[The Soup Nazi]

A more optimistic (for the most part...) take via Zakaria's newsletter:

The Year Science Won

As vaccines make their way into the public’s willing arms, The Atlantic’s Ed Yong writes that science has pulled off the nearly unthinkable, by producing a Covid-19 vaccine less than a year after the virus’s genome was sequenced. In achieving this feat, the scientific community has passed through a sort of crucible.

“In fall of 2019, exactly zero scientists were studying COVID‑19, because no one knew the disease existed,” Yong writes. “But by the end of March 2020, it had spread to more than 170 countries, sickened more than 750,000 people, and triggered the biggest pivot in the history of modern science. Thousands of researchers dropped whatever intellectual puzzles had previously consumed their curiosity and began working on the pandemic instead. In mere months, science became thoroughly COVID-ized.”

It was a triumph of collective intelligence, with papers flooding into academic journals and preprint servers by the thousands—more voluminously, by a large factor, than ever before in history—and new disciplines came to bear on public health. Work that had already gone into mRNA technology, which amounts to a “platform” for developing different kinds of vaccines for different diseases, proved prescient.

The story was not so purely positive: Experts in other fields rushed to publish some questionable work for what Yong describes as questionable motives, and 2020 has seen science’s gender divide deepen. Along with its triumph, and the fear and trembling at humanity’s brush with the virus, Yong writes that science can draw important lessons. “Warped incentives, wasteful practices, overconfidence, inequality, a biomedical bias—COVID‑19 has exposed them all,” Yong writes. “And in doing so, it offers the world of science a chance to practice one of its most important qualities: self-correction.”