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Hello, and welcome to the intelligence on economist radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. violence as follows last month disputed election in Ivory Coast, but it's just the latest example of an African strong man who simply didn't want to leave office. We take a look at a troubling democracy bending trend across the continent. And India's got a case of reefer madness. accusations are flying that Bollywood types are corrupting the culture with their weed habits. It's a surprising Flashpoint. India has a long, unbroken and altogether pretty chill relationship with marijuana.
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But first, during a year blighted by the pandemic, through difficult days of isolation, fear loss, one hope has seemed forever distant a vaccine to provide immunity from the Coronavirus. Some promising news brings that hope closer. Yesterday, Pfizer and beyond tech to pharmaceutical firms announced that their candidate vaccine is more than 90% effective preventing symptomatic cases of COVID-19. The results are based on an interim analysis of a trial on 43,000 people, a trial that's still underway, that hint that life might soon return to something like normal electrified the markets. positive news on a COVID-19 vaccine trial in Jeff get a jolt of energy into stocks driving the Dow up more than 800 points Monday, as he has plenty of questions remain about the vaccine about its safety, who at most helps, and for how long? Then there are far bigger logistical questions about distributing it. what's clear is that this is a major milestone, the beginning perhaps of the end of the pandemic.
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This is a really exciting moment. It's what we've been waiting for all
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year. Natasha Loder is our health policy editor.
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Not only do we have a vaccine that seems to be effective, it's highly effective. And this is according to what Pfizer has said, none of us had dared to hope for a vaccine that was more than 70% effective. So to find one that is 90% effective, seems like an enormous achievement.
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And how much stock should we put in that number of 90% efficacy?
2:46
Well, at the moment, these results are very provisional. We do need to wait for scientific data to be published, we do need to see more details about the trial and how it was conducted. All that said, I think we can expect that even if ultimately the efficacy of the vaccine is not quite as effective as they thought with their initial analysis, it's still going to be an extremely successful vaccine. It is fair to say it is a watershed moment. And also, it's a real success. For Science, the vaccine is really the ultimate solution to this crisis. And the more effective the vaccine is, the better.
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And presumably this late in clinical trials, the question of safety is largely solved.
3:33
No, I wouldn't say that at all. What we know is that they've not seen any kind of worrying side effects so far, and it appears to be safe. But it has only been used in 10s of thousands of patients. And we've only been looking at the side effects for not quite two months. So we do need to gather more safety data.
3:56
So aside from questions of safety, what questions about this vaccine in particular are still around in your mind?
4:02
Well, there are a lot of questions remaining and one is the extent to which it's going to be effective in elderly people. And we know that vaccines typically don't work as well in older people, so those results will be eagerly anticipated. The second really important question is the extent to which it prevents infectiousness. If we trust what Pfizer says and I do, we can say that it's preventing this disease from occurring in most of the people who received the vaccine, but we don't know if it's preventing them from spreading it. The third thing is just essentially the long term efficacy of the vaccine. I saw someone quoting someone from Pfizer saying they expect it to last for a year. I think that's a reasonable expectation, but it is also really just based on theoretical knowledge. We have no practical knowledge of how long this vaccine will last.
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And so what are the next steps in getting this vaccine actually put to you
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pharma companies have to convince regulators to give something called an emergency authorization that will allow them to roll out the vaccine more widely. It's worth bearing in mind that the permission that they're given is likely to be quite limited. I would expect regulators to ask for vaccines just to be given to very high risk patients in the first instance.
5:27
And that's the permission end of things. But what about the the distribution end? The question has always been once there is a viable candidate how to get it into all the right hands or arms.
5:36
Yeah, I mean, that's the big question. We do need to ramp up production of the vaccine has been underway since October, supply is going to be extremely constrained at first, and I would expect to see 10s of millions of doses being distributed in some countries this year. The firm has said it can make 1.3 billion doses in 2021. And various governments, the American government, European Union, United Kingdom, Canada and Japan, have all signed deals with Pfizer and beyond tack to access doses of vaccine. The bigger question now is whether the international community through something called Kovacs, which is a vaccine group is able to secure a deal with Pfizer as well, the distribution challenges are enormous. This vaccine needs to be kept frozen, it needs to be kept at minus 80 degrees C. And so in cities and in countries with lots of good infrastructure, you can envisage it being possible to distribute it. But it is possible that the international community will ultimately end up buying more doses of a vaccine that's just easier to distribute.
