Facilitation Note 2
May 21, 2020
Dear Pandemic Supermind Activation,
Thank you to so much to everyone who has participated in the exercise thus far! We’re excited about all of your contributions and appreciate your activity. If you have not yet had the chance to submit a contribution, please log in to the platform using the credentials emailed to you to participate: (https://www.pandemicsupermind.org/contributions). We also encourage you to comment on or support others' contributions.
We’re impressed by the diversity and breadth of ideas you are sharing, particularly within the diagnostics and monitoring, transmission control, and pandemic preparedness categories. As a reminder, at this stage in the process we are looking precisely for a wide variety of ideas. In the aforementioned categories, we are seeing contributions that are highly technical, but also policy-related, community-oriented, and beyond, which is fantastic. Keep up the great work!
We want to flag a few items for your attention:
- We are making a small change to the “Validating and Sharing Scientific Insights” category and are now renaming it to “Validating, Sharing, and Communicating Scientific Insights”. The driving question is now reframed as follows: “As new research is generated, how do we ensure that scientific insights can be validated, confirmed, shared, used, and communicated to the public and other stakeholders?” We’ve adapted this question to cover issues of misinformation and how to communicate scientific evidence to the public so that it is understandable. We’re also looking for how scientific studies can be communicated to stakeholders like policymakers to enable regulatory action.
- In the “Therapies and Vaccines” category, we are hoping a few voices could provide more contributions regarding therapies. Some examples might include ways to screen existing antiviral drugs, exploration of combination therapies, or blood plasma transfers from convalescents patients.
- We’d also encourage you to look at comments made in the discussion area, which point to other areas of consideration: (https://www.pandemicsupermind.org/contributions/2020/therapies-and-research-resources/discussion).
- Finally, please do revisit any contributions you have made to engage with others who may have left comments on your post.
May 28: First Session in Series of Catalyst Conversation Events
As another component of this initiative, we are also hosting a series of “Catalyst Conversations,” which are live virtual events where we will dive deeper into the various categories of the exercise. The first conversation will take place on May 28 at 11 am EDT on the topic of “Mask Innovations for Virus Transmission Control.”
We would be delighted for you to sign up and share the registration link for the event with any colleagues or other interested parties, with information below:
Registration: www.PandemicResponse.Events.
Kindly let me (dkong@mit.edu), or Annalyn (annalyn@mit.edu), know if you have any questions. Thank you so much again for your energy and enthusiasm!
Sincerely,
David Sun Kong, Ph.D.