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22 Dec, 5 tweets, 1 min read
The single most powerful force in epidemic prevention in history has been the U.S. military, ever since the days Washington variolated the Continental Army.

HT @alexbhturnbull
defenseone.com/technology/202…
The U.S. military was key to developing vaccines against yellow fever and adenovirus and crucial for eradication campaigns against yellow fever and malaria.

To this day a huge amount of vaccine basic research is funded via the Department of Defence, iirc.
Yellow fever, because of its devastating effect on epidemiologically naive expeditionary forces, is probably the most militarily important disease in history.
Yellow fever is why the Haitian revolutionaries managed to defeat Napoleon, why the weakened Spanish empire managed to hold the Caribbean and tropical Americas for three centuries, why Bolivar's ragtag army eventually managed to drive them out.
It's why America, not France, built the Panama canal — because the U.S. military discovered the mosquito vector and so U.S. engineers could use that knowledge to prevent outbreaks in the canal work camps.

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More from @davidfickling

David Fickling Profile picture
15 Dec
Think Europe is seeing crazy electricity prices amidst this winter's power crunch? It's got nothing on Singapore. 🧵

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
There's been a lot of headlines in recent weeks as a global and continent-wide gas shortage has driven Europe's wholesale power prices to more than $200 a megawatt-hour, extraordinary levels by normal standards.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
But Singapore routinely sees prices at 10 times those levels. They were at $2,184/MWh in October!

Even compared to European peak load prices, which is probably a better comparison, this is 5x higher.
Read 18 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
2 Dec
This recent @wsj scoop under the innocuous headline "Secret Chinese Port Project in Persian Gulf Rattles U.S. Relations With U.A.E." has immense implications for the 21st century.

wsj.com/articles/us-ch…

IMO you won't read a better analysis of this than in @bopinion. Thread:
@WSJ @bopinion The report said that US intel agencies had found China was building suspected military facilities at Khalifa, a container port built by Chinese state shipping company COSCO in Abu Dhabi.

Building work was stopped after the US said it risked damaging US-UAE relations.
@WSJ @bopinion The story is a big deal because the Persian Gulf is essentially an American lake. The only outside powers with military facilities there are the U.S., plus some pretty small bases from its allies the U.K. and France which were only recently established.
Read 33 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
26 Nov
If you're wondering about vaccine hesitancy in Africa, it's really worth thinking about the experience with polio vaccinations and how to convince local populations to treat it as a priority.
This isn't rocket science and we did it with polio, but you have to actually do the work and learn the lessons rather than just going "muh vaccine hesitancy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
Key lesson: You gotta explain why you're treating this as a prioirity when people are still dying in huge numbers of cholera/TB/HIV which rich countries seem far less concerned about.
Read 4 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
26 Nov
This is great on why the U.S. mining industry developed so much faster than other regions in the 19th century:
One thing I wonder about:

Is the U.S. vs. the British Empire a fair comparison?

The dominant factor of production in India, then as now, is labour, not land.

Does it look different if you compare c19th America to other land-rich colonies like Australia and Canada?
The water pipeline to Kalgoorlie in Western Australia, built soon after gold was discovered, seems a good example of "American know-how" ambitious development capital. A young Herbert Hoover worked as an engineer in the WA goldfields!
Read 5 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
26 Nov
I don't want to overplay this announcement of a ride-hailing firm announcing plans for a lease-to-own scheme for lower-emission vehicles in Nigeria. It may be far less than meets the eye. But it's *interesting*:

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Conventional wisdom is that energy transition technologies like EVs will be very slow to spread to poorer countries, especially ones like Nigeria that are awash in relatively cheap crude oil. That clearly has implications for the whole trajectory of energy transition.
But if total cost of ownership for EVs is lower (as it is already in places like the U.S. and Europe), then price-sensitive emerging economies with fewer privately-owned vehicles might be expected to leapfrog richer countries in adopting them.
Read 6 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
25 Nov
It's sort of endearing in a way that people still believe this fairytale story of development where it's all about where the governing ideology sits on a left-right axis, rather than deeper issues of trade, urbanization, industry, labor force change and capital accumulation. Image
Why did the interwar Soviet economy industrialise so rapidly when the Tsarist economy remained persistently agrarian? Because of orthodox Keynesian capital accumulation!

Marxists are obsessed with capital accumulation, that's literally what Das Kapital is all about!
The Soviet economy outperformed pretty much every major emerging economy over a 1914-1989 range barring Japan, though the stagnation after 1970 was profound.

China has been the world's best-performing economy ever since.
Read 5 tweets

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