“one of the best Covid forecasters there is” according to this tweet, which might be based on some quantitative metrics I haven’t easily found or might just not be right
There isn’t (ironically) a clean quantifiable metric for comparing forecasters [1] across different platforms and different question sets , but among the EA forecasting world (at least in 2020 when I paid attention to this), Juan has had nontrivial renown in having consistently one of the best coronavirus forecasting records across a broad range of platforms. For example, in addition to his native Metaculus, Juan currently is #3 for coronavirus questions among Good Judgement Open forecasters (and iirc used to be higher, note that he did not predict all questions). He was also #1 in a private GJP 2.0 tournament I was in. He became a certified superforecaster (TM) in the end of 2020. He also generally has explicit reasoning and good takes.
With the caveat that I mostly stopped paying attention to covid in 2021, I think Juan is plausibly one of the best covid forecasters out there, at least among people willing to put their forecasts out there publicly. I think it’s plausible that private entities (eg in intelligence agencies, or trading firms) have noticeably better private forecasts on covid than the public ones we’ve seen, but I’m pretty agnostic about this.
[1] The Rick and Morty joke “science is more art than science”comes to mind.
Re Omicron-specific boosters—I’d love some ideas about what to do here. Orgs like 1DaySooner are helpful for advocacy but I don’t see any path to the kind of speed we need here.
“I believe, in principle, we will at a certain time point need a new vaccine against this new variant. The question is how urgent this needs to be available,” CEO Ugur Sahin told a conference hosted by Reuters.
I’m struggling to see a plausible intervention at all here.
(This is Dave Orr, on the board at Packard.)
(Copied from below from before there was this thread.)
Sorry, just saw this! This did not in fact work out on the hoped-for timeline, and I didn’t have a grantee in mind—I think the right way to try to do something here would’ve been through direct dialogue with policymakers.
I’m curious about when the FDA’s expedited flu vaccine approval came to be. It seems plausible to me that this is something grandfathered in from the early days and that the modern FDA wouldn’t be flexible enough to start something like it.
The immune system is complicated. Changing the vaccines to be Omicron specific could negatively affect the body’s ability to fight delta and future strains. They need to do enough research to at least know that changing the vaccines would be unlikely to cause harm—or, that Omicron is sufficiently bad that it would be worth the risk. It’s not the flu.
Comments for today’s post on Omicron will go here.
Re: your comment on Juan Cambeiro being
There isn’t (ironically) a clean quantifiable metric for comparing forecasters [1] across different platforms and different question sets , but among the EA forecasting world (at least in 2020 when I paid attention to this), Juan has had nontrivial renown in having consistently one of the best coronavirus forecasting records across a broad range of platforms. For example, in addition to his native Metaculus, Juan currently is #3 for coronavirus questions among Good Judgement Open forecasters (and iirc used to be higher, note that he did not predict all questions). He was also #1 in a private GJP 2.0 tournament I was in. He became a certified superforecaster (TM) in the end of 2020. He also generally has explicit reasoning and good takes.
With the caveat that I mostly stopped paying attention to covid in 2021, I think Juan is plausibly one of the best covid forecasters out there, at least among people willing to put their forecasts out there publicly. I think it’s plausible that private entities (eg in intelligence agencies, or trading firms) have noticeably better private forecasts on covid than the public ones we’ve seen, but I’m pretty agnostic about this.
[1] The Rick and Morty joke “science is more art than science”comes to mind.
This is helpful, thanks!
Re Omicron-specific boosters—I’d love some ideas about what to do here. Orgs like 1DaySooner are helpful for advocacy but I don’t see any path to the kind of speed we need here.
And even Pfizer seems to think that there isn’t a reason for urgency right now (WaPo):
I’m struggling to see a plausible intervention at all here.
(This is Dave Orr, on the board at Packard.)
(Copied from below from before there was this thread.)
Sorry, just saw this! This did not in fact work out on the hoped-for timeline, and I didn’t have a grantee in mind—I think the right way to try to do something here would’ve been through direct dialogue with policymakers.
Thanks for this post- I forwarded it to a Oxford bioethicist and nudged him to write about it and they just published a thoughtful piece on it in the BMJ: ‘Regulating strain-specific vaccines – speed, rigour and challenge trials’.
Nice!
I’m curious about when the FDA’s expedited flu vaccine approval came to be. It seems plausible to me that this is something grandfathered in from the early days and that the modern FDA wouldn’t be flexible enough to start something like it.
The immune system is complicated.
Changing the vaccines to be Omicron specific could negatively affect the body’s ability to fight delta and future strains. They need to do enough research to at least know that changing the vaccines would be unlikely to cause harm—or, that Omicron is sufficiently bad that it would be worth the risk.
It’s not the flu.