholesale abandonment of masking, testing, and even laxness around vaccinating. Surely we can find a happy science-based medium!
I also appreciate your correcting the record on COVID revisionism. Many forget how terrible 2020 was, especially in areas like NY and parts of Italy where the sick really did overwhelm the health-care system, and how necessary "flattening the curve" really was.
Another thing that strikes me is how effective the original vaccines were: it seems like we've effectively eradicated original COVID, haven't we?
And I think in the story of vaccines, one big fact gets constantly overlooked: when we talk about "the unvaccinated" of 2021-2022, there was a huge pool of people who lived everywhere throughout the population and didn't get vaccinated, not because they refused, but because they couldn't: children. I know child-specific testing was necessary, but I would be very interested in a look at how the delay in offering vaccines to *everyone* affected how the pandemic played out, and the rise of delta and omicron variants.