Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Moderna and Pfizer are expected to make $18 and $15 billion in revenue this year respectively, thanks to their COVID-19 vaccines. Guess how much Astra-Zeneca, the British company, will make? Zero profit. That’s right, AZ sells at cost price. And yet, see the amount of flak and negative publicity they draw in the West? Sarah Boseley looked into the reasons .   In America, the reasons are not political. Rather, it’s based on their (mis)handling of an early adverse reaction during clinical trial way back in September. In the UK, the trail was stopped and restarted within days. The US regulatory body though felt it had not been told of the issue early enough. The situation was also complicated, says Stephen Evans, a professor of pharmacoepidemiology in London by the intent of the trial: “I think that some of the difficulties were that the trials were being set up by Oxford to answer public health questions, whereas very clearly Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna’s trials in the US were...

As India is hit by the second wave of COVID-19, compounded by a new variant (mutant), one begins to wonder: when will it end? Will the ongoing vaccination drive, once it hits a critical number, turn the tide of new cases per day, like it seems to have done in Israel, the UK, and now in the US?   One thing felt strange though: the US and Israel are using vaccines with efficacy rates of 94% and above, while the UK is using one with a much lower rate of 67%. Something doesn’t feel right: with such a huge difference in efficacy rates, how could both the US/Israel and UK have similar outcomes (lower case rate)? This is a critical question for India, since after all, we’re using the British and Indian vaccines with much lower efficacy rates too.   This YouTube video was revelatory on so many fronts, including the questions above. First up, different vaccines were tested in different places and at different times:          Moderna and Pfizer were...

David Wallace-Wells’ very long article points out that: “For decades, the richest nations of the world had told themselves a story in which wealth and medical superiority offered, if not total immunity from disease, then certainly a guarantee against pandemics, regarded as a premodern residue of the underdeveloped world. That arrogance has made the coronavirus not just a staggering but an ironic plague.” And as it has turned out: “It was these countries that suffered most, died most, flailed most.”   Even within those countries, the EU has handled it particularly badly. It started with a (Western) belief that the disease can’t be controlled, that China too would fail. Worse, the one measure that was used (and worked) across Asia – lockdowns – was dismissed contemptuously: “The shutdown was seen not as a demonstration of extreme seriousness but as a sign of the reflexive authoritarianism of the Chinese regime (and the imagined servility of its population).” They never...

Back when I was a teenager, “acid rain” was a worrying phenomenon. The term referred to the problem of particulate matter released from factories (e.g. Sulphur etc) mixing with water-vapour in the air. As a result, the rain that fell was a bit more acidic. Acid rain then made the soil more acidic and impacted the organisms that lived in soil as well as the growth of plants. And from them the acidic content would flow up the food chain with damaging consequences at every step. Even worse, the (slightly) more acidic rivers would be a bit more corrosive and wear down rocks faster. In turn, those rocks would release more particulate matter into the water and air, accelerating the whole acid rain cycle further.   Sounds scary, right? So why don’t we hear about acid rain anymore?   This podcast explains. Remember this was a problem in the 1980’s. The biggest polluter back then was the US (China and India were inconsequential back then on most matters, including pollution). ...

As the second wave of COVID-19 hits India, PM Modi raised concerns about vaccine wastage, i.e., the fraction of vaccines that go unused. The national average wastage rate is 6.5%, with Telengana and Andhra the worst offenders at 17.6% and 11.6%, and states like Tamil Nadu doing well at 3.7%.   So how does this wastage happen? Broadly, as this Indian Express article explains, it is split into two categories, as wastage in (1) Unopened vials, and (2) Opened vials.   In case of unopened vials, the reasons are (a) expiration date reached, (b) vaccine exposed to heat, (c) vaccine frozen, (d) breakage, (e) theft, and (f) discarding of unused vials. And in case of opened vials, the reasons are (a) discarding unused vials at the end of a session, (b) inability to draw enough doses from a vial, (c) submergence in water, (d) contamination, and (e) poor vaccine administration practices.   Or if you look at it from a different angle, wastage can happen during transportat...

Look at the history of the first European “global” powers, Spain and Portugal, and you’ll see it is based on military/naval might. But the next power, Holland, had another ace up its sleeve, writes William Bernstein in A Splendid Exchange : “Their most potent weapon was Dutch finance.”   Bernstein elaborates. In 1602, investors poured 6.5 million guilders (that’s $100 million in today’s money) into the Dutch East India Company: “The capital was permanent, that is, if things went well, it would yield profits that would go mostly to pay for the expansion of business.” Contrast that with the standard practice of the day: money put in a company had to be paid back after a fixed period… with interest. See how close the Dutch model is to modern day stock investing? This was a sign of an “extraordinary degree of confidence in Dutch financial institutions”.   But why was there so much confidence to begin with? Being a lowland country, the Netherlands had to laboriously ...

