I wrote in January about vaccines and public health, and I wanted to retract my bottom-line recommendation about which vaccine to get -- if you have a choice -- in Hong Kong. Appointments opened to residents 16+ yesterday, so this post is coming a bit late, but oh well. Here we are.

If you're in Hong Kong and have choices, my personal recommandation is that you get an appointment for the BioNTech (Pfizer) vaccine as soon as possible. (If you are in Hong Kong and have a HKID, the link to book a vaccine in English is here -- click the red "Book Vaccination" box at the left.)

In the rest of this post, I'll describe how my thinking has changed on the argument I expressed in my January post.

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When I wrote in January, I was looking at a massive shortfall in vaccine demand in the US and assuming that it couldn't happen here in Hong Kong. In hindsight, I was extremely wrong.

In the first 57 days of the government vaccination program, 16.3 doses have been given for every 100 persons in Hong Kong, at an average rate of 21,500 doses/day (government source). On Friday at 9am, all residents 16+ became eligible to book appointments, and "about 31,300 new vaccination bookings [were] made online" in the 13 hours before and 11 hours after the opening. I'm not sure whether this is 31k people with 62k appointments, or 16k people with 31k appointments.

Even if it's 62k new appointments in the first-day rush, that's still only 2.4x the daily processing rate (26,100 doses given in the same 24

Another may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him;
but this bell that tells me of his affliction, digs out, and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another's danger, I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself...

I was talking with a friend the other day, and the topic turned to vaccines. It's expected that the Sinovac and Pfizer vaccines will become available roughly simultaneously in Hong Kong, and so the question was, which vaccine we'd would prefer to receive.

Two topics that came up were safety and efficacy...

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On safety, one can ask whether the Sinovac vaccine should be trusted quite as much as the ones developed in the West. (Hey, one can ask just about anything...)

Well, medically speaking, CoronaVac is a relatively conventional killed-virus vaccine. There's significant trial data available on it, as it has been given to more than a million people in mainland China since it received EUA in July. They've had months to observe side effects.

The issue is that that trial data is in the hands of Sinovac, a state-owned enterprise. And the question, then, is whether the Chinese authorities might have EUA'd the vaccine even if it had side effects that would make you, personally, balk. If it did, and even if it was massively good for society as a whole to get it, you might prefer to pass on getting it in your arm.

But that's just speculation; how likely is it to be true? Well, if CoronaVac's minor negative effects would be suppressed

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The Harvard Political Review reports that a Chicago nonprofit is scraping Twitter to pass on complaints about food poisoning in restaurants to the Chicago Department of Public Health:

Foodborne Chicago depends on human judgment in addition to computerized predictions. First, the algorithm "surfaces tweets that are related to foodborne illnesses." Next, "a human classifier goes through those complaints that the machine classifies, [...determining] what is really about food poisoning and what may be other noise." The Foodborne team then tweets back at the likely cases, providing a link for users to file an official complaint. In short, computers deal with the massive quantity of Twitter data, and humans ensure the quality of the result. According to its website, between its launch on March 23, 2013 and November 10, 2014, the Foodborne algorithm flagged 3,594 tweets as potential food poisoning cases. Of these tweets, human coders have identified 419, roughly 12 percent, as likely cases meriting a reply on Twitter.

But does it actually work?

In its first nine months of operation, Foodborne initiated 133 health inspections. Approximately 40 percent of these investigations uncovered critical or severe violations of the health code -- the kinds of violations that force restaurants to shut down or to remain open only under strict conditions. As Richardson noted, "that percentage is equivalent to the ... percentage of violations we find based on reports we get from 311" -- the phone number citizens can call to report food poisoning to their city’s municipal services. (...)

Apparently, yes.

Elsewhere in the brave new

It's Jonas Salk's 100th birthday (as commemorated in Google's daily doodle, above, which, ironically enough, enjoys more patent protection than does the polio vaccine it commemorates), which makes for a fine reminder that you should get your annual flu shot! By doing so, you're:

1. much less likely to get the flu
2. decreasing potential anxiety as a result of experiencing flu-like symptoms, which, annoyingly, are highly similar to the early symptoms of Ebola every disease ever.
3. protecting your friends, family, the elderly, babies, and the immunosuppressed through herd immunity.

On this last point (herd immunity), Vax is a neat online game where you try to shut down epidemics by vaccinating and quarantining people; my top scores are 94%/81%/76% in turn-based mode and 94%/91%/84% in real-time mode. It's addicting, but mercifully not that long, so you won't lose days of your life to it.

Anyway. Happy birthday, Dr. Salk. May the world always have scientists so visionary and daring. May your legacy as the man who killed a disease be less rare in the future, when we've likewise struck malaria, worms, and so many more preventable diseases from the list of things that kill us, but until then, thanks for getting us this far.