May 27, 2021
When Rajesh Pathak’s wife took their daughter to get tested for Covid-19 at a Gandhinagar hospital on April 1, she saw two plastic-covered dead bodies being moved out of the premises. That day, the government figures listed zero Covid deaths in Gandhinagar. The situation alarmed Pathak, resident editor of a 98-year-old local newspaper Sandesh’s Ahmedabad edition.
Pathak sent his reporters digging. Sandesh journalists talked to sources at the biggest hospital in the state’s biggest city the 1,200 bed Civil Hospital in Ahmedabad inaugurated by prime minister Narendra Modi in March 2019. With every conversation, their suspicions became clearer: there was a glaring gap in the Covid death counting at the facility.
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May 12, 2021
Over nearly two decades, a new study has found, government agencies have given at least £175 million ($248 million) to develop ChAdOx, a vaccine delivery system developed by scientists at Oxford University. Charities like the Wellcome Trust have given at least a further £53 million. As much as 99% of the total disclosed funding for ChAdOx research came from public or philanthropic money. And yet ChAdOx now sits at the heart of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine, and the company is free to profit from it at will.
To be sure, AstraZeneca has said it will sell these vaccines at no profit to the developing world “in perpetuity,” and at no profit in the West until it decides the pandemic is over. But that could be as soon as July after which AstraZeneca can cash in heavily on these years of publicly funded research, just as its competitors, such as Pfizer and Moderna, are already doing.
It seems intuitive enough: Red means stop, amber means caution, green means go.
As Covid-19 levels fluctuate around the world, health officials are devising ways to quickly alert their constituents about the virus’s threat level. Predictably, most have turned to color and many have adopted the hues of traffic lights. After all, the three-color schema developed in Detroit in the 1920s based on a British system for railroad traffic, has been universally used for over a century.
This is where the problem arises. The thing is, our understanding of color is richer and more nuanced beyond its application in traffic management.
April 23, 2021
In 2010, the Japanese government had a rude wakeup call: Beijing had abruptly cut off all rare earth exports to Japan over a fishing trawler dispute. Tokyo was almost entirely dependent on China for the critical metals, and the embargo exposed this acute vulnerability.
The silver lining to this incident, which sent global rare earth prices skyrocketing before they crashed down as the speculative bubble popped, is that it forced Japan to rethink its critical raw materials policy. A decade on, it has significantly reduced its dependance on China for rare earths, and continues to diversify its supply chain by investing in projects around the world. Its model may have lessons for the US, which desperately wants to break China’s rare earths monopoly. Rare earths are a group of 17 metals that are crucial in the manufacturing of high-tech products.