China pushes ahead on vaccine diplomacy

In the US, it is reported that we are almost at the point where there is going to be a surplus of vaccines. Now that vaccine programs are underway all over the world, the issue of inequality of access has started to loom large, with accusations that wealthy countries are hogging most of the supplies.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has criticised what it describes as a “shocking imbalance” in the distribution of coronavirus vaccines between rich and poor countries.

The group’s chief said a target of seeing vaccination programmes under way in every country by Saturday would be missed.

The WHO has long called for fairer distribution of Covid-19 vaccines.

It is leading the Covax scheme which is designed to get jabs to poorer nations.

So far, more than 38 million doses have been delivered to around 100 countries under the scheme.

Covax hopes to deliver more than two billion doses to people in 190 countries in less than a year. In particular, it wants to ensure that 92 poorer countries will receive access to vaccines at the same time as wealthier countries.

“There remains a shocking imbalance in the global distribution of vaccines,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a news conference on Friday.

“On average in high-income countries, almost one in four people have received a Covid-19 vaccine. In low-income countries, it’s one in more than 500,” he said.
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High-income countries currently hold a confirmed 4.6 billion doses, while low-middle income nations hold 670 million, according to research by the Duke Global Health Innovation Center.

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I am tired of posting these but feel I must

Once again we have a case of police using unnecessary force on a driver of color. He is now suing the police department.

Army Lt. Caron Nazario filed suit against police officers Joe Gutierrez and Daniel Crocker last month, and video from the officers’ body cameras and Nazario’s cellphone has gone viral in recent days.

Nazario seeks $1 million plus punitive damages from the officers, saying they violated his constitutional rights.

Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, said the videos raise the question of whether the officers overreacted and used more force than necessary.

The videos “make it seem that Lt. Nazario has a persuasive case,” Tobias told USA TODAY.

The officers said in the police report that they stopped Nazario’s Chevrolet Tahoe because it didn’t have a rear license plate, although the report acknowledges the officers later noticed a temporary plate displayed in the back window.

The fact the Nazario was released at the scene and not charged and that the two police officers “threatened to destroy the lieutenant’s military career with “baseless” criminal charges if he reported them for misconduct” show that the police realized that they had gone too far.

You can see for yourself.


I am amazed the Nazario was able to speak so calmly while being threatened and humiliated by people pointing guns at his face.

I keep posting these because I feel that these cases must be widely publicized to build the case that the police in the US need serious reform and curtailment of their powers. We simply should not let these things pass and become seen as normal.

It gets crazier and crazier

We have a man at Disney World refusing to have his temperature checked and then being charged with trespassing, handcuffed, and escorted out of the premises.

A man who was arrested after refusing a temperature screening at Disney Springs in Florida told authorities that he couldn’t be told to leave because he had spent $15,000 on his vacation.

The man, Kelly Sills, a tourist from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, bypassed the Orlando attraction’s medical screening in February and refused to get his temperature checked when asked by Disney employees, according to a report from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.
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Sills also claimed to be a Disney stockholder at another point.

What is surprising is that he was wearing a mask. For some reason, having his temperature taken with the remote sensor that takes a couple of seconds, tops, was too much for him. Did he know he had a temperature and not want it revealed? Or did he think that the thermometer was sending radiation towards him? Some people do believe this, not understanding that the thermometer measures radiation coming from the person.

The plastic recycling scam

Plastic pollution is a global menace. In. his latest episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver exposes how the plastics industry has managed to pull off one of the biggest scams on the public by persuading us that tackling plastic pollution is our responsibility and urging us to ever greater recycling efforts while making false promises about their own efforts to reduce plastic contamination. In one episode of his excellent series Adam Ruins Everything, host Adam Conover made some similar points.

One of their triumphs was to get legislatures to force manufacturers to put those triangles on almost all plastic items, suggesting that they can all be recycled when in fact most of them can’t. Only those with the numbers 1 and 2 have a reasonable shot at being recycled. Worse, by having the public think that all of them can be recycled, it contaminates the plastic pool making it harder to even recycle the plastic that can be. What then happens is that the ‘recycled’ plastic from the US ends up in landfills all over the world.

The best thing we can do is to dispose of all plastics with numbers 3 and higher in the trash and not in the recycling bins, enact legislation that creates strong disincentives for single use plastics by manufacturers, and put the burden for reducing plastic pollution where it really belongs, on the manufacturers and not the public. Some countries are doing just that.

Cold and colds

Growing up in Sri Lanka, it was an article of faith with my mother (and the mothers of many of my friends) that after a shower, we should not go outside while our hair was still wet because that increased the risk of us catching a cold or getting a chill. If we happened to get caught in the rain, we were told to quickly dry ourselves thoroughly so that we did not catch a cold. But Sri Lanka is a tropical country where what is considered ‘cold’ would be like a balmy summer day in the US. Furthermore houses have very open architecture with open windows and doors so that air is freely circulating and hence there is little difference between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ except that inside one had a roof over one’s head. Hence these restrictions made no sense. But given the power of confirmation bias, it was always easy to find such a cause to blame whenever one caught a cold.
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Trying to understand the wide variations in covid death rates across the globe

It used to be a pretty good rule of thumb that whenever any catastrophe had global consequences, poorer nations would be much harder hit than the richer ones. Hence you would have expected that in many poorer countries, and in the poorest parts of those countries where people live crowded together with inadequate sanitary conditions, the deaths from the pandemic would have skyrocketed. And yet one of the notable features of this pandemic is the reversal of this pattern.