As COVID-19 vaccination rates increase in some countries, there’s talk of a vaccine passport: a certificate that you’ve been vaccinated, which then allows you access to certain activities (travel, work, gym, school etc). Others argue against it pointing out that fraud apart, the vaccines have never been rigorously tested: how long are they effective? What if the passport gives a false sense of well-being, thereby causing caution to be thrown to the wind?   The vaccine passport should logically be a digital app. Ironically, I find that it’s the West that doesn’t have a solution to solve the question of unifying (1) Who you are, (2) Have you been vaccinated?, (3) Is this your phone?. Amusingly, this is an area where India and China are better placed, thanks mainly to the fact that they started building their systems in the Internet/smartphone age (think Aadhar) whereas Western systems are pre-Internet/pre-smartphone era relics!   Then again, there’s Israel, a hi-tec coun...

Check out this night view of the world, that shows which areas are lit up: Notice the contrast between how India (and Japan) are lit up in their entirety whereas China dims from its east to the center and then just goes dark?   This blog isn’t to gloat. Rather, it is about the “why” behind the China lighting pattern. The fact that parts of China are uninhabitable deserts is only part of the answer. In his book, Divided , Tim Marshall explains the major reasons.   From Genghis Khan onwards, the famous Silk Road route was on the ascendant. It traversed from China through Central Asia to the Middle East and modern-day Turkey. Surely, that should have resulted in the parts of China along the route, and regions radiating outwards from it, to be richer and more developed, and thus better lit up in our map, right? So why is that not the case today?   The reversal in economic priority from the land routes to the sea lanes happened not by choice, says Marshall. Inste...

In March, 2011, a Canadian couple drove towards Las Vegas using GPS for directions. They never got there. Instead, the man was found dead, and the woman barely alive. There’s a term for what had happened: “Death by GPS”. As Greg Milner explains in his book on GPS, Pinpoint : “It describes what happens when your GPS fails you, not by being wrong, exactly, but often by being too right … it takes you down roads which barely exist, or were used at one time and abandoned, or are not suitable for your car…”   Of course, literal deaths by GPS are very rare. But reaching the wrong place is not very uncommon. Like the Japanese tourists who drove into the Australian ocean. Or the Belgian woman who ended up in Croatia. How can these things happen? Can’t people realize something is off as they stray farther and farther?   Well, when you’re driving through places you have no idea about, you have no sense of where you are anyway. And thus alertness is not really an option: “GPS ...

In his book, Origin Story , David Christian points out the different techniques using which different fields of science find the age of something. And “age” is another way of saying “time”.   Let’s start with astronomy. How do they know the Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago? It started off when astronomers discovered that certain stars have the same brightness, i.e., their actual brightness is the same everywhere. When they see such a star, astronomers measure its perceived brightness as seen from earth (or a telescope in space). Using the two values (actual v/s perceived brightness), they can calculate the distance of the object in question. Next, take the current distances and speeds of galaxies, and work backwards to see when they must have all been together, and you get the age of the universe.   Geologists and paleontologists, on the other hand, used radioactivity to come up with the age of everything from ancient mummies to the earth to the solar system ...

Heard of America’s Operation Warp Speed project? “Operation Warp Speed (OWS) is a public–private partnership initiated by the U.S. government to facilitate and accelerate the development, manufacturing, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics.” It was started back in May or June last year. Yes, by Trump. Is that why the opposition dominated parliament refused to fund it? Upon which Trump & Co then diverted funds from other projects into OWS…   Every vaccine (other than Johnson & Johnson) requires 2 doses. Canada can’t get delivery of its vaccines, and has now flipped their policy and announced that the greater good is served if everyone got 1 dose first (twice the number of people vaccinated that way). But what is the effectiveness of just 1 dose? Why then were all the vaccines approved as 2 dose vaccines?   In Australia, physicians are banned from recommending one vaccine over the other (It is apparently considered a form o...

In his book, A Splendid Exchange , William Bernstein says Columbus knew he shouldn’t even be trying to reach India by going west. After all: “The feasibility of the westward route depended on its being short.” While nobody had found a route by going west (and thus its length wasn’t known), simple maths told the tale. From the time of the Greeks, the earth’s circumference was known to be 25,000 miles. The eastward route from Lisbon to Malacca was 7,000 miles. Ergo, the westward route would be (at least) the difference of the two: 18,000 miles. Not only was this much longer, it was “incompatible with survival at sea” for the age.   So how did Columbus then convince his funders? He used the age-old technique of fudging the data. He took the least possible circumference of the earth and the maximum possible width of Eurasia. Lie often enough, and you start believing the lie yourself! It happened to Columbus: “So thick-skulled was the discoverer of the New World that not un...

Even if you’re the world’s largest vaccine maker, you’re not ready for production on the scale needed for COVID-19. Serum Institute of India (SII)’s CEO, Adar Poonawalla, described some of the steps taken to get there.   First, they bet on several vaccines long before regulators had approved any: “We took a huge calculated risk. It wasn't a blind risk, because we knew the Oxford scientists from our earlier collaboration with the malaria vaccine.” Back in April last year, Bill Gates had recommended exactly this policy, promising to fund factories for seven of the most promising vaccines, even though most of them would fail. In fact, SII too raised some money from Gates.   Second, decision making was fast at SII, probably helped by the fact that it is a private company. Third, he procured items like glass vials early: “I got 600 million doses worth of glass vials ahead of time and locked it in my warehouse by September.”   Fourth, SII was willing to tak...