Arquivo para a ‘Economia’ Categoria
The danger of the third wave and the vaccine for the poor
24
May
The richest countries in the world have only 13% of the
total population and for this first semester already have more than half (51%) of the doses of vaccines against covid-19 in development, the search for profit and the market dispute has led to this.
A strain of the virus is advancing in India that does not yet have very decisive data on the effectiveness of vaccines, so sending a test to the state of Maranhão is important, we will be able to know the effectiveness of the 3 vaccines that are already in Brazil for this variant , Coronavac, AstraZeneca and Pfizer, although the number of doses is still small, Brazil made a purchase of 100 million doses for October.
We need to go through the reverse with some security, the CNN website (figure) warns of the real danger of the third wave, the production of more vaccines with input already made in the poorest countries will be decisive for an increase in vaccination, which is still slow.
In percentage terms the logic is simple, if by the first week of June we are close to the level of 4 thousand daily deaths, the third wave has arrived, if we are below 2 thousand it has been stopped.
A shipment of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (IFA) arrived this Saturday at FioCruz, and will be used for the production of 12 million doses of vaccines, with the production of inputs in the country already started we can reach around 20 million doses (the promised is 18 million doses), will still be insufficient if Coronavac does not increase its production.
The government beckons with a total of 90 million doses, and the second dose for people over 70 is about to start, but it is necessary to respect the 90-day interval of the AstraZeneca vaccine.
In the case of Coronavac, the ideal interval is 21 to 28 days, to increase the effectiveness to 62.3%, but it is being used in an interval of 14 to 28 days, this effectiveness, which is low, can be maintained.
The essential thing now is to keep an eye on the new strain of India that already has registered cases in the country, make a strict isolation and maintain the protocols of maximum security, a poorly done thing.
Pandemic´s time of the planet
17
May
The data observed by the Opera Mundi website, there you can see
the pandemic numbers all over the world, show that in the pandemic cycles, despite the vaccination that according to the website reached 1.5 billion doses administered on Sunday night (if the world population is around 7.5 billion people) this means 20% of vaccination worldwide, of course it varies in many regions.
India for example, which is the worst case of Pandemic at the moment, is the third most vaccinated with more than 179 million doses, but has a population of almost 1.4 billion people and this gives 7% only vaccinated, well below the world average (above) of 20%. The number of deaths falls, but the number of infections grows.
Brazil with approximately 37 billion vaccines for at least the first dose (the number of more than 50 billion vaccines is added to the first with the second dose, which counts those who took the 2nd dose twice) also means a number below average, with a population of more than 200 million inhabitants (211 in the last estimate), this is 20%, which means on average, but the seriousness of the Pandemic still requires greater efforts.
The purchase of 100 million doses of Pfizer could make us optimistic, if it weren’t for October, and the value of 6.6 billion reais means this means 66 reais per dose, something around 10 euros or 9 pounds sterling in exchange current, expensive price and the vaccine requires special logistics because it must be kept at low temperature (dry ice, refrigerated transport, refrigerators, etc.).
All of this could make us optimistic, but the reality is not quite this, it is observed that even in countries where there was a sharp drop (England and Portugal for example) you cannot let your guard down because the world is a global village and even with few flights people circulate, and a case of infection, and there are new strains of the virus, can trigger the whole process again.
It is time for the planet, we can and we must take a planetary attitude, we have not yet done so, and even regulators, governments and health agencies still seem to fall short of the measures to be taken, for example, in the case of India and in the creation of protocols for travel, a global plan is required.
There is a fair concern that this is done exclusively by political and non-technical-sanitary criteria, which is a fact, but as politics has not helped, we can help politics with sanitary attitudes, in a current language: public health policy.
The campaign is simple and global: vaccine for everyone, global protocols in relation to types of vaccines, by age, type of comorbidity, equitable distribution (for example, reaching 20% vaccination in all countries as a target for this month), we could think 50% by July that it would be an audacious attempt, but doing the math: there will be the production of 3.5 billion doses by July counting all vaccines (we are already at 1.4 billion) does not seem an impossible number.
Vaccine for everyone !!! aid to poor countries and countries of major pandemic crisis.