In the March 1, 2021 issue of The New Yorker Siddhartha Mukherjee looked at one particular case of Dharavi, a slum in Mumbai that is the largest in Asia where “a million residents live in shanties, some packed so closely together that they can hear their neighbors’ snores at night. When I visited it a few years ago, open drains were spilling water onto crowded lanes.”
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What makes hummingbirds hum?

I am fortunate in that there are a couple of hummingbirds that live near my home and I frequently get to see them hovering just outside my window, giving me a close-up view. This article looks at what we have learned about how the hummingbirds get their name.

The results reveal that aerodynamic forces produced as the wings move, together with the speed and direction of the wing movements, are largely enough to explain the hummingbirds’ hum.

The team note a crucial factor is the motion of a hummingbird’s wings. While most birds only create lift on the downstroke – found by the team to be the primary sound source – hummingbirds do so on the down and upstroke as a result of their unusual wing motion, which follows a path akin to a U-shaped smile. What’s more, these strokes occur much faster for hummingbirds – about 40 times a second. As a result, the team say, the hummingbird wing movement generates sounds at both 40Hz and 80Hz – sounds that are well within our hearing range and which were found to be the dominant components of the birds’ hum.

But variations of the forces within the strokes, together with further influence of the U-shaped wing motion, generate higher frequency overtones of these sounds.

“The lovely thing about the hummingbirds’ complex wingstroke is that those two primary pulses also cause even higher harmonics,” said Lentink, adding that such tones added to the timbre of the overall sound.

“It truly is the specific way that the forces fluctuate that creates the sound that we hear,” he said.

The team applied a simplified version of their theory to data for flying creatures from mosquitoes to birds like pigeons to reveal why their motion produces different sounds.

“It’s the way they generate forces that is different,” said Lentink. “And that causes why they whoosh versus hum, versus buzz, versus whine.”

The Trumps’ shameful lack of leadership in fighting vaccine hesitancy

An NPR poll found little differences in vaccine hesitancy between white, Black, and Latino groups.

Among those who responded to the survey, 73% of Black people and 70% of White people said that they either planned to get a coronavirus vaccine or had done so already; 25% of Black respondents and 28% of white respondents said they did not plan to get a shot. Latino respondents were slightly more likely to say they would not get vaccinated at 37%, compared with 63% who either had or intended to get a vaccine.

However, there were big differences between politically aligned groups.

Among Republican men, 49% said they did not plan to get the shot, compared with just 6% of Democratic men who said the same. Among those who said they supported President Trump in the 2020 election, 47% said they did not plan to get a coronavirus vaccine compared with just 10% of Biden supporters.

Similarly, compared with “big city” respondents, rural residents were more likely to say that they did not plan to take a coronavirus vaccine.

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Monarch butterfly migration is truly amazing

In the February 15/22, 2021 issue of The New Yorker there is a photo essay by Brendan George Ko of the annual migration of monarch butterflies, with accompanying text by Carolyn Kormann.

The butterflies have never seen the forest before, but they know—perhaps through an inner compass—that this is where they belong. an inner compass—that this is where they belong. They leave Canada and the northeastern United States in late summer and fly for two months, as far as three thousand miles south and west across the continent. The migration is accomplished in a single generation that lives eight months, whereas the return journey north will occur over some four generations, each living four to five weeks. This is the most evolutionarily advanced migration of any known butterfly, perhaps of any known insect.

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Yo-Yo Ma gives impromptu concert for those waiting for the vaccine

After I got my vaccine, like everyone else I had to wait for 15 minutes to make sure I did not have an allergic reaction. I just sat in the CVS drugstore. Too bad I did not get it at the Berkshire Community college in Massachusetts. After cellist Yo Yo Ma got his second shot, he spent his 15 minutes giving an impromptu concert to the other people in the venue.

The 15-minute turn included renditions of pieces by Bach and Schubert, and at its close prompted an enthusiastic round of applause and cheers from the lucky crowd of socially distanced patients.

Ma, 65, had “wanted to give something back”, Richard Hall of the Berkshire Covid-19 Vaccine Collaborative told local paper the Berkshire Eagle. “What a way to end the clinic,” he added.

When Ma had first visited the clinic for his first shot, he did so quietly, taking in the surroundings, staff said. But brought his cello when he returned for the second shot.

Staff described how a hush fell across the clinic as Ma began to play. “It was so weird how peaceful the whole building became, just having a little bit of music in the background,” said Leslie Drager, the lead clinical manager for the vaccination site, according to the Washington Post.

Ma is someone who clearly loves what he does, likes to use his incredible talents for the general good, and also wears his celebrity status lightly.