I made a stupid mistake in my last post on this topic1 and mis-estimated how much vaccine doses were given out in September.2 In fact, the peak of global vaccination happened in August and it has slowed down since then.
What is going on? We know that Western countries are no longer dose constrained but demand is down. But what is responsible for the global slowdown? There is still a lot of misinformation of the style “Rich countries are hoarding vaccines,” which has not been true for a long time.
It seems that many countries in Africa are seeing their demand plateau at very low levels of vaccinations: South Africa has delayed shipments, doses are spoiling in Nigeria… It is not clear how representative these stories are of what is happening in Africa,3 but if the bottlenecks are not lack of doses, what are they?
Links of the Week
Combinatorial, additive and dose-dependent drug–microbiome associations: a large cohort study in Nature (including yours truly)
An open code pledge for the neuroscience community: a clever use of conditional pledges to solve collective action problems in science
Tweets of the Week
I have already reimbursed everyone, with interest.
There was a typo in my code, so that what I called September actually consisted of August + September.
One of the annoying aspects of this discourse has been lumping all of Africa together as if there weren’t huge economic, cultural, and other differences between countries there. There is a larger difference in development between Botswana and Mozambique than between Bulgaria and Norway.