Talking Points
- Dozens were killed during anti-policy brutality protests in Lagos
- Facing pleas for change, Lebanon's elite served up Saad Hariri
- France honoured the slain history teacher, Samuel Paty
- Poland lurched further right with an effective ban on abortions
- Pope Francis backed same-sex civil unions in a historic shift
- Russia and Iran were accused of interfering in the US election
- Bolivia's socialists return to power a year after Morales was deposed
- In Thailand, protesters delivered an ultimatum to the Prime Minister
- China's economy rebounded strongly, with 4.9% growth in Q3
- Google faced its stiffest threat yet: a concerted antitrust suit
Deep Dive
Last week we took stock of the stark difference between how East Asian and European countries tackled the coronavirus – and their divergent fortunes today. This week we'll find out what lies between you and a coronavirus vaccine being injected into your arm.
The needle and the damage avoided
Without a vaccine, all predictions of how and when the Covid-19 pandemic eases are – like a facemask not covering your nose – just there for decoration. Which is why all of us have become armchair epidemiologists, rifling through every bit of news that we can. US and German authorities have said they are preparing for a vaccine before the end of the year, although such announcements have little bearing on the actual pace of vaccine development. Still, there was some good news from this week; Western front-runner AstraZeneca (AZ) recorded promising results, namely that its vaccine was following the genetic instructions programmed into it. The AZ vaccine is a marvel; a cold virus extracted from chimpanzees which has 20% of its genetic material deleted to prevent it from replicating. It mimics the protein spike of the coronavirus and trains the immune system to attack those spikes. Pretty neat.
Expect a frenetic few weeks as AZ, Pfizer and BioNTech SE, Moderna, Gilead, and Johnson & Johnson finish their make-or-break clinical trials. But along the way several missteps have sent tremors through the scientific community (not to mention the stock markets). AZ halted its stage three trials in the United States when, in early September, a participant in the UK developed a rare neurological illness. The trials are expected to resume within the week . And another AZ trial, this time in Brazil, was rocked when a 28-year-old participant died of coronavirus complications (though it was quickly revealed this individual was in the control group). Likewise, US pharmaceutical giants Johnson & Johnson and Eli Lilly's studies have ground to a halt over safety concerns. Worryingly, J&J have refused to divulge the nature of the health risk.
The heightened focus on vaccine safety has led the US Food and Drug Administration to ask foreign regulators for feedback on whether their requirements are stringent enough . At present, Big Pharma needs to produce a vaccine with a minimum 50% efficacy rate, and one that has been tested on at least 30,000 people (including high-risk minorities). But is that enough? That's a hypothetical in America, but a real-world question in China. China's Sinovac is already available for high-risk individuals such as medical staff in the eastern city of Jiaxing. That a vaccine is already in use may surprise some readers, especially considering the fact that the results from Sinovac's stage three trials are not due until the end of the year, but a full 90% of the company's staff and a great deal of their family members have been vaccinated. So, is this the candidate we should be paying attention to?
It may be. But when you dive in, you'll discover that dirty politics – both national and international – is shaping public health decisions. Take Brazil, which having suffered 155,000 Covid-19 deaths to date, has cancelled its agreement to purchase 46m doses from Sinovac . Strongman Jair Bolsonaro said, "The Brazilian people will not be anyone's guinea pig". That elides the tens of thousands of Brazilians taking part in the AZ trial while also obscuring the underlying reasoning. As it happens, the research institute in São Paulo that had partnered with Sinovac is under the control of a rival politician. It also helped that the virulently anti-Chinese White House official Robert O'Brien flew to Brasilia last week for an audience with Bolsonaro. Are we leaving a vaccine on the table for the sake of a rivalry?
Anti-vax nation
If one of the major western vaccine candidates succeeds (i.e. demonstrates an efficacy rate in the low 60's or over) then laboratories around the world will whir into action. The prospect of manufacturing millions of licensed doses in short order has required significant expansion of national, university, and commercial labs. The next headache will be transportation: the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines must be stored between -15°C and -70°C , necessitating the appropriation of a good deal of the globe's cold-transport freight stock. And even then, beyond the tricky – though ultimately knowable – hurdles of global logistics and supply chains, there lies a greater challenge: ignorance, fear, and the internet.
Viral anti-vaccination beliefs are, to the dismay of public health officials everywhere, endemic in the United States. Those who question the efficacy and impact of the coronavirus vaccine are not just leaning on anti-government conspiracies, they have also burnished their arguments with the language of civil liberties . The phrase "medical freedom" (presumably the freedom to inflict infection and possibly death upon yourself and others) is now commonplace is the US. At the end of the day, persuasion will simply not be possible for a certain subset of the community – a minority that is well into the double-digits in many Western countries – and coercion is neither lawful nor tenable. So in a country as fractious as the US, the vaccine rollout will be piecemeal at best.
It's also safe to say that the World Health Organisation's entreaty against 'vaccine nationalism' has fallen on deaf ears. Save for a few egalitarian nations and international organisations, future allotments of vaccines have already been snapped up by wealthier countries.
So, prepare for a situation in which impoverished countries cannot afford to vaccinate those at risk, and the most privileged nations in human history cannot convince a sizeable fraction of their citizens to take shots that have already been paid for.
Worldlywise
For your viewing pleasure
No doubt you'll be a little overwhelmed by the aforementioned unpredictability and partisanship of vaccine development. And it's the weekend – you ought to relax in front of a screen (even if you've spent a tense week in front of one). So here are some of the latest programming suggestions.
