Month: May 2021

How blocking works on the voice-only group chat app Clubhouse:

When you block someone on Clubhouse, it doesn’t just affect communications between the two of you, as it would on Facebook or Twitter. Rather, it limits the way that person can communicate with others too. Once blocked, they can’t join or even see any room that you create, or in which you are speaking—which effectively blocks them for everyone else in that room. If you’re brought “onstage” from the audience to speak, anyone else in the audience whom you have blocked will be kept off the stage for as long as you’re up there. And if you’re a moderator of a room, you can block a speaker and boot them from the conversation in real time—even if they’re mid-sentence.

Imagine a live panel discussion in which each member of the panel has the power to cut the mic of any other member, at any moment and for any reason, and also the power to have that person dragged from the lecture hall by security. That’s roughly how blocking works on Clubhouse. This is not just a personal decision, but a social act, with implications for who can speak at what times and in what settings.

There’s even a visible emblem of this regime. When a user you don’t follow has been blocked by some unspecified number of people whom you do, that user’s profile will appear on your app with an ominous icon: a black shield with a white exclamation point. Clubhouse calls this feature a “shared block list.” Some users call the badge the “black check mark”

Today’s techniques to control our own social media experience have been designed for algorithmic feeds. Here, each person has their own list of who they follow. Tools like block, mute account, mute keywords apply to one’s own experience.

A Clubhouse room is by its design a continuously shared experience. Giving one particiapnt the ability to control their experience affects others. This is not to judge Clubhouse’s tools – I have not thought about them well enough – but it is clear that different social experiences are emerging, Clubhouse-like rooms perhaps being the most promiment among them [1], and designers will need to create different tools for each of them.

[1] Venmo, the person-to-person payment app, also shares your payments on a public and semi-public feed, creating a different social experience. While you have some control over privacy, as the USA president Biden learnt, it’s not always enough.

(Part 1: whether IP waivers or manufacturing constraints are the gating factor in mass vaccination in India)

This is the best estimate I could find of states and city municipal corporations ‘floating’ global tenders for vaccine acquisition.

The known numbers in the table total 191 million doses, which would vaccinate less than 100 million people.

It’s baffling, to me, to state governments, to commentators published in the media, that the national government refuses to import vaccines. After all, even the 27-member European Union, not even a single nation-state, has negotiated vaccine purchases as a bloc – securing a total of 1.5 billion shots from just Pfizer-Biontech for its population of 450 million people, to be delivered through 2023. That includes booster shots. One would think that this is one occasion when the country’d use its large population to its advantage. To use this analogy from an interview with two economists on the vaccination rollout:

 Think about how McDonald’s does procurement. If you have 1000 McDonald’s stores across the length of the country, McDonald’s doesn’t say each of these 1000 independent franchisees should go and procure the potatoes and the oil themselves from the local daily market. The reason you have centralised procurement is precisely because it’s the most efficient way to do it.

The only possible reason I could think of the national government’s refusal is that importing vaccines would be a reversal of its messaging of being the ‘pharmacy of the world’, a claim made publicly as recently as mid-March 2021. I hope there is another reason to have states compete against one another.

Then there’s the claim made by a member of the national Covid task force that over two billion doses would be available between now and December 2021.

If those doses actually materialise, they would be enough to vaccinate the entire adult population and more.

Here are the manufacturers’ supposed estimates:

This Economic Times article has more details on the delivery schedule. I couldn’t find a definitive answer to whether the national government has committed to paying for these doses in advance, or according to a schedule – something that every major country worldwide has done.

As the graphic above states, these numbers don’t include imported vaccines. That is, the very doses that states and municipal corporations are ‘floating tenders’ for. So the country may well end up with more vaccine doses than it needs. State governments looking at this estimate have also probably wondered whether their procurement, costing a significant percentage of their state budgets, is redundant – once again, puzzling.

The well-known heart surgeon and hospital founder Devi Shetty also called for national vaccine procurement – and urgently:

… whatever has happened has happened; now for the vaccination the country has to buy together. So the bulk order will give you huge leverage in terms of negotiating for the best price. And unless these companies get money in advance, they won’t commit. We need at least five different vaccine manufacturers to come forward and say, okay, you give me the money, I will deliver you on this time.

We should just open our door for any country’s vaccine company to come here, set up the shop, and sell it to us. But they have to give it to us within the next three months. After that, it may not make that kind of a difference.

Q: Multiple states have floated global tenders, corporates have asked the government to liberalise vaccine import…
A: All of them should come together as one vaccine procuring agency.

– Interview | We should be mentally prepared for COVID-19 pandemic to last until mid-2022: Devi Shetty

To me the most convincing case is economic. Devi Shetty in the same interview:

So one day of lockdown, how much it is going to cost us; the vaccine is the cheapest solution we have today against COVID and we have to use it…

According to an April 2021 Barclays estimate, the economic cost of ‘sporadic lockdowns’ is USD 12.5 billion per week. Those are numbers, of course; this feature has a clearer picture of what that loss looks like for people.

(Part 3: The market for vaccines is not like the stock market)

From the excellent Morning Brew newsletter:

One way to find out where people’s heads are at is by looking at the top of the App Store rankings. Last year it was Zoom, in February it was Robinhood, and yesterday, with the Colonial pipeline shutdown causing all kinds of havoc, GasBuddy topped the list for the first time ever.

I looked at the Play Store India rankings. I’d have expected the Aarogya Setu and CoWin apps to be higher on that list, although entertainment apps domainating is a good sign.

Because there were a lot of Covid-19 vaccine names mentioned in the Indian and other press, I put together a list of vaccines that appear to be in the market or in Phase 3 trials as of 10 May 2021.

The WHO has a basic primer on the different types of Covid vaccines.

I recently read a detailed two-part article exploring the constraints holding back vaccine manufacturing and distribution. Written by a professor of Law at Yale. Part One, Part Two.

The material focuses on patent law, and is probably the writer’s expertise.

But I am also interested in understanding manufacturing constraints: how long it takes for existing manufacturers to ramp up vaccine facilities, build new ones and repurpose other vaccine/drug facilities for a Covid vaccine. From a Financial Times article:

While some EU leaders do not want to appear intransigent on the IP waiver issue, they mostly agree that it is a distraction from the more pressing issue of expanding near-term production capacity through licensing deals and sharing technology… But that puts the onus on the EU to come up with industrial solutions for increasing production and for sharing its own supplies, due to expand vastly in the second half of the year, with developing countries.

– EU is the vaccine good guy that manages to look like the villain

After all, India’s SII already has a license and has transferred tech for the AstraZeneca vaccine. Another company, along with a couple of government agencies, has developed an effective indigenous vaccine branded Covaxin. A third pharmaceutical firm has licensed the Russian-origin vaccine, Sputnik V, but even after having been cleared for administration in India on 13 April, as of 13 May, a fresh round of ‘local testing’ means there is no clarity on when distribution will begin, despite 150,000 doses having arrived from overseas on 1 May.

So. Licensing has not alleviated the vaccination crisis in India.

While there are legitimate and necessary debates about granting other vaccine makers the rights to the locally-created vaccine, the high lead time to expand production capacity means a terrible slowdown in India’s vaccination rollout:

and has meant that despite being home to the world’s largest manufacturer, despite having a vaccine not limited by global IP rules, despite having a decentralised distribution mechanism, despite having no anti-vaxx movement, vaccination coverage in India is dismal.

(Part 2: pitting the centre, states and cities against each other)