摘要:
We are, at this writing, slowly beginning to see the light at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel. Eighteen percent of the population has now been vaccinated, and the national third wave of COVID-19 cases is on the wane. Both of these forces are conspiring to give us hope that the United States can soon start to move beyond the COVID-19 year, to start picking up the pieces from where the country left off when COVID-19 first hit. There is going to be much to do in the wake of COVID-19. The economy remains weak, and only about half of the jobs lost during COVID-19 have been recovered. There will have to be a rethinking of how the country works, a reckoning with the inequities laid bare by the pandemic, and a wholesale reimagining of how we can prevent future pandemics.
Science will have an important role to play in this post-COVID reconstruction. The COVID-19 year was marked by an incredible explosion of science around COVID-19 (1). Aided by the rise of preprints and the ubiquitous reach of social media, science made a real-time contribution to national and global decisions that needed to be made to contain the evolving pandemic. There has perhaps never been a more visible time for science in the decision-making landscape, and, commensurately, never has there been a time more fraught with potential peril for science. Fundamentally, the work of science is slow and painstaking, with different groups of scientists building on the work of others until we arrive at some consensus on what we know. That is, of course, challenged when science is being produced at a breakneck pace, made public mostly before peer review has taken place (2), and often looked to by decision makers hoping for solutions before the field has had time …
[↵][1]1Email: sgalea{at}bu.edu.
[1]: #xref-corresp-1-1