By May 1st, there had been circa 1 billion covid vaccine doses administered (the first approvals having been done circa 5 months earlier). Since then, circa 1 billion doses have been administered every single month.
By May 1st, (slightly) more than half of all doses had been used in rich countries (despite them being one fifth of the world population). Since then, the rich countries used 23% of the doses, just slightly more than their population share.
This is later than it could have been, but it’s excellent news. During the month of June alone, more doses were given out than had been given out during the 5 month period Dec-Apr.
The small size purple component (Low income countries) is still a tragedy, of course1; but, globally, vaccine shortages will soon be a thing of the past as hesitancy (or refusal) become the bottleneck everywhere (as they already are in Europe and the US) and then individuals in low income countries will also receive shots.2
Day job link
We recently uploaded a preprint on our semi-supervised system for MAG (metagenomic-assembled genome) building: SemiBin: Incorporating information from reference genomes with semi-supervised deep learning leads to better metagenomic-assembled genomes (MAGs).
Comments are welcome (as are users of the tool and bug reports).
Links of the Week
Steep vs gentle curves for software development. This probably applies to everything: businesses, academic project, ….
“The infallible test of anything I write is embarrassment,” Rushdie says. “If I’m embarrassed to show it to you, then it’s not ready.” Salman Rushdie is on Substack
The idea of Degrowth has always come across to me as so obviously eurocope: once European countries realized that catch-up growth with the US had definitely stopped and Asian economies kept overtaking them in economic/cultural importance, then eurocope kicked in: “we are poor, but honest.”3 Economically and politically, it has always been a daft idea, as Noah Smith points out. Also, note how degrowthers say things like “you have to give up luxuries, like your SUV” and rarely “you have to give up luxuries, like organic produce.” (Bonus link: Sri Lanka switched to organic farming and food shortage ensued).
AI can do art, but, in a weird twist on Moravec’s Paradox, it cannot do mathematics (yet?).
Oldie, but goodie: The market for fake degrees.
Tweets of the Week
Photos
Because these charts use the World Bank’s definition of Low Income, note that these countries only comprise a small fraction of the world’s population (620m people, <10%). Even under a two-dose regime, this is about a month’s worth of vaccinations at the current pace.
Just having doses exist in the world is not enough to have them reach people, though, and many of the factors that keep these countries poor will also make it difficult to distribute vaccines efficiently.