12 years ago most experts felt it would be reckless to update major web browsers more often than 6-12 months. Now 4-6 weeks is the norm.
It’s far from a perfect analogy, but perhaps there’s something to learn from this for vaccines? @RADVACproject https://radvac.org/ 1/11

  1. Chrome led this “evergreen browser revolution” by taking the controversial position that it was more important to be able to respond to issues very quickly than to have maximum confidence in quality before releasing. A fast update culture can reduce net harm. 2/11
  1. Updates happen in a staged fashion with careful attention to usage and performance metrics. If there’s an anomaly we can’t explain, updates are paused (or, worst case, recalled) while we figure it out. 3/11
  1. Lab testing is of course still critical. We do as much as we reasonably can WITHIN our release timeframe. 4/11
  1. Rapid and tight feedback loops are essential. If something goes wrong, users can file bugs with a system in place such that the right developer can hear about it, and potentially take immediate corrective action. 5/11
  1. The Chrome team created a culture and set of processes to ensure that emergencies would be dealt with effectively in a matter of hours. This includes “blameless post-mortems” to constantly get better at emergency response. 6/11
  1. Risky changes are done as random A/B trials starting with a small population and ramping up only when metrics look good. Yes, that means Chrome is always experimenting on average users and some users are harmed as a result! 7/11
  1. All users are given the choice to opt-in to even higher risk models (daily-update canary channel, weekly update dev channel, etc.) and feedback from those populations are essential to decision making for the larger user population. 8/11
  1. Finally, Chrome was released open source as the Chromium project so that when we inevitably make mistakes or have blind spots, others can step in and correct them by competition (forks) and/or cooperation (upstream contributions). Users can choose more stable browsers. 9/11

Ok, I know you’re outraged that I’m suggesting maybe doing things with vaccines which would cause some harm. The important question is how much more or less harm than status quo?
Millions died while we waited for COVID vaccine trials! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Tzj76m1n1A 10/11

Oh and if you think this fast-update model can’t possibly work for something with life-and-death consequences, then you probably don’t yet own a Tesla. It’s just a matter of time before most cars will follow this “evergreen” model too. 11/11