The chart looks the way it would look if the vaccines have the impact we hope they have – but the chart could also look like this for other reasons than vaccines and descriptive statistics are not enough to know that some other reason might explain the differences we see.
For example: young people could be less worried about infecting their parents and therefore are less cautious than before so that cases (and hospitalizations) among young people are increasing, while they are falling for older people.
Health researchers estimate that every year 8 million people die an early death due to smoking. This means that 15%(!) of global deaths are attributed to smoking.
Smoking causes incredible suffering globally – but we can win the fight: A thread. 👇
With the knowledge that smoking causes cancer and the evidence that cancer didn’t only increase with smoking, but also declined when smoking declined, it may appear obvious that smoking kills.
But it wasn't obvious *at all* until the second half of the 20th century.
If we would apply the US poverty line for the world – and we would perfectly redistribute the world’s incomes, so that everyone has the average – the world economy would need to more than double to end global poverty.
Don’t know if this question is very odd, or if someone might perhaps have the same problem.
I like to write in Google Docs and I like to write in many, many documents at the same time.
Is there some tool, extension, etc that allows me to find and access many active Google Docs?
In the last months I “organized” that by relying on different tabs.
All the Google Docs in which I’m writing or in which I’m editing work of others would be in tabs – and via Tab Suspender they would be suspended, so as soon as I clicked on the relevant tab they became active.
A nice solution would be if there was for example an extension that would allow me to put together a kind of home page – perhaps a simple grid with all the links to the relevant Google Docs – and as soon as I click on one of them it’d open quickly.
I agree with the goal of a “people’s vaccine” – we need vaccines for the entire world.
But I don’t see how these proposals would get us there.
It seems to me that our global situation is very much worse than these proposals assume.
1/
The various "people’s vaccine" proposals want to get rid of intellectual property restrictions for the COVID vaccines so that more vaccines can be produced.
2/
In the past there were such horrible situations in which patent restrictions prevented the world from making progress against diseases.
(For example the patent restrictions on ART that meant that HIV-positive people in poor countries could not get the treatment they needed).
3/
The good news: “even at this late stage, investment to expand manufacturing capacity would have large benefits.”
The frustrating finding “investing in the amount of capacity recommended by our model (as of August 2020) would have allowed ... the world to complete vaccination by October 2021 rather than June 2022.”
(The benefits would have been $1.14 trillion. Obvs much higher than costs.)
One of the key points to understand in the question of to get the world vaccinated is that the the social value of more vaccines far exceeds the commercial returns to vaccine the manufacturers from installing capacity.