As we close out the year, omicron is raging, inflation is spiking, and you can forget about next year's offsite in Honolulu.

But not all is lost. As a holiday gift to you – and ourselves – we wanted to take a moment to look back over 2021 and celebrate the many good things this year brought.

We thank you for your ongoing collaboration – and we wish you a happy holiday season.

1. A Year of COVID Data-Sharing

Back in January, economist Tyler Cowen reflected on how the rush to develop vaccines was forcing more fluid data sharing among researchers. The sharing “improved how the world does science”:

Most relevant scientific advances on the Covid-19 front have been put online in open-access form and then debated online. Even if they later came out in refereed journals, their real impact came during their early open-access days…The articles are free, the whole world can read them, and the interplay of ideas they generate is easier to track. As scientific contributions come from a greater number of different countries, including many poorer countries, these factors will be increasingly important. I work at a major U.S. research university, but even so I am frequently unable to gain access to desired academic publications.

2. The Better Health of Global Health

In February, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation made a persuasive case for how the pandemic was bringing lasting improvements to global health:

In the past, “global health” was rarely used to mean the health of everyone, everywhere. In practice, people in rich countries used this term to refer to the health of people in non-rich countries. A more accurate term probably would have been “developing country health.”

This past year, though, that changed. Global health went local. The artificial distinctions between rich countries and poor countries collapsed in the face of a virus that had no regard for borders or geography.

3. Laughing at Americans

Remember the big Oprah interview back in the spring with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle? So do the Brits. But not for Oprah’s penetrating questions. It was pharma’s DTC ads during commercial breaks that made the real impression. Tweets are forever:

If these medicine ads are what it’s like to not have an NHS I never want to experience that.

How are the side effects of the medicine in American ads more lethal than the thing they’re treating???

Maybe unregulated free market capitalism isn’t the best model for healthcare.

Got a dry mouth? Put down that glass of water. Try Hydrobouche. Side effects include death and anal leakage. Ask your doctor if this is right for you but first watch a pretty middle age woman on a swing during sunset.

4. Did One Fly Over the Cuckoo's Nest?

This summer, the edifice of the “mental health pandemic” began to crack. Sure, quarantine was lousy. But was it really amounting to a mental health crisis? The Atlantic, among others, wasn't so sure:

What many news outlets called a rise in claims or an increase in emergency-room visits was actually a rise in the percentage of claims or visits. So, for instance, the number of insurance claims related to intentional self-harm among those ages 13 to 18 did almost double as a percentage of overall medical claims in March 2020 compared with March 2019. But the total number of medical claims dropped by about half that month, likely because people were postponing their less urgent trips to the doctor.

5. Reality & Virtual Clinical Trials

The logic was obvious: lockdown would slow down clinical trials. The solution equally obvious: allow clinical trials to go virtual. Progress is being made:

Our findings demonstrate that in-silico trials of endovascular medical devices can: (i) replicate findings of conventional clinical trials, and (ii) perform virtual experiments and sub-group analyses that are difficult or impossible in conventional trials to discover new insights on treatment failure, e.g. in the presence of side-branches or hypertension.