Links.Tweets. (Week 36.2021)
Over 3 billion covid vax doses were administered over the last 3 months
I have been catching up on good tweets & links from the summer, so perhaps the next few posts will me more links/tweets than the typical.
One piece of good news is that vaccination keeps going at a steady pace, with ~1 billion shots being given every month for the last three months! Most of these are going to middle-income countries, with high-income countries also taking a larger than proportional share; but low-income countries still have not administered many doses.
If the world as a whole had done first-doses-first, at this point, every adult in the world could have been vaccinated by now.
Links of the Week
Strategic citing: “For example, living Nobel prize winners get more citations than dead ones even when they were awarded the prize jointly.”
NIMBY worries stop solar power in Nevada, while in the EU, the image of nuclear energy may be turning around, slowly: (“‘We can’t afford to shut down nuclear because we’re going to build more coal like Germany has done over the last 15 years — frankly to its shame,’ said Sean Kidney, CEO of Climate Bonds Initiative and a member of the European Commission’s advisory Platform on Sustainable Finance.”). As I have said before, I predict that, at some point in the not-so-distant future, anti-nuclear environmentalism will be seen as the oxymoron that it is.
One of the tensions in the current situation is that “we” want agencies such as FDA/EMA/… to act as public health agencies, but they are, at heart, regulatory agencies. They think of themselves as standing across the table from Big Pharma and fighting to keep them inline. As they say, in politics, if you are not at the table, you’re on the menu. Here is a first-person account of being on the menu: “The FDA almost killed me”