6:55
And what about those other candidates? How does this result fit in with with other vaccines that are in the race here,
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there are two more vaccines that are close behind Pfizer. And it's enormously exciting. In the coming weeks, we should get results from AstraZeneca and from Madonna. And there's a lot of reason to hope that these vaccines will work as well. The AstraZeneca vaccine, for example, has shown really promising results in the elderly. And so even if Pfizer's vaccine doesn't do well, in this group of people, we could expect the Astros as well.
7:29
So as someone who's been watching every twist and turn of this story, you You sound quite encouraged by this.
7:35
Yes, I am. I think when we look in the rearview mirror next summer, this will be the moment things started to change. It's gonna take months for the vaccines that do get approved to start having an impact. But in terms of the impact that covid has on our society, it will start to be diminished next year. The other thing I'm enormously excited about is this vaccine has proven that this mRNA technology works for the first time. What it means is that if we needed a little bit further down the line, a slightly different version of this vaccine. For example, if the coronavirus mutates, we could just tinker with the genetic information inside the Pfizer vaccine or any other RNA vaccine and create a completely new vaccine that doesn't need to go through all these trials. And so not only are we in the business now of defeating COVID-19, it looks like we could be much closer to defeating the pandemics of the future.
8:39
Natasha, thank you very much for the good news.
8:42
You're more than welcome, Jason.
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In Africa in recent weeks, there's been a run of elections dogged by allegations of vote rigging and marred by violence. in Guinea a vote on October 18 resulted in a dubious victory for incumbent president alpha Conde
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Well, first that unfuck Monday, Episode iconsiam dimeo. Cuts aka t Miller, researchers have
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swung the opposition there says dozens were killed protesting against the result may mean
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john Bombay Josefa
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magufuli
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the swearing in of john McAfee lead for a second term. As Tanzania's president followed an election that many said was neither free nor fair. And most recently in Ivory Coast, President Allison watauga has retained power in a contest that few believe he should have been allowed to stand in
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so soon.
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Go Go.
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With elections approaching in several other countries, democracy in Africa appears to be in deep trouble. trouble.
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So in the Ivory Coast, the president president watcher has changed the Constitution, which would have imposed a two term limit on him, he says allows him to run again, which he has done. Kenley salmon is our Africa correspondent. On October 31, the election was held and he won with a whopping 94% of the vote. That was in large part because the opposition chose to boycott the poll. And alongside that boycott, there's also been civil disobedience in quite some violence, in protest and also in ethnic violence, both before and after the election itself. The opposition for example, Pascal afyon guests and one of the main opposition leaders says the election was anti constitutional and announced that the opposition would set up a transitional government instead in law for snap on Camila Doral. Avec la parte
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de la calidad de la decrease
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in the gun, Mr. Gaston is now believed to have been arrested. But he has just recently released a video or someone has released a video saying he is alive and well.
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Meanwhile, other opposition leaders have also been targeted. They've had their houses surrounded. But just on Monday, the Constitutional Court in Ivory Coast said that nonetheless, despite all this, the election is valid. And Mr. Water has indeed officially won.
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And with that, what danger is there? Do you think of more of the violence that you mentioned?
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Well, there's certainly a risk of the crisis may worsen. And we might see more of these clashes between rival supporters, which often also map on to different ethnic groups. And there's also a risk that part of the Armed Forces likely don't see Mr. Water as legitimate now that he's gone past his two term limit. And in fact, we saw BM Sora, who's a former prime minister and a rebel leader now exiled in France, call on the army to act against Mr. Ouattara. Amidst all of this attention, over 3000 people have already fled the country. And this is kind of starting to look like a pattern. We've certainly talked about Tanzania on the show before. Well, that's right. There have been pretty alarming similarities in Tanzania. But also in Guinea, there were recent elections. And there's also a lot of violence, in reaction, again, to a changing of the constitutional setup to allow for extra terms. And Tanzania probably is the most troubling in terms of that real clamp down on the opposition. There again, the president, President mega Fuli, has won with a very large share of the vote. But the opposition's in alleges fraud. Many members of the opposition have since been arrested. And one of the main opposition leaders to looser is still in the German Embassy, where he sought refuge having been questioned already by police. And what's the international reaction been to all of this electoral discomfort, regional bodies and international actors, of course, have responded in some way. But particularly in the region, they tend to favor incumbents. And that's because of course, most of these regional bodies, like the African Union, are led by incumbents themselves. And so they tend to favor the opposition, perhaps a little less. And specifically in Tanzania, the African Union hasn't actually expressed an opinion despite having an observer mission there. And Cyril Rama poza, the President of South Africa, who currently chairs the African Union, overall, has already congratulated president mega Fuli of Tanzania on his win in a, quote, peaceful election. outside the region, there's been a bit more concern, Britain noted that it was deeply troubled by what was happening in Tanzania. The US has also weighed in on Ivory Coast, for example, urging all parties to follow the electoral rules, but that was widely mocked, given the US was going through its own electoral troubles at almost the exact same moment. And looking at the bigger picture here, then
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this proliferation of troubled elections. Do you think there's there's a signal here that democracy in Africa is under threat more than ever?
