To Ashish Jha..of..Brown University..the insistence on offloading responsibility to..states looks less like a reasoned plan than a deliberate evasion tactic."
"'It’s very clear that the feds..didn’t know or care whether states were going to be able to do this or not. If states can’t do it, [they could] always blame them. And that has been the strategy from the very beginning.'"
"Signs..we live in a dying superpower are all around us. Officials..make illogical, chaotic decisions; and everything is much more complicated than it needs to be. Could no one have invented an app or..website that assigns people to..vaccination sites in order of priority?"
"Is it impossible for [a state] to..take direct control of the process, and order its National Guard to give out the vaccine at schools? How about letting the..oldest people get their shots first—as..orderly countries have done—before opening up the system to a million others?"
"China’s experience has underscored the advice that many experts have suggested but few countries have followed: The more quickly you bring the pandemic under control, the more quickly the economy can recover"
“In many countries, debates have raged over the balance between protecting public health and keeping the economy running. In China, there is little debate. It did both.”
"The success has positioned China well, economically and diplomatically, to push back against the United States and others..It has also emboldened Mr. Xi, who has offered China’s experience as a model for others to follow."
"[T]here is another pathway, also plausible, that must be investigated. That is the possibility of a laboratory accident"
"Wuhan..is a..center of virus studies..with at least six..BSL-3 laboratories..some..very active in coronavirus research."
"To find out if there was a..lab..accident at..WIV..or another lab, investigators would want to..examine..lab notes, records of experiments and data, intra-laboratory communications.., as well as bat samples, viral strains and all sequences"
"One model that COVID-19 vaccine updates could follow is that of seasonal flu vaccines..Generally,..threshold for updating flu vaccines is similar in magnitude to..changes in neutralizing..responses that researchers have linked to the 501Y.V2 variant."
"Moderna..said..it expects to..rely on clinical trials involving 100s, rather than 1,000s, of participants to push forward with..vaccine against..variant. Foroohar expects that it will take..company..about 5 months to go from producing..new vaccine to submitting.. to regulators."
"Like Moderna, other coronavirus vaccine makers have said that they are looking into updating their vaccines. They include Johnson & Johnson of New Brunswick, New Jersey, which is developing a single-shot coronavirus vaccine."
Taiwan: 0.3 per million (7 deaths)
China: 3 per million (4,636 deaths)
Singapore: 5 per million (29 deaths)
South Korea: 28 per million (1,420 deaths)
Hong Kong: 24 per million (178 deaths)
Japan: 44 per million (5,546 deaths)
US: 1,400 per million (450,381 deaths; +3K daily)
New Zealand: 5 per million (25 deaths)
Australia: 35 per million (909 deaths)
..
UK: 1,600 per million (105,571 deaths)
Nations that successfully suppressed outbreak include both small and large, both island and non-island, and both autocratic and democratic.
Sole relevant parameter for success or failure is whether government took prompt resolute action (success) or whether it did not (failure).
"As most nations around the world struggle with new lockdowns and layoffs in the face of the surging pandemic, just one major economy has bounced back after bringing the coronavirus mostly under control: China. The Chinese economy rose 2.3% last year"
"The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences predicted last week that the country’s economy would expand 7.8% this year. If it does, it would be China’s strongest performance in nine years."
"Keeping the virus at bay has been critical to China’s economic success over the past year. While the pandemic ravages other nations, Beijing’s aggressive top-down approach kept the virus from spreading rapidly across the country."