COVID-19

A collection of 34 posts

biopolitics

Homo medicatis

With Covishield in my body, I feel like there is a capillary tube erupting from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, and its panoply of attendant bodies vis-à-vis India’s COVID-19 response, soaring across the length of India and plunging into my veins, somewhere in Bangalore. And with every

antimicrobial resistance

COVID-19, AMR and India

Maybe it’s not a coincidence that India is today the site of the world’s largest COVID-19 outbreak and the world’s most prominent source of antimicrobial resistant (AMR) pathogens, a.k.a. ‘superbugs’. The former fiasco is the product of failures on multiple fronts – including policy, infrastructure, logistics,

2020

Good luck with your Maggi

You know when you’re cooking a packet of Maggi noodles in a saucepan, and you haven’t used enough water or don’t move the stuff soon enough from the pan to a plate once it’s done cooking, and you’re basically left with a hot lump of

basic amenities

Super-spreading, mobility and crowding

I still see quite a few journalists in India refer to “super-spreaders” vis-à-vis the novel coronavirus – implying that some individuals might be to blame for ‘seeding’ lots of new infections in the community – instead of accommodating the fact that simply breathing out a lot of viruses doesn’t suffice to

anti-masker

Trump, science denial and violence

For a few days last week, before the mail-in votes had been counted in the US, the contest between Joe Biden and Donald Trump seemed set for a nail-biting finish. In this time a lot of people expressed disappointment on Twitter that nearly half of all Americans who had voted

alcohol

Thermal gun, sanitiser and volatility

Most of the shops I visit to purchase my supplies dispense an alcohol-based hand-sanitiser at the point of entry and have a person stationed there to check customers’ body temperature with a contactless thermal gun. They used to point the gun at the forehead but of late many of them

anti-vaxxer

Pandemic: A world-building exercise

First, there was light news of a vaccine against COVID-19 nearing the end of its phase 3 clinical trials with very promising results, accompanied with breezy speculations (often tied to the stock prices of a certain drug-maker) about how it’s going to end the pandemic in six months. An

azithromycin

Spray and pray – the COVID-19 version

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw is the head of Biocon, a company headquartered in Bengaluru and which has repurposed a drug called itolizumab – already approved to help manage severe chronic psoriasis in different markets – to manage cytokine release syndrome (CRS) in COVID-19 patients. Setting aside CRS’s relevance in the COVID-19 pathology (considering

Bharat Biotech

India's missing research papers

If you’re looking for a quantification (although you shouldn’t) of the extent to which science is being conducted by press releases in India at the moment, consider the following list of studies. The papers for none of them have been published – as preprints or ‘post-prints’ – even as the

Biocon

The matter of a journal's reputation

Apparently (and surprisingly) The Telegraph didn’t allow Dinesh Thakur to respond to an article by Biocon employee Sundar Ramanan, in which Ramanan deems Thakur’s article about the claims to efficacy of the Biocon drug Itolizumab not being backed by enough data to have received the DCGI’s approval

COVID-19

Super-spreads exist, but do super-spreaders?

What does the term ‘super-spreader’ mean? According to an article in the MIT Tech Review on June 15, “The word is a generic term for an unusually contagious individual who’s been infected with disease. In the context of the coronavirus, scientists haven’t narrowed down how many infections someone

COVID-19

A non-self-correcting science

While I’m all for a bit of triumphalism when some component of conventional publication vis-à-vis scientific research – like pre-publication anonymous peer review – fails, and fails publicly, I spotted an article in The Conversation earlier today that I thought crossed a line (and not in the way you think). In

clarity of thought

Clarity and soundness

I feel a lot of non-science editors just switch off when they read science stuff. A friend told me this earlier today, during yet another conversation about how many of the editorial issues that assail science and health journalism have become more pronounced during the pandemic (by dint of the

COVID-19

Go easy on the dexamethasone hype

1. The people involved with the RECOVERY clinical trial have announced via statements to the press that they have found very encouraging results about the use of dexamethasone in people with severe COVID-19 who had to receive ventilator support. However, the study’s data isn’t available for independent verification

conspiracy theories

Journalistic entropy

Say you need to store a square image 1,000 pixels wide to a side with the smallest filesize (setting aside compression techniques). The image begins with the colour #009900 on the left side and, as you move towards the right, gradually blends into #1e1e1e on the rightmost edge. Two

cherry-picking

The number of deaths averted

What are epidemiological models for? You can use models to inform policy and other decision-making. But you can’t use them to manufacture a number that you can advertise in order to draw praise. That’s what the government’s excuse appears to be vis-à-vis the number of deaths averted

COVID-19

The costs of correction

I was slightly disappointed to read a report in the New York Times this morning. Entitled ‘Two Huge COVID-19 Studies Are Retracted After Scientists Sound Alarms’, it discussed the implications of two large studies of COVID-19 recently being retracted by two leading medical journals they were published in, the New

COVID-19

The virus and the government

In December 2014, public health researchers and activists gathered at a public forum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to discuss how our perception of diseases and their causative pathogens influences our ideas of what we can and can’t do to fight them. According to a report published in The Harvard Gazette:

Andrew Gelman

A caveat for peer-review

Now that more researchers are finding more holes in the study in The Lancet, which claimed hydroxychloroquine – far from being a saviour of people with COVID-19 – actually harms them, I wonder where the people are who’ve been hollering that preprint servers be shut down because they harm people during

coronavirus lab origin hypothesis

The WHA coronavirus resolution is not great for science

On May 19, member states of the WHO moved a vote in the World Health Assembly (WHA), asking for an independent investigation into the sources of the novel coronavirus. Their exact demands were spelled out in a draft resolution that asked the WHO to, among other things, “identify the zoonotic

ambulance chasing

The Wolfram singularity

I got to this article about Stephen Wolfram’s most recent attempt to “revolutionise” fundamental physics quite late, and sorry for it because I had no idea Wolfram was the kind of guy who could be a windbag. I haven’t ever had cause to interact with his work or

COVID-19

Good journalism is still around

This morning, a trusted scientist called my attention to a tweet thread by Jordan Fischer listing the many good stories journalists in the US had done that had improved the lives of people. The scientist then tagged me, presumably to respond to his request for someone to compose a similar

Ars Technica

Poor journalism is making it harder for preprints

There have been quite a few statements by various scientists on Twitter who, in pointing to some preprint paper’s untenable claims, point to the manuscript’s identity as a preprint paper as well. This is not fair, as I’ve argued many times before. A big part of the

Anna Isaac

In conversation with Sree Srinivasan

On May 1, I was hosted on a webinar by the American journalist Sree Srinivasan, along with Anna Isaac of The News Minute and Arunabh Saikia of Scroll.in. As part of his daily show on the COVID-19 crisis, hosted by Scroll.in, Srinivasan hosts a few people working in

COVID-19

The journalist as expert

I recently turned down some requests for interviews because the topics of discussion in each case indicated that I would be treated as a scientist, not a science journalist (something that happened shortly after the Balakot airstrikes and the ASAT test as well). I suspect science and more so health