Favorites April 22 2021

Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH @ashishkjha

India is in the throes of a horrendous COVID surge Horrendous They are struggling to get more people vaccinated We are sitting on 35-40 million doses of Astra Zeneca vaccine Americans will never use Can we please give or lend them to India? Like may be now? It'll help. A lot

Considering vaccination rates are falling despite plenty of supply, this seems like a no brainer

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

It's very noteworthy that actually existing Covid measures — including the less responsible people, the laxer red states, whatever chaos Trump unleashed, etc. — were sufficient to totally crush the flu.

I'm really wondering what it's going to be like next year, with just some hold-over precautions.

Kim-Mai Cutler @kimmaicutler

As Upton Sinclair once wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his crypto holdings depend upon his not understanding it.” https://t.co/PAjOOpaZN6

Akshat Rathi @AkshatRathi

Good take on the new tech billionaire (Dorsey and Musk) idea that bitcoin mining can encourage renewables https://t.co/QVb113rncf by @MathisWilliam

Bloomberg explains it in more detail, but the majority of bitcoin mining is happening in China, on coal. Pretty hard to see how that’s a good outcome from an emissions perspective.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

Surely we could work out a “vaccines for lumber” barter with Canada.

I'll trade you sheep for the Settlers of Catan joke that goes here

Armand Domalewski @ArmandDoma

during his nomination, Kavanaugh argued that he shouldn’t be held accountable for something he did as a teenager today, he ruled that teenagers should be imprisoned for life without a chance for parole

The Supreme Court ruled that giving juvenile defendants a life sentence without parole does not violate the 8th amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishments.

Scott Lucas @scottlucas

.@AP says that California's 2 major university systems plan mandatory COVID-19 vaccines for students and staff. We can all hope the state's minor universities, like Stanford, will follow suit.

This is good news, also, gotta get in that dig at Stanford

The New York Times @nytimes

Health officials are leaning toward lifting the pause on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in the U.S. after finding only a small number of new cases of a rare blood clotting disorder. Instead, the FDA is likely to attach a warning to the vaccine’s label.

nyti.msWith Few New Clotting Cases, Johnson & Johnson Pause Could Be Lifted SoonTop federal health officials said in interviews this week that the number of rare blood clotting disorders in recipients of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has remained small.

Nate Silver is exactly as frustrated about being attacked on this as you'd expect

It’s amazing what you can do with just editing and sound design. Especially when one of the characters is wearing a mask.