|
| |
|
| |
|
|
|
|
TCHS 4O 2000 [4o's nonsense] alvinny [2] - csq - edchong jenming - joseph - law meepok - mingqi - pea pengkian [2] - qwergopot - woof xinghao - zhengyu HCJC 01S60 [understated sixzero] andy - edwin - jack jiaqi - peter - rex serena SAF 21SA khenghui - jiaming - jinrui [2] ritchie - vicknesh - zhenhao Others Lwei [2] - shaowei - website links - Alien Loves Predator BloggerSG Cute Overload! Cyanide and Happiness Daily Bunny Hamleto Hattrick Magic: The Gathering The Onion The Order of the Stick Perry Bible Fellowship PvP Online Soccernet Sluggy Freelance The Students' Sketchpad Talk Rock Talking Cock.com Tom the Dancing Bug Wikipedia Wulffmorgenthaler       |
|
bert's blog v1.21 Powered by glolg Programmed with Perl 5.6.1 on Apache/1.3.27 (Red Hat Linux) best viewed at 1024 x 768 resolution on Internet Explorer 6.0+ or Mozilla Firefox 1.5+ entry views: 413 today's page views: 22 (6 mobile) all-time page views: 3283873 most viewed entry: 18739 views most commented entry: 14 comments number of entries: 1217 page created Wed Apr 30, 2025 01:39:02 |
|
- tagcloud - academics [70] art [8] changelog [49] current events [36] cute stuff [12] gaming [11] music [8] outings [16] philosophy [10] poetry [4] programming [15] rants [5] reviews [8] sport [37] travel [19] work [3] miscellaneous [75] |
|
- category tags - academics art changelog current events cute stuff gaming miscellaneous music outings philosophy poetry programming rants reviews sport travel work tags in total: 386 |
| ||
|
A lot's been happening in the past weeks, non-transitory inflation (also present locally) being broadly acknowledged aside; quite astoundingly, headlines like "Why did almost nobody see inflation coming?" are now popping up in the useless mainstream media, with admissions such as "...virtually all economists' predictions for the United States in 2021 were way off the mark". I could point to this blog's recognition of inflation back from April last year at least, but please do note that it was not even a prediction. It was merely an observation. Now, of course, if one were a very decorated economist, one could start mumbling about consumer baskets and supply snarls and substitute goods ("if there's no bread, let them buy cake instead"), but one supposes that such policy-drivers ain't exactly toting baskets about emptying grocery aisles. There may also be a large shifting of sentiment on the pandemic front, with what sure feels like an increasing number of posts admitting that perhaps those tinfoil-hatters were onto something after all, as widespread pandemic (and bullshit) fatigue sets in. OYK may have sounded the alarm over the Omicron wave, but the concurrent Chinese New Year restrictions and revocation of "fully vaccinated" status (consider past "fact-checks") without a third booster shot within 270 days of the last dose, can't be too popular - and this is before considering how current vaccines don't seem to be slowing the soon-dominant-if-not-already Omicron strain by much if any (so agrees the WHO), and how being "fully vaccinated" is so last year. Domestic political pundits might do well to watch closely as OYK continues endorsing a literal half-farked approach - which one might perhaps sympathize with, given difficult circumstances - while swinging from suggesting it was too early to know if more boosters were needed, to admitting that they may be needed every year, and how we now have to ride Omicron out to exit the "fog of war". Well, one sure hopes that his advisors have his best interests at heart, from how even the AstraZeneca vaccine's creator has asserted that continued frequent boostering may be infeasible, and other countries begin to lift restrictions while recognizing natural immunity. Seen in this light, OYK's end of the tunnel promise may come to haunt him - and the incumbent party, by association - pretty soon. If that were not enough, there was a minor hubbub several weeks back, when the U.S. briefly classified Singapore's travel advisory status as "unknown" (joining Afghanistan, North Korea, Syria etc.), apparently after the withholding of (inconvenient?) data on vaccination outcomes. OYK seems to have sorted this out after confirming that we know our own situation very well (but no, not going to publish it), and engaging with the relevant embassy and the CDC (which seems to have bumped their assessment to "high" from "unknown"). While that might have gone fairly well, there remains grousing over how it's looking like boosters will only be mandated for locals, with foreign travellers able to get away with being non-fully-vaccinated.  Was this what you were expecting? (Source: nature.com; as of October 2021) [N.B. CoronaVac appears to be Sinovac] Which brings us to the main course for the day - the vaccine front of Cold War II. We have surveyed the landscape in January last year, but that was back when most of those offerings were either barely released, or merely hypothetical. The situation has become rather clearer now, though, and one might think about the impressions painted (or entirely ignored) by the FAKE NEWS mainstream media, as the analysis below proceeds. Again, I am entirely happy to correct matters of fact, where they occur. To begin with, despite all the publicity (and occasional outcry) over the Pfizer & Moderna mRNA vaccines, it sure looks like it's been the more-traditional ones that have been pulling the bulk of the weight, in this pandemic. CoronaVac, Sinopharm and AstraZeneca together account for near five billion doses applied by themselves, compared to about two billion for Pfizer & Moderna. That said, the apparent relative effectiveness (and sciencey prestige) of mRNA vaccines is not to be discounted, with China hastily pursuing their development (seemingly with Temasek investment - which may not be a good sign for them), and a local team also getting in on the act, notably with the previous homegrown Arcturus vaccine scheduled around 2023. But back to the major vaccines. One can hardly stake one's claim to being a big player in the Cold War II New World Order Great Reset New Normal without a vaccine (and dependant client states) of one's own, obviously, from how intimate and substantial the decision on such acceptance is; without mincing words, this is various countries allowing another (generally greater) power, to inject a substance of that power's design and manufacture (that, frankly, is not fully understood by the client), into virtually all of