Envelope / Develope

Photo by davide ragusa on Unsplash The social distancing forced families to stay together and live confined for many hours in a row. Habits exposed at work were transferred in  the family setting and did not fit or led to conflict. The simple way of spending time revealed that suddenly when the time is lapsing slower than usually, people don't know how to stare or leave in contemplation. For unknown reasons: 1. what became obvious to everyone during the corona virus: people have time to think and question and fall on the same old theories - the gods are cheating on us, there is a large conspiracy of big pharma, the government is sold to big corporations, etc.. 2. when there is no skin in the game, there is no incentive to innovate - education, health, management of limited resources, cooperating among nations at safeguarding resources  3. there is no planning for all elected officials and there is no pay-back for the ones who really played the system - I ...

Photo by Trust "Tru" Katsande on Unsplash I was reading about the developing efforts for a vaccine reflected through the stock market. It happened to have a few shares of the VIR Biotechnology ( VIR ) company when the chase of finding a vaccine started. It was an incredible ride, even for a guy accustomed with the up-and-downs of the shares in a company and the political game played when companies are bought or acquired. Just for illustration, please see the chart of this stock for a three month period. There is excitement, at the beginning  of March about the possibility of developing a vaccine for Corona virus, and the stock surpasses 70$/share when before is was lingering under the 17$/share threshold. There are many companies in the race - Moderna ( MRNA ), Gilead ( GILD ), Inovio Pharmaceuticals ( INO ) and probably a few of them will find a virus. What I don't understand is the effort spent in parallel of fighting the same cause. It is a lot of ...

Here in Toronto, there is an intermittent radio show called "White coat, black art" about being a doctor nowadays or the dilemmas of the health system in Canada. The whole accent is about how difficult is to navigate the current medical problems when in fact, almost everyone is more interested about the ethical questions, economic factors (why some procedures are supported or not) and obviously the transparency of the personal skills of the medical staff. The public services are served as a "block" for everyone when the reality is that it counts on whose hands are you under medical care. What is not touched in any way (the guest making the show is a doctor) are conflictual and controversial views about doctors. The show is mostly about raising big questions, not touching constant slippage of the system and the self-empowerment of the job due to the social contract of how the doctors and the medical system are provisioned in Canada's economy. In this post I...