Second Doses, Iran Inspections, Texas Blackouts
February 17, 2021
Yesterday’s Newsletter / February 17, 2021
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Indians healthcare workers are missing their second vaccine doses
Summary: Over 200,000 Indian healthcare workers received their first vaccine doses in mid-January, but only about 10% of those workers returned for their second shots on time.
Context: Single doses of COVID vaccines do provide some protection and have been shown to help prevent its spread and the development of severe symptoms, but the lack of a second dose means less protection and more opportunity for it to mutate vaccine-resistance.
—Quartz
Iran says it has told IAEA of plan to end snap inspections
Summary: Iran has informed the International Atomic Energy Agency—the United Nations nuclear watchdog organization—that it will no longer allow the agency to inspect its nuclear facilities beginning on February 21.
Context: Iran is making progress on nuclear technologies that they claim are for electricity and other peaceful purposes, but they’ve also said that they have the right to make nuclear weapons if they choose—and these announcements are being seen as an effort to force the US to remove economic sanctions and rejoin a treaty they left under the Trump administration.
—Reuters
Frozen wind farms are just a small piece of Texas’s power woes
Summary: The southern and central United States has suffered a record-breaking winter storm, and Texas—the biggest power-producer of all the states—suffered widespread electrical blackouts.
Context: Political and industry interests used the opportunity to criticize the newly built green energy infrastructure the state has been building as part of a transition away from its fossil fuel-dependent economy, but it would seem that natural gas, coal, and nuclear infrastructure actually suffered more damage from the frost than the state’s wind farms, and the state’s separate electrical grid was a core part of why the blackouts weren’t remedied faster.
—Bloomberg
Visual
94%
Decrease in symptomatic COVID-19 infections in people who received two doses of Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccine, according to new data.
The same research also indicates that this vaccinated group—a cohort of 600,000 people in Israel, which was compared with a group of 600,000 Israelis who hadn’t been vaccinated—were 92% less likely to develop severe cases of the disease.
These results are being celebrated as very good news in the medical community, but concerns about eventual decreased efficacy due to coronavirus mutation remain.
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Yesterday’s Newsletter is published by analytic journalist and host of the Let’s Know Things podcast, Colin Wright.