their citizens (including the military). Skin-in-the-game doesn't get much thicker than that! This is in contrast to the constant wayang being put on in other areas, for example the government's amusing tendency to sign preliminary MOUs with the Motherland whenever they feel like they've been seen to be cosying up a little too overtly with the Yanks - who have in turn seem to have let them off in not taking attendance at their (honestly self-serving) Democracy Summit - for now, at least. They have certainly been trying their hardest to straddle both boats here, with the only three vaccines officially approved for application here as of today, being the U.S.'s Pfizer(-BioNTech) and Moderna, and China's Sinovac. One might further suppose raw performance to not be the only factor under consideration, from how other vaccines with recognized efficacy no lower than Sinovac (most prominently Sputnik V, approved by no less than The Lancet), were seemingly never under real consideration.  One hopes reproducing one of the Big Four medical journals' call for raw data from all those Big Pharma-run trials (originally slated for fifty-five years for release, which brings back memories), will not be automatically denounced as a conspiracy theory and censored (Source: bmj.com) From all this, a quite interesting question might be: what is each player's geopolitical reach in vaccine terms, as Cold War II unfolds? Strangely, this specific analysis appears wholly absent from the Internet currently - which may be due to my non-optimal search skills - despite there being stats on overall global vaccination and boosterism/trials (regardless of vaccine provenance), limited country-level roll-outs and production figures, and aggregate reach by number of countries (but not their strategic arrangement). Well, as I like to say, if you want something done, best to do it yourself - and thus, I set out to compile the requisite data on the vaccines accepted by each country, as previously attempted for excess mortality. About this, the VISAGUIDE.world website offers a vaccine checker widget, which can be used to check whether one's vaccine is accepted at one's intended travel destination (last updated in December 2021, when accessed for this blog post). It then only remained to extract the necessary data to a spreadsheet, and for this I chose to focus on six major vaccines considering the likely Cold War II blocs... which just so happen to be the top six vaccines by distributed quantity, from the Nature bar chart above:
Well, from the above, China and Russia ain't trusting no-one else in this Pandemic Game - not even each other. For the U.S., the acceptance of Sinovac/pharm and AZ/Covishield for travellers appears a consequence of adhering to the WHO Emergency Use list - a sop to their crumbling international order - although there's no doubting they have their favourites (Pfizer/Moderna) domestically. For India, their acceptance of Moderna can be taken to reflect their recent shift towards the U.S., with their traditional buddies (though not in terms of an outright alliance) being Russia (to counter China) Before continuing, a few limitations on the data: it was taken from a website to facilitate international travel in the New Normal, and therefore likely reports vaccines as accepted for inbound persons, which may not coincide with the vaccines applied to one's own citizens (though one expects the travellers' set to be a superset of that applied domestically). While this admittedly dilutes the commitment factor, domestic application would also depend on other considerations such as availability and price, and the travellers' list does probably still signal as to which links a country values more strongly. Assuredly, not having an approved vaccine might not make entry a definite no-go, since other tests and quarantine periods can be imposed, but it definitely makes interaction between the respective nationals very much more inconvenient. Moreover, the data may also not reflect the actual popularity/distribution of the vaccines, in the various countries. For example, while Singapore technically allows the Sinovac/pharm vaccines, they are not exactly being encouraged (but this can probably be attributed in large part to efficacy concerns). Indeed, there are signs that Sinovac/pharm may not be recognized as valid boosters, so make what of that you will. With this, from the compiled data, countries can be placed into five brackets, depending on which combination of vaccines they have accepted for inbound travel. Since the fashion/propaganda appears to be towards branding the old First World camp as the "Alliance of 'Democracies'" (AoD), they will be referred to thusly from here onwards:
 The teams, as it stands (click for full-sized version) [N.B. Map as generated from GeoPandas with Python; map is for illustrative purposes only and does not imply expression of any opinion on political boundaries, so no drone me pls] Definitely, the U.S. of A should rightly be in blue there but for the bone thrown to the WHO, and one might then note some similarities to the Western/Soviet blocs, especially right before the Sino-Soviet split. While there are few changes on the parts of the players that really matter, the rising influence of Team Red in Africa is clear to see, together with Iran/Venezuela confirming their alignment. The U.S. grip on their backyard of South America doesn't seem as solid as before (with the State Department & CIA perhaps up to their old tricks once more), but if shit really goes down, I figure they'll get whipped into line. Quite a bit of central & eastern Europe may be wavering somewhat too, and as for the region of our greatest concern - Southeast Asia - they all appear hedging their bets at best, with Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar tilted towards Team Red (supporting previous narrations; note Myanmar notably rejecting the Chinese vaccines, but accepting Sputnik V and Covishield, which may or may not hint at their backers) I suppose we might return to this when we look in primarily from the geopolitical angle in the future, but since I still have a day job in code-monkeying, it might be nice if a political science/geography student could expand on this angle for a term project or something... Next: How Cold This War (Prelude)
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Copyright © 2006-2025 GLYS. All Rights Reserved. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
