Tag Archives: COVID-19
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Life notes
Tagged biopolitics, COVID-19, Homo sacer, vaccinated
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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 … Continue reading
Posted in Science
Tagged antimicrobial resistance, broad-spectrum antibiotics, COVID-19, emergent properties, novel coronavirus, One Health, pathogens, public health, superbugs
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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 … Continue reading
Posted in Life notes
Tagged 2020, causality, COVID-19, epidemic, Maggi Noodles, memories, pandemic, Paul Feyerabend, Penrose process, sense of time, The Wire, Thucydides
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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 … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Science
Tagged basic amenities, caste, class, COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccine, Dharavi, herd immunity, housing poverty, inequality, Mumbai, novel coronavirus, public distribution system, public toilets, seroprevalence survey, super-spreader, T Jacob John
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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 … Continue reading
Posted in Science
Tagged anti-masker, anti-vaxxer, Ashis Nandy, Challakere, COVID-19, disease modelling, Donald Trump, history of science, India-based Neutrino Observatory, Joe Biden, Kudankulam nuclear power plant, medical care, medical ethics, political mathematics, public hospitals, reason of state, Science City, science denialism, scientism, social epidemiology, Sterlite, Thoothukudi, US presidential election
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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 … Continue reading
Posted in Science
Tagged alcohol, COVID-19, disinfectant, ethanol, ethyl alcohol, evaporation, hand sanitizer, isopropyl alcohol, phase change, thermal guns, volatile, volatility
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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 … Continue reading
Posted in Op-eds
Tagged anti-vaxxer, clinical trials, COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccine, Donald Trump, epidemiological modelling, epidemiology, healthcare privatisation, migrant workers, phase 3 clinical trials, Politically Math, private healthcare
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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 … Continue reading
Posted in Science
Tagged azithromycin, Biocon, chyavanprash, COVID-19, cytokine release syndrome, cytokine storm, favipiravir, hydroxychloroquine, Itolizumab, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, novel coronavirus, psoriasis, The Print
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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 … Continue reading
Posted in Science
Tagged Bharat Biotech, Biocon, Covaxin, COVID-19, COVID-19 epidemic, COVID-19 pandemic, ELISA test kit, favipiravir, hydroxychloroquine, Indian Council of Medical Research, Itolizumab, novel coronavirus, peer review, preprint papers, remdesivir, science academies, science by press release, seroprevalence survey, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, tocilizumab, Zydus Cadila
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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 … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Science
Tagged Biocon, Björn Brembs, COVID-19, cytokine release syndrome, Dinesh Thakur, Drug Controller General of India, Itolizumab, Jammi Nagaraj Rao, journal impact factor, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Newslaundry, phase II clinical trials, phase III clinical trials, prestige journals, prestigious journals, reputed journals, Seema Ahuja, Sundar Ramanan, The Telegraph
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