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,…
COVID-19
34 posts
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.…
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 cooki…
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 infection…
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 expresse…
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 contactle…
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 pric…
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 differen…
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 studi…
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…
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…
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 sp…