First, to Borat (which we bet you didn't think you'd see in the Wrap). For reasons that will soon become apparent, we've filed this one under political drama. English comedian Sacha Baron Cohen has released the sequel to Borat, his stunningly low-brow yet undeniably funny appraisal of the United States through the eyes of a Kazakh peasant. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm , has been released on Amazon, and has shifted its target from ordinary Americans to those with some heft: trailers reveal that Trump lieutenant Rudy Giuliani has fallen victim to the comedian. If presidential advisors in compromising positions is your thing, this is the film for you.
If Giuliani is too junior a player for you, you could also watch Trump's fiery interview with Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes. The major discussion – one of the few remaining opportunities for the American president to proselytise to a broad audience – turned into a fiery clash. Trump actually stormed out of the interview early. It was due for its traditional screening on Sunday evening, but it appeared online yesterday having been leaked early by the White House .
We can also take a stab at what you are not watching. Netflix missed its Q3 subscriber numbers , resulting in a precipitous drop in share price. The Covid-19 bump that many digital platforms enjoyed seems to have disappeared. But if you've cancelled your Netflix account (because you've got better things to do) then at least you can rejoin one day. The same cannot be said of Quibi, the "quick bites" streaming platforms which self-destructed this week . The legendary producer Jeffrey Katzenberg poured all his energy – and $1.5b of investors' cash – into creating a place for high-quality short-form video content (all under 10-minutes long). It flopped after six months , because Katzenberg and his backers had overestimated the market size for people who wish to view an aggravatingly-short drama series. At least when the K-Foundation set fire to one million pounds in 1994 they had a lasting impact on art – it's doubtful people will remember the name Quibi this time next month.
Big birds, space rocks, and the key to life itself
The ancient Egyptian deity Bennu was an enormous bluish-grey heron that flew over all creation and was the animating soul of the sun deity, Ra. It's also the name given to an asteroid (101955) that is shuffling about our solar system at a lazy 28km per second, at a distance of 322 million kilometres from Earth. Given that the Egyptian Bennu was associated with rebirth, it makes sense to check up on it with the god of the underworld, Osiris. The Nasa probe Osiris-Rex (for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) was launched in late 2016 with Bennu as its target.
It arrived at its destination in 2018 and has been trying to find a good place to park ever since. Having created an extremely detailed map of the small (500m in radius) and lumpen rock, this week Osiris took the plunge. The probe lowered itself to the surface of Bennu and fired a jet of nitrogen into the surface to loosen dust and rock particles which were then promptly swallowed by Osiris-Rex. The entire affair took around 6 seconds, and has been described in the media as a "boop", a "kiss", and a "bump". We're still waiting for clarification on the proper terminology from Nasa.
The burning question is why? Why send a probe hundreds of millions of kilometres out into space to collect (we kid you not) 60 grams of asteroid dust? Because, as it turns out, Bennu might just contain the mystery of life itself . It's believed to hold same carbon compounds that helped spark the explosion of organic life on this planet. On the other hand, there is a 1-in-2,700 chance that Bennu will catastrophically strike our planet in about 170 years, which means it might just contain the key to life and death. Osiris indeed.
The Best of Times
Big cat
Before the invention of Instagram, the best way to show off your cat was to etch a 36m tall geoglyph on the side of a mountain. The Andean Paracas culture (800BCE-100BCE) are responsible for many of the ancient figures that predate the Nazca lines in modern day Peru. Given this newly discovered cat geoglyph, we can discern that they had their priorities straight.
An algorithm for good
Not all algorithms will turn your children into Nazis (take note, YouTube). In fact, there's one that can predict the risk of someone developing active tuberculosis before they become sick. The algorithm looks at a source of 80,000 people tested for latent tuberculosis infection across 20 countries. As such, the tool’s accuracy is invaluable in not only predicting who may develop active tuberculosis, but how to treat them before symptoms set in.
The Worst of Times
Growing pains
Bottle-fed babies ingest 1.6m microplastic particles every day for the first 12 months of their lives, new research shows. The microplastics are released when the common polypropylene bottles are exposed to hot water or sterilisation. The hotter the water, the more microplastics are released. Researchers have yet to determine the effect of consuming microplastics, particularly on infants .
Bird flue
Hundreds of thousands of birds have fallen out of America’s skies in recent months — and nobody definitively knows why. One theory suggests that the wildfire smoke may have forced the birds to start their migration prematurely — though little is known about the effect of wildfire smoke on birds. Birds aren’t usually trapped by wildfire smoke, however the scale of this year’s wildfires has diminished their chances of escaping.
Weekend Reading
The image
The quote
" Abraham Lincoln here is one of the most racist presidents we’ve had in modern history . "
– US presidential hopeful Joe Biden addresses his opponent during the final debate .
The numbers
$2,900,000,000
- Goldman Sach has to cough up a record penalty for its part in looting Malaysia's sovereign wealth fund .
0.000000000000000000001 seconds
- Scientists have measured the shortest period of time yet (with lasers, of course). May we present: the zeptosecond . It is one trillionth of one billionth of a second and it's up to you how you wish to use this information.
The headline
"It's Google's World. We Just Live In It." – The New York Times . Preach.
The special mention
These hugging robots . They ought not require any further explanation.
A few choice long-reads
- What does it mean to bring a lawsuit against the most pervasive company on Earth? The Economist gives Google the hard eye.
- It is near on impossible to criticise the Pakistani army if you live there. Foreign Policy give it a try.
- The president has his own ready-made propaganda outfit. Who are the figures behind OAN?
Tom Wharton