Criticism of inadequate reason
30
Mar
Western philosophy lives in an inadequate reason, it cannot be
rational to ignore the pain, death and inclement weather of nature and life, life is death and resurrection and without understanding one does not understand the other, in the middle of a pandemic it is observed that not even religious understood this.
In Western philosophy, idealism and its dualistic logic predominate, so pain and happiness complement each other, that is why so much sadism is possible with one’s own body, with human relationships, although now there is a great appeal to empathy, we have already discussed the “third party included ”Of quantum physics and the logic of going beyond me-you.
Epicurus submitted the pain to the tetrapharmakon, the idea that to deny it would be useless so it is to seek the best way to live with it, it is the neurotic terrain of right and wrong, of good and evil, to reach a philosophical plain populated as I would say Espinosa, good and bad encounters.
Epicurus’ first two remedies refer to the intellect, proper to idealism, to undo all the irrational superstitions and fears that cause anguish in men, the death and anger of the gods, that is why the litany God is good, he is , but incompatible with evil and this does not mean the absence of pain, but its transposition to a greater good.
The last two remedies are a hedonistic “ethics”, it deals with the preventive characters of pain and the obtaining of pleasure, they also do not admit pain with a contingency of life, and not everything is inevitable, for example death, and so it remains improper reason.
Camus also addressed the issue, and we had the opportunity to make a post about the Myth of Sisyphus, and his starting point is to find happiness where it is possible in dark times (wars).
If we admit the pain, and go through it, we will find a third go-beyond or think towards the beyond, suggested by Emmanuel Lévinas, which means to move more and more towards the stranger, the mystery and the infinite (another Lévinas theme) and we have already mentioned here the Cosmos and Teilhard de Chardin’s vision of a Christian worldview.
We entered Easter week and with it in the Christian worldview, the sacrifice of Christ replaces the sacrifice of the lamb made by Abraham (in the three great monotheistic religions: Islam, Judaism and Christianity), so the pain enters a new meaning from of which afterlife is possible.
It is serious, but there can be hope
29
Mar
While Europe is experiencing the 3rd. wave, the number of infected
and the severity of the disease makes the pandemic a humanitarian crisis in Brazil, the hope is to increase the rate of vaccination.
In Europe, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen recognizes that the bloc of the 27 member countries “is not where it wanted” with immunization, and said that efforts should accelerate, despite the 2 billion doses contracted, for a population of 450 million, rates are still below 10%, which is very little due to the effort already made.
While Italy, Germany and France vaccination 10.3% outside the block the United Kingdom has already reached 36.5%, in Brazil close to 13% have already received the first dose, the official data is 15,503,373 for the first dose, while 4,699,784 for the second dose, in a total of more than 20 million, but the rate of infection and mortality grows, if we think that 12.5 million have already had covid-19 it can be said that in number there is a small advantage.
However, it is not so, it would be necessary that half of the population already had the first dose, but looking at the most optimistic case, which is the 38% of the United Kingdom, we see that the way to go is great.
The hope comes from the two institutes that develop the vaccine in Brazil, Butantã in São Paulo and FioCruz in Rio de Janeiro, it is believed that people over 60 years of age may be vaccinating in April, this would lead to a rate of just over 20% in the month, not counting the external contracts that can increase this number a lot, reaching an optimistic rate of 35%.
This is because the promise of 57,179,258 doses fell to 47,329,258 doses, among which the number decreased are Pfizer and Oxford, but with the promise of vaccines coming from abroad this rate could reach the goal expected in May for 47 657 058 just below the plan.
The rate will only exceed that planned in the month of August where more than 82 million doses are expected instead of the planned 35 million, so only in September can a drop in infections and deaths be expected, the health system is expected in trouble to get there.
The hope remains the growth of vaccines available on the market.
The proximity in Ricoeur and Pope Francis
23
Mar
Paul Ricoeur’s quote in the papal encyclical Fratelli Tutti is of a
philosophical and theological dimension that few still understood, by separating partners from close ones, inspired by Ricoeur’s categories, the pope dialogues with contemporaneity both with philosophy and with theology and opens a new path for concrete fraternalism.
