Comments
Curated and popular this week
Michael Nielsen has a beautiful new essay on moral imagination: the ability humans have to 'develop and transmit new notions of good action, indeed, even new kinds of good'.
As examples, he gives:
* Hammurabi's creation of a code of laws (in 1754 BCE) and his justification of his rule not in terms of divine or hereditary right, but by the delivery of justice to his citizens.
* St Gregory of Nyssa's...
100
Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
A preliminary estimate, and a request for better ones.
Summary
I believe the standard literature estimates for the number of DALYs attributable to a case of stunting are too low, largely because they don’t account for the long term effects. This means that childhood nutritional interventions that reduce the prevalence of stunting may be substantially more cost-effective than previously believed.
Epistemic status
Exploratory and back-o...
In your view, what is the next step?
This has some of 1Day's thoughts (though it was published before PQ happened). This tweet thread is briefer and has some more technical ideas.
Big picture -- probably need to raise about $500 million to pay for distribution and need to get WHO/GAVI/UNICEF to announce a much more aggressive plan for implementation. Also need to do a ton of work in African countries to create the political will and technical plans for rapid rollout.
From an advocacy perspective, 1Day's main idea is to generate a ton of public attention to achieve the goals above (particularly the money) -- ideally by bringing in new philanthropic funders, though that may be unrealistic. But there will also be more targeted campaigns at the international institution and African country levels.
Current rollout plans are unclear, but the below probably gives the best sense of current international institution goals.
As you can see, current vision doesn't get to the predicted steady state (80 million doses) until about 2027. Serum Institute can currently produce 100 million doses per year and already has on-hand material to make 20 million. About 80 million children are at risk of malaria and in the age range in which R21 was tested and demonstrated high efficacy. About 25 million are born each year. Each child requires 4 doses (3 doses the first year followed by a booster).
Optimistically, Gavi and partners do their thing and we get a nice efficient rollout across the relevant areas. But I have very limited knowledge of this space. I don't know what the bottlenecks or process here is.