First Opinion is STAT’s platform for interesting, illuminating, and provocative articles about the life sciences writ large, written by biotech insiders, health care workers, researchers, and others.
To encourage robust, good-faith discussion about issues raised in First Opinion essays, STAT publishes selected Letters to the Editor received in response to them. You can submit a Letter to the Editor here, or find the submission form at the end of any First Opinion essay.
We welcome the call for new research into the role of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) during the Covid-19 response using U.S. county-level data, but we regret that Marc Lipsitch and Sara Cody’s recent First Opinion mischaracterized our 2023 Lancet study as a strawman in order to make the case for theirs. In doing so, they made errors that a fact check and a closer reading of our study would have identified.
After we alerted Lipsitch and Cody to the errors a week ago, they updated their original piece to address some of the mistakes, but others still persist. More importantly, the authors miss the opportunity to state plainly the real challenges of demonstrating the value of NPIs in those early years of the U.S. Covid response.
