This is how America gets its vaccines

Lessons from fighting covid-19 misinformation

Sponsored by Darktrace The Download Your daily dose of what's up in emerging technology How vaccines go from labs to arms 01.27.21 Good morning! Today: we explain the five steps that get vaccines from manufacturers’ labs into patients’ arms in the US, and a project in Atlanta shows how we can do a better job of fighting covid-19 misinformation. Get your friends to sign up here to get The Download every day. This is how America gets its vaccines After just a week in office, the Biden administration is already under immense public pressure to fix America’s mangled vaccine rollout. Operation Warp Speed injected enormous sums into developing vaccines but left most of the planning—and cost—of administering them to states, which are now having to cope with the fallout. The reliance on chronically underfunded health departments has exposed a threadbare digital ecosystem in which manual data entry, unscalable though it is, is often the fastest way to fix things that break. Compounding the problem, local leaders have repeatedly complained about inconsistent vaccine supplies. The lack of top-down coordination and communication has led to thousands of appointment cancellations and countless doses tossed in the trash. Biden’s newly released pandemic strategy is organized around a central goal: to oversee administration of 100 million vaccines in 100 days. To do it, he'll have to fix the mess. But before we get to the solutions, we need to understand how the system operates at the moment—and which aspects of it should be ditched, replaced, or retained. Read this story to understand the five steps that get vaccines from manufacturers’ labs into patients’ arms in the US. —Cat Ferguson and Karen Hao Building a healthier internet: Lessons from fighting covid-19 misinformation Online misinformation and political polarization have hampered the efforts of public health officials to stop the spread of covid-19. Are there better ways to counter the falsehoods and get more reliable information out there? The MIT Media Lab’s HealthPulse project recently tried to answer that question. It ran a trial in Atlanta, a city with a large population of African-Americans, who for historical reasons have a high level of mistrust in health authorities. The HealthPulse team used a mix of technological tools to analyze what people were saying on radio and in social media, crafted messaging that could counter common falsehoods and misperceptions, and then asked community leaders and other influential people to spread those messages. So how well did it work? Tune in to a live panel tomorrow, January 28, at 2pm US Eastern Time, to hear the HealthPulse team and other experts discuss the project with our editor-in-chief, Gideon Lichfield, as part of the World Economic Forum’s Davos Agenda Week.  We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet 'em at me.)   + What actually is soup? Actually, maybe don't think about that one too much.   + A painting to get you excited for spring.    + A really quite lovely (and kind of moving?!) rendition of With A Little Help From My Friends. Thanks Daniel.    + These are not the stamps you're looking for… or are they? A Star Wars range is coming to the US.   + This parrot is very good at impressions.      + Paul O'Sullivan found a bunch of other Paul O'Sullivans on Facebook and naturally, they formed a band. (WP $)   + This piece of volcanic rock really looks like the Cookie Monster. Sponsor Message Cyber Security is Now a Machine Fight AI is being used to create increasingly customized, targeted, and hard-to-detect cyber-attacks at scale.  Autonomous Cyber AI learns ‘normal’ for your organization and stops advanced threats in their tracks.   Learn more > The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 The world has recorded more than 100 million covid-19 cases There is cause for hope—but also deep concern, especially thanks to the new variants. (NYT)   + It's not too late to turn things around in the US. (New Yorker $)   + How the UK got to the dreadful milestone of 100,000 deaths. (BBC)   + The "when covid is over" meme, explained. (WP $)  2 Reddit took on Wall Street… and it's winning 📈 GameStop shares have become the battleground. (The Guardian)   + How WallStreetBets pushed GameStop shares to the moon. (Bloomberg $)   + It's cool and fascinating and scary all at once. (Bloomberg $)  3 Vaccine passports seem inevitable 💉 They are divisive, politically tricky, yet they also look like one of the few paths to normality. (The Economist $)   + They claimed the covid vaccine made them sick—and went viral. (Wired $)   + Google Maps will soon show vaccination sites in the US. (Ars Technica)   + The case for vaccination mega-sites. (Wired $)   4 How many holes does a straw have? Mathematicians love this stuff. Find out why. (Quanta)   5 The Democrats are getting ready to tackle Big Tech The Capitol attack has fueled a general sense of "enough is enough" among much of the US public. (NYT $)   + They need to tread very carefully, though. Ditching Section 230 could hurt the very people they claim to want to protect. (The Verge)   6 Coding bootcamps are luring people into indentured service One training program costs $36,500 to quit. (OneZero $)   7 MIT is pushing back against the arrest of an engineering professor  Gang Chen is accused of hiding links to China's government, a charge he and the university strenuously denies. (NYT $)   8 The trouble with AI audits It's a burgeoning industry, but there are some very perverse incentives at work. (Fast Company)   9 Can WeWork survive the pandemic? There will be demand once it's over. But… that's a while away, and in the meantime it's relying on a lot of patience from lenders. (Wired UK)   10 This will be the first private crew to visit the International Space Station Yes, they are all rich (they're paying $55 million each.) Yes, they are all men. (Scientific American $) In just 2 weeks, join us at Future Compute, our virtual conference on intelligent computing.  Top executives from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, IBM, and Microsoft will share their perspectives on how the convergence of 5G, AI, and IoT is creating new opportunities and what this means for how business gets done. Register now. Quote of the day "Solidarity is failing." —Robert Yates, the director of the global health program at London-based think tank Chatham House, tells the New York Times vaccine nationalism has come to Europe, as the UK and EU trade in a tit-for-tat fight over distribution.  Top image credit: MS TECH | GETTY Please send your theories on soup to hi@technologyreview.com. Follow me on Twitter at @charlottejee. Thanks for reading! —Charlotte Was this newsletter forwarded to you, and you'd like to see more? Sign up for free Don't settle for half the story. Subscribe to MIT Technology Review for access to subscriber-only content and more.   Follow us: MIT Technology Review One Main Street Cambridge, MA 02142

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