Alibaba Breakup, Croatian Earthquake, Sinovac Vaccine
December 30, 2020
Yesterday’s Newsletter / December 30, 2020
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News
China orders Alibaba founder Jack Ma to break up fintech empire
—The Guardian
AstraZeneca’s COVID vaccine is set for near-future UK approval
—Barron’s
US to allow small drones to fly over people and at night
—Reuters
Seven dead as rescuers search rubble for survivors of 6.4 earthquake in Croatia
—BBC News
Mexico set to become world’s largest legal cannabis market
—The Wall Street Journal
Visual
50%
Reported effectiveness for China’s Sinovac Biotech’s CoronaVac SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, based on a study conducted in Brazil with around 13,000 participants.
This is far lower than the effectiveness of other available COVID vaccines, but it also has fewer distribution-related issues (like the -70 degrees Celsius storage requirement of Pfizer’s vaccine), and China’s sprawling manufacturing capabilities means there’s a large quantity of the vaccine available.
Nonetheless, because of the comparable dearth of studies that’ve been conducted on this option, and because of a growing mistrust of China and the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, a survey in Brazil indicated that about half of the country would be unwilling to take China’s vaccine, compared to 36% being unwilling to take Russia’s Sputnik V, and 23% saying they didn’t want a vaccine from the US.
Yesterday’s Newsletter is published by analytic journalist and host of the Let’s Know Things podcast, Colin Wright.