One billion vaccine doses per month!
Links. Tweets. Photos (2021.27)
It is still under-appreciated how successful the global covid19-vaccination programme is. It did start badly: there was massive under-investment in production capacity during 2020,1 which slowed the early rollout of vaccine.2
While this was a huge mistake and did cause many unnecessary deaths, eventually production did catch up and the world is now consistently giving over 30 million covid shots per day, corresponding to >1b/month:
Our primate brains over-focus on distribution issues, but was there a single person who around July 2020 was predicting that in a year, the world will be delivering 1 billion covid19-vaccine doses per month? Even a few weeks ago, I was still reading people who claimed that without drastic actions3 global vaccination would not be possible for several years.
As most vaccination regimes use two doses per individual, this corresponds to ~500 million people per month. As over >1 billion people are already vaccinated (again, who would have dared predict this a year ago?), by the end of 2021, more than half of the world’s population will have received a vaccine and dose availability will likely no longer be a constraint on the speed of the vaccination programme.4
Links of the Week
Quine-relay: “[A] Ruby program that generates Rust program that generates Scala program that generates ...(through 128 languages in total)... REXX program that generates the original Ruby code again.” (via DRMacIver)
Slowly, the world is exploring alternative vaccination regimes, including fractional dosing. But the lack of urgency in studying the best vaccine regimes is still shocking: it should have been the #1 issue of 2021.
More Marginal Revolution: Scientists discover spiders are eating snakes all over the world
Why Are Gamers So Much Better Than Scientists at Catching Fraud? by Stuart Richie. And related link: Why do psychology reformers keep leaving the field?
“Life was not kind to Pouchain even before she was pronounced dead.” — A woman has spent 20 years trying to prove to the French state that she is not dead. What is most interesting about this story is how she was pronounced dead originally: as part of what can be generously be termed an aggressive legal strategy, a former employee in a labour dispute claimed to the Court that Pouchain was dead so they could sue the estate (as it was legally easier than to sue a living person). Given the novelty of this approach, it probably did not even occur to the judge that this could be a complete fabrication, so nobody checked and the woman was now legally dead.
Tweets of the Week
Photos
The US government did invest in vaccine capacity with Operation Warp Speed. But the EU instead haggled with manufacturers for pennies and was proud of it.
Also, regulatory approvals were slow, with few regulatory agencies really internalizing the need for speed.
Drastic measures proposed included ideas such as lifting intellectual protection laws to punish vaccine developers.
Quick back of the envelope calculation: There are 7.6b people in the world (give or take) and supply seems to stop being the major constraint when ~50% of the population is vaccinated, which is 3.8b. Around 1.3b are already vaccinated, so once another 2.5b are vaccinated, supply will no longer be the constraint. At 0.5b/month, this milestone will be reached in November. Production capacity keeps increasing too (including new vaccines becoming available).