Episode 116: Variants and Vaccines Part I

Rukmini S
1 min readMay 28, 2021

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Hello and welcome to The Moving Curve. I’m Rukmini, a data journalist based in Chennai. Two nights a week on this mini-cast, I consider one question around the novel coronavirus epidemic in India. Tonight I’m considering this one — what can we say we know by now from real world data on vaccine effectiveness?

Here’s the data shared by the health ministry at the press conference

Here’s what I found out when I investigated the data (hint: it was worthless).

Here’s what the Public Health England report says.

Here’s the FT journalist John Burn-Murdoch’s Twitter thread on it:

It’s a lot to take in, but I want to better understand what it means for us — how did the UK manage to get this kind of data, for one. Should those lower numbers for Covishield worry us? And lastly, what should the ideal gap between two doses of a vaccine now look like in India? In the next episode, I’m delighted to have on John Burn-Murdoch, data journalist at the FT, to help answer some of these questions.

Thank you for listening. This episode was edited by Anand Krishnamoorthi. On the next episode — a new question.

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