Let this chart be a lesson - you MUST wait ~10 days after your initial dose before the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine provides any immunity. Good news is that by being careful for those first 10 days, your potential to acquire symptomatic Covid plummets to basically zero if taking standard 2020 precautions.
Again - we do not yet know whether this vaccine reduces our ability to transmit the disease. So even if you've gotten vaccinated, you can't simply go out into the world maskless and do whatever the hell you want. You'll have to wait until enough vaccine is distributed to provide anyone who wants it with the opportunity to get vaccinated. At that point, we may be able to start doing some things 2019-style.
Hospitalizations
We have entered the time when case counts are almost irrelevant - they have doubled in the past 30 days and continue going up relentlessly. Hospitalizations is what really matters now and the New York Times is tracking and publishing these figures. It shows that already 1/3 of Americans live in a region where ICU beds are getting hard to come by, never mind nurse/doctor shortages. We could all use some Hibernol about now.
Patents Matter
A public health activist and a couple economists penned an op-ed in the New York Times suggesting that suspending patent rights worldwide is the best course of action to ensure everyone can get access to vaccines.
You probably couldn't come up with a better way to guarantee the NEXT pandemic will see nothing near the investment in Covid vaccines that we have seen. Do we really want to wait even longer next time?
The WTO already allows countries to produce generics of patented products for their domestic market in extreme scenarios like a pandemic. Thing is, most countries cannot produce mRNA vaccines. So what the authors are really getting at is they want want patent rights to be lifted in rich countries so competitor companies there can produce them and send them overseas. But most countries in the world cannot even handle a biotechnology product, let alone produce one.
This is a proposal with enormous downsides and very little upside. Thankfully it was opposed at the WTO by the United States, European Union, Britain, Norway, Switzerland, Japan, Canada, Australia & Brazil. So that's that.
Get Ready for False Attribution
On average an American has a 0.4% chance of being diagnosed with cancer every year - that's 100,000 people per month. Thanks to social media and unhinged news sources all over the place, it will only take a few of those newly-diagnosed cancer patients blaming their recently received Covid vaccine to create the potential for a real vaccination PR problem.
The cancer figures in Derek Lowe's piece seem off, but the idea seems correct. People are going to blame a lot of health issues on the Covid vaccine. Be prepared.
Taller Than Ever
China & Nepal jointly announced that Mt. Everest is taller than previously thought. The more exact measurement was achieved by placing a GPS device at the summit for over an hour. Nice recounting of that perilous achievement here.
Rich mountaineers the world over can now rejoice in having a $45,000 death wish that culminates even further from the ocean than previously thought.