Although the tendency of Utopian content that the word Fraternity (the name of the encyclical is Fratelli, remember) takes on a new dimension when reading Socius et Prochain de Ricoeur.
It can be said that it develops a true culture of proximity, that is, it is not the friends of that group that I am connected with, of those who share a certain “identity”, the encyclical also clarifies these false concepts of identity that isolate us from others.
Ricoeur’s mention deserves note: “charity brings together the two dimensions – the mythical and the institutional – as it implies an effective way of transforming history that requires incorporating everything: institutions, law, technique, experience, professional contributions, analysis scientific, administrative procedures ”(FT §164), and thus incorporates human realities in the mythical.
It can be said that it is a realistic realism of a utopia of a better possible world, which cannot be reduced to an ineffective religious sentimentality that threatens certain conceptions that both mystique and good philosophy contemplate, going against the Other, proximity .
Another essential point of the encyclical is the misuse of the identity category, the Encyclical will say that “when they cling to an identity that separates them from others” and it is in Chapter III that speaks precisely of thinking
And the Encyclical alerts: “There are peripheries that are close to us, in the center of a city or in the family itself”. (FT §97), and again in Paul Ricoeur we find: “the neighbor is the very conduct of being present (…) the neighbor’s science is immediately blocked by a neighbor’s praxis: we do not have a neighbor; I am the next someone’s neighbor “(Ricoeur, 1968).
It is the misunderstanding of this category that leads bad philosophy to not understand what the other means and to give and this can be seen in the whole history of philosophy in the different conceptions of identity, the concept is in Stuart Hall and also Heidegger’s that identity is the degree of understanding that each one has of their own culture, but the topic is controversial and we will return to it.
Ricoeur, Paul “O socius e o próximo”, in História e Verdade, trad. F. A. Ribeiro (Companhia Editora Forense: Rio de Janeiro, 1968),
Pope Francis. (2020) Carta Encíclica Fratelli Tutti (FT), Vatican. Available in:
Fratelli tutti (3 October 2020) | Francis (vatican.va)
Urgent vaccines and lockdown in Brazil
22
Mar
We have entered a critical phase of the pandemic in Brazil, even the most economically advanced state is already showing signs of hospital exhaustion and there is already a threat of an ongoing humanitarian crisis.
Flight arrives 17h30 International Airport in Guarulhos, Brazil.
A slight hope comes from the consortium Covax Facility, led by the WHO, landed in Guarulhos, Greater São Paulo, 1,022,400 doses of immunizers yesterday, and there is a prospect of more than 42 million doses this year, is the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine, manufactured by SK Bioscience of South Korea, the same one manufactured by Fiocruz with a definitive registration by Anvisa (the Brazilian Health Surveillance Association).
AstraZeneca´s 8 million that will come from the Serum Institute of India will be delayed (only 2 million arrive).
But the Coronavac from Butatan made available 24.6 million doses of the vaccine for the whole country, the schedule until the end of April foresees 46 million doses, where will the missing ones come from?
Anvisa has already granted the definitive registration for the Pfizer vaccine, which authorizes its importation, but the immunizer is not yet available on Brazilian soil, with the extension of the lockdown extension, Ceará State signed a contract for the direct purchase of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, the state wants to acquire 5.8 million doses of this vaccine.
The União Química laboratory has production rights for Sputnik V in Brazil, but Anvisa charges the delivery of data for emergency use, the data published in the scientific journal The Lancet, indicate that the effectiveness of this vaccine is 91%.
The government has signed a contract to purchase 100 million doses of Pfizer immunizers, and the remaining 38 million from Janssen, which, however, does not yet have a definitive registry.
Several reports and scientific data show that a combination of lockdown with vaccination is necessary, the success of the United Kingdom and Portugal, where the number of hospitalizations has dropped dramatically, while the rest of Europe is facing a 3rd. wave.
Although it is difficult, it is necessary to have hope for vaccination and not to slow down measures of social isolation in Brazil.
Give a “soul” to the Earth
18
Mar
The idea of giving the man of our time a planetary citizenship, we
live in a time of globalization or globalization, and this implies rights, it will only be sustainable if in return this path also points to an earthly “soul” where everyone sees themselves as codependents among themselves, the pandemic should have sparked this, but not yet.