13:56
Well, it's certainly a very worrying trend. And the most concerning part of it is this changing of constitutional term limits for presidents we've seen that happen, obviously, in Ivory Coast and Guinea, but also elsewhere recently, it seems to be increasingly prominent. Not that long ago, back in 2015, one of the regional bodies in West Africa, eco house, actually had a proposal to restrict presidents right across the region to two terms, and it came close to passing but was ultimately dropped after a few of the more stubborn incumbents continue to block it. And since then, these regional bodies have really had a pretty limp response to efforts to change the constitution to allow prisoners to stay in power for longer and longer. And so I think without that regional effort to stop it, this is a pretty worrying trend.
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And so what are the next kind of flash points that we should look out for?
14:46
Well, obviously, things haven't quite finished yet in Guinea, Tanzania in the Ivory Coast, and so it'll be important to see what happens there as the opposition continues to dispute and contest. What's an officially declared but There are a lot more elections coming up very soon in Africa. So we've seen elections in next few months in Burkina Faso and the Central African Republic, Nigeria, Ghana and Uganda all very soon. And there is of course, a risk of things going poorly. And other places, too. We already saw in Uganda, the one of the main opposition candidates, Bobby wine was arrested when he went to submit his application to run for president. But there are still I think, bright spots and a lot of people expect Ghana to have an election in December that will adhere much more closely to democratic principles. And we saw in Seychelles, admittedly a small country but hardening example of a peaceful transition of power, where all parties attended the handover ceremonies. And it was a sort of peaceful and positive example. So I think there's still hope to see that elsewhere as well.
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Kinley, thank you very much for your time.
15:51
Thank you.
16:02
Indian media went to war with weed in September, as a investigation into the Bollywood drugs cartel violence,
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drugs connection.
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That's when law enforcement agencies rolled out a series of pretexts to hold Rhea Chakrabarti, a Bollywood starlet in jail for a month. She was accused of sourcing marijuana for her famous boyfriend Sushant Singh Rajput, who had committed suicide in June.
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This is clearly turning out to be Bollywood's Dirty Picture top stars being involved drug chats coming to the light and several drug deals as well.
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Puritans Fred is dead Miss Chakrabarti and other cannabis crazed actors were corrupting the nation's youth. But in India, the moral crusade against stoners, runs counter to culture.
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Marijuana, it's known to have started in central Eurasia many thousands of years ago.
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Alex Trevelyan is our India correspondent.
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But our first and oldest extant Literary Reference is from the Hindu Vedas, which would put the first description of anyone's getting higher in any way affected by cannabis to about 3000 years ago.
17:16
And what about today? What's the Indian relationship with marijuana these days?
17:19
These days, India's relationship with marijuana, cannabis all the various things that come from the plant is quite a jumble the plant can be chopped up and used in different ways. Among the less potent parts are fan leaves and seeds. put those together and you've got a category called palm. It'll get you high if you take it the right way. But it's not terribly strong and a funny loophole and Indian drug law has it that pung isn't really a drug. And once a year when the Holi festival comes in springtime, nearly everyone especially Hindu families, quite respectable and middle class families too, will make a drink with Pong. And everyone will get quite high on this drink, and then throw brightly colored powders and colored water at one another. And it's quite strange to see in very recent days, an attempt to turn cannabis use into some sort of devilish foreign perfectly as some people have implied it is among film stars. Right. So
18:21
what happened in the end with Rhea Chakrabarti and the Bollywood cannabis conspiracy,
