Dr. Ashish Jha, Dean of Brown University School of Public Health, opens his remarks by highlighting what he was wrong about and what he has learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the importance of communicating and disseminating new information as it contradicts the old.
His remarks also focus on ways the pandemic has changed the peer review publication process because of the need to disseminate new information quickly in ways that traditional publication can’t keep up with. While the rise of preprint publications was warranted, he also notes the rise of misinformation and junk science.
The pandemic also enabled reliance on non-traditional data sources and revealed the need to build better, more equitable data systems that account for disparities. He offers three ways the D&I community can address these issues:
1. Invest in data infrastructure.
2. Require rigor & quality of pre-prints without down slowing science.
3. Think about who the trusted voices for dissemination and implementation are and build them up.