Says Chardin in the book we are analyzing: “the man of our time will still go through a period of great illusion, imagining that, having reached a better knowledge of himself and the world, he no longer needs Religion” (Chardin, 1958) and this gets worse when we see the night of God hanging over humanity, confused between ideologies and fundamentalisms.
He saw the imperative that “from universal evolution God emerges in our consciences”, and he saw that it was necessary to overcome “religion understood as a simple appeasement of our difficulties, nothing ‘opium’. Its real function is to sustain and stimulate the progress of Life”and note that the systems proposed against it have not been able to prove effective in this direction.
He explains that the religious function is “born of ´hominization´, and linked to it can only be continually with the Man himself”, and he will ask: “Isn´t this what we can verify in our life? When, in the Noosphere, was there a more urgent need to seek, to find a Faith, a Hope to give meaning, a soul to the immense organism that we built?
It implied that this process of hominization, as the highlight of the complexification of the Cosmos, its “more advanced” form is “personalized”, and it raises a double necessary condition for the future: to super-animate the Person (anima-soul and animation has the same etymological origin), but without destroying it, and a universal convergence “must still (eminently) have the quality of a Person”, we purposely invert, due to current events.
Chardin imagined that the person would grow up with this “super-anima” (here in the sense of the animation) but we see that the Person was in the background, or as most current existentialists prefer, the Being and the Being-with-the-Other, that should have evolved along with the super-anima, but it didn’t.
In the 1937 Beijing writings, he speculates about this human energy that drives so many advances and this “being-more” force in a more primitive and more savage form: the War.
He believed that the time will come when “those who triumph over the mysteries of Matter and Life” as opposed to being used for war, armies and fleets, “doubling this other power that the machine will make free, and an irresistible tide of energies available will lead to the most progressive circles in the Noosphere”.
As a first conclusion, the texts will still go ahead, he says: “Love, like thought, is always in full growth in the Noosphere. The excess of their energies in relation to the increasingly restricted needs of human propagation is becoming more flagrant every day”.
Chardin, T. (1958) Construire la Terre. Paris: Editions du Soleil.
Healing, the soul and the law
16
Mar
The pandemic follows an even more dangerous path, which is the
production of new variants or new strains, all humanity wants a cure, even the so-called denialists, we all suffer and because the cure does not come, what is missing for science, or for understanding the virus that does not happen, in fact we have other diseases that are social comorbidities: hunger, misery, ignorance and intolerance that do not give respite too, and the disease of the soul that is not talked about.
Ah it was always like that, we have no other solution, we talked in the previous post about the next pandemic, if we do not cure ourselves, of course, there is a different and emblematic case.
In 1977, Ali Maow Maalin, who was a hospital cook in Somalia, caught smallpox, he didn’t know, but he was the last person in the world to naturally contract the disease, she infected 1 billion people and killed 300 million in the 20th century, when he was cured he went down in history, smallpox was considered eradicated, two things were needed: the vaccine and managing the disease.
Management must be global and WHO must play an essential role in this struggle, identify outbreaks and act quickly and firmly to prevent infectious diseases from spreading.
The disease that prevents this is the disease of the soul, we are almost always in radicalization poles and we do not allow a fraternal and general advance of all countries and in all countries by WHO, this problem of the human “soul” will not be solved only by law, politics and repression, it is necessary to educate.
Religions could play an essential role in this, created to make the human family the daughter of one Father and thus all his children, limited as we are in the face of sanitary and social diseases, cannot be fulfilled because the human soul remains ill, and only “law ”does not solve the need to change the mentality, only radicalization will produce more dictatorships and less fraternity.
n the Bible passage that Jesus heals a paralytic, and he goes out taking the bed, the Jews say that it was not allowed to carry the bed on the Sabbath (John 5: 10-13) and Jesus had already forgiven his sins, that is, healed his soul, and we remain sick with sin and new mentality.
Teilhard Chardin wrote “Construire la terre” (Ed. Soleil, 1958) where he speaks of the “common soul”, we will return to the theme.
