You're doubtless familiar with the term armchair quarterback, and probably with its myriad modifications for disciplines outside of football, like armchair meteorologist to connote enthusiasm for forecasting despite an obvious lack of expertise, but I heard a different usage yesterday that sounded truly groundbreaking. Armchair epidemiologist.

"During the pandemic, everybody was an armchair epidemiologist, right?" Dr. Tyler Evans was telling me on the phone from California. People were excited about the mRNA technology used to develop COVID-19 vaccines.

"Everybody was citing the evidence and the data and all that. A lot of my patients were like, 'Oh yeah well Pfizer's 96% effective, Moderna's 97%.' Everybody knew these numbers, so I'm surprised now that people are having amnesia."

In th

See Full Page