Viswanathan K's Thoughts

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...

It’s been a long time since I wrote about COVID-19, so here I go again. When India’s active case count (number of people still with the virus) started dipping, I crossed my fingers and hoped we had turned the tide. It’s been a few weeks since then and touchwood, and this is how the graph looks now (it’s falling): India is formulating its plans on how to rollout the vaccine (if and when that is available), hedges its bets by pursuing indigenous vaccines as well as trying out the Russian vaccine, identifies whom to prioritize first (doctors and other healthcare folks, truck drivers etc), and explores the option of using this as an opportunity to issue Digital Health ID’s for all. And even now, we hardly hear any politicking on the topic of the virus across states, across political parties.   On the other hand, there’s the US, which still shows no signs of reversing the trend of active cases (still rising, never fell): But that doesn’t stop Trump from claiming not just success,...