Holy Vaccine, Batman!!! Pfizer shows early vaccine results are over 90% effective.
Warp speed vaccine developments are a game-changing "Meeting of the Minds" in the scientific community that will benefit humanity for decades to come.
Not only has Pfizer announced this morning that their vaccine has proven over 90% effective in early trials, but we have even more exciting news for you today!
In a few weeks, we will be publishing an eBook titled “How To Build A World-Class Network In Record Time” and releasing an updated version of our online course under the same name. Premium subscribers will get BOTH of these resources complimentary as part of their monthly or annual subscriptions ($400+ value).
If you didn’t catch the news this morning, Pfizer announced that early trials of their vaccine efforts have proven to be 90% effective.
This puts them on track to request emergency authorization (i.e. extremely limited use) from the FDA in December 2020, with Dr. Anthony Fauci adding (according to the Associated Press) that “the results suggesting 90% effectiveness are ‘just extraordinary,’ adding: ‘Not very many people expected it would be as high as that.’”
Long-term, I think this is INCREDIBLE news, both for overcoming the pandemic and resuming some sense of normalcy towards the end of 2021.
However, in the short term, I still believe we’re in a world of pain given:
Our 5 highest case counts for the pandemic have all been…in the last five days!
The federal government and most state/local governments are doing nothing to curb the spread of the virus, either because they don’t believe it’s a real threat to their constituents and/or the political pressures of mask mandates, social distancing requirements, and lockdowns are worth navigating.
It will still be months before any vaccine is approved for the general public.
There is a strong “anti-vaxxer” movement in the United States as well as heightened distrust of the vaccine development effort which may slow efforts to get enough citizens to take a vaccine for it to be effective as a society.
Even if everyone trusted the vaccines being developed, depending on how they’re supposed to be taken (i.e. once, twice, quarterly, annually, etc), manufacturing and distributing hundreds of millions of doses will prove demanding and difficult.
If we look past the “Negative Nancy” stuff for a second, we are better off as a society because the scientific community has learned to fast-track problem-solving efforts in 2020 to combat this pandemic.
It’s worth noting that we have never developed a vaccine this quickly.
In fact, according to History.com, the fastest we’ve ever found a vaccine before was for Mumps. That effort to FOUR YEARS and was only possible because of post WWII infrastructure and the demands to overcome mumps as a “national security threat”.
Side note: Mumps is still around today, but fewer than 1000 Americans are infected annually, so we will likely never stomp out COVID-19. The goal would be to get in under control and develop therapeutics to limit loss of life for those unfortunate to catch this virus in coming decades.
The takeaway is that, in order to establish an effective “Meeting of the Minds” to solve problems in your own company, community, or family, you can:
Increase urgency (i.e. if we don’t develop a vaccine in the next year, millions of people may die and tens of trillions of dollars will be lost in the global economy)
Increase resources available to solve the problem (i.e. invest more collective manpower and money to solve the problem faster)
Decrease the red tape or communication barriers around problem-solving.
On this last point, part of the reason we’ve found vaccine possibilities in months (rather than years) is because the scientific community is sharing information more quickly than before.
Normally, scientists wait for their work to be “peer reviewed” in traditional publications before sharing with the public.
However, this year they have bypassed the peer review process in order to share work with colleagues through Internet “pre-prints” and line up the next steps in their vaccine development efforts.
Despite the many negative consequences of pre-prints, including the proliferation of conspiracy theories and misinformation…
…and while peer reviews have been required from my limited understanding to officially test on human subjects…
…by moving down the field before peer review, when scientists have gotten the green light from others, they’ve already saved months of time in setting up follow-on research or trials.
And in your own company, community, or family, removing communication errors likely won’t lead to the same potential risks as they may with a global healthcare crisis as you capture all the positives of speedy collaboration.
Here’s what I’m ultimately getting at…
How can you learn from the global scientific community and improve the problem-solving and solution-scaling efforts within your own organization?
While today’s headlines are a bright spot in the sh*tstorm that’s been 2020, we aren’t out of the woods yet.
But hopefully, we can learn from the global scientific community about how to improve future vaccine developments as well as how to overcome other issues like climate change, political and social unrest, or income inequality so we can beat those pressing problems in record time as well.
That’s my two cents and I’m excited to get your thoughts as well.
-Jared
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Jared Kleinert is the founder of Meeting of the Minds (motm.co), as well as a TED speaker, 2x award-winning author, and USA Today's "Most Connected Millennial".
Meeting of the Minds curates "super-connectors" and subject matter experts as invite-only attendees to 3 day summits in places like Napa Valley, Bermuda, and elsewhere, as well as “deep dives” such as this Marketing and Biz Dev strategy & implementation workshop. Members of the MOTM network include CEOs of 7, 8, and 9-figure businesses, creators of globally-recognized brands and social movements, New York Times bestselling authors, founders of pre-IPO tech unicorns, c-suite execs from Fortune 500 companies, and others.
Jared's career began at 15 years old when he started his first company, and took off at 16 while working as the first intern, and then one of the first 10 employees, for an enterprise SaaS company called 15Five, which today has raised over $40M and has almost 2000 forward-thinking companies as monthly recurring clients.
Later, Jared would become a delegate to President Obama's 2013 Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Malaysia, write multiple books including the "#1 Entrepreneurship Book of 2015", and speak at TED@IBM the day before he turned 20.
As a highly-sought after keynote speaker and consultant, Jared’s clients range from organizations like Facebook, Samsung, Bacardi, Estee Lauder, IBM, Cornell, Berkeley, AdAge, and the National Speakers Association. His insights on entrepreneurship, networking, marketing, and business development have been featured in Forbes, TIME, Harvard Business Review, Fortune, NPR, Entrepreneur, Mashable, Fox Business and more.
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