The unpredictable future of the pandemic
15
Mar
It is becoming increasingly clear that the future of the pandemic
may be far from what everyone imagines, the number of variants of the virus, scientists are beginning to identify the small variations it makes in its genetic code, and for years epidemiologists have said that we should be prepare for a next pandemic, if we haven’t done it before, now more than ever should be done.
Meanwhile, the epidemic shows no signs of cooling, despite the number dropping, in Europe for example, there was a considerable increase this week, of every 100 infections registered in the world, 41 are from Europe, the Brazilian case we have already revealed is tragic due to the records infections and deaths higher than last year’s data.
The studies on the variants also find a change in its genetic code that is frightening because with each transmission, changes in the genetic code can influence the efficiency of the vaccine (we have already explained the efficacy rates that depend on the “type” of the vaccine), that is it may happen that the next epidemic is the coronavirus itself in one of its mutations.
What to do for now, increase the vaccine and combine it with lockdown, is a cultural fact that will be difficult in Brazil and the restrictions are highly unpopular, but there is nothing else to do, and it needs to be combined with increased rates. vaccination.
Another problem is the humanitarian crisis that can occur, limiting the movement of people means limiting trade, consumption of goods, etc., which in 2020 had a positive fact, since the little circulation of vehicles and the use of non-renewable energies, it caused CO2 emissions to drop by an average of 6% across the planet, and some signs of nature rehabilitation appeared, the presence of dolphins close to the coast, which means an abundance of fish, improved levels of pollution in large cities.
However, it is important to say that the number of deaths grows that had started to decrease, returns to very worrying levels, and new bouts happen again due to the virus variants.
The economy must also be a worrying factor because there are already signs in many countries of social problems, unemployment, poverty levels and related issues: income distribution and impoverishment.
We can learn from this cruel lesson, but still most people care little about what hasn’t directly affected them yet, but it will gradually affect everyone.
Good news, bad and post-pandemic trauma
01
Mar
The good news is that the pandemic is decreasing worldwide, the
bad thing is that in Brazil at least 7 states with a worse worsening than the data from 2020, it is worrying, but what is already beginning to be thought is what will come next, our worldview has changed and we need to take a new path.
These are events that happen individually when we have a serious accident, a rupture in personal relationships, or something that creates trauma, according to David Trickey, a psychiatrist and member of the UK Trauma Council, the trauma rupture is a “construction of meaning” .
The psychiatrist explains: “the way you see yourself, the way you see the world and the way you see other people” are shaken by the turn of an event, a gap in your “guidance system” and a simple everyday stress turns into trauma if they are mediated by strong and prolonged feelings of helplessness and apprehension.
It will be necessary to look at people’s mental health, to extend our limit of tolerance and attention, it is at this moment that intolerances and practices of latent or simply little pessimism
What is this guidance and meaning system about, we all have a kind of “personal GPS”, connected to work, human fulfillment and their needs, in short self-esteem and the relationship with others, we dealt with the subject in the past week.
Mental resilience is a kind of balm that moves our cognitive machine and makes us move on from stress and if it gets close to exhaustion it creates a psychic trauma, as serious as a physical trauma.
Remembering the lessons of this pandemic crisis and building new meanings is more difficult than just being “optimistic”, but the penultimate great epidemic of the Spanish crisis has shown that it has been forgotten and the lessons we could learn have not been learned.
Martin Bayly, a social scientist at the London School of Economics (LSE), quoted in a BBC report, went to revisit files on Spanish flu in the UK where 250,000 people died, and could not find any evidence of public homage, he said in the report “The absence of memorials made it disappear from public memory, when writing history”.
This affects our preparedness for future crises, when the 1957 pandemic occurred (the Asian flu killed one million people), several analysts pointed out, according to Bayly’s report, “we completely failed to learn the lessons of 1918”, but also the moral lesson why we were in the middle of war.
Creating a meaning from a social narrative would be an important step, highlights the report, and one of the efforts in the United Kingdom will be to remember the NHS (National Health Service) in the Brazilian case the SUS (Unified Health System), in addition to this thinking about memories and other ways of remembering and recounting this crisis will be alert and preparation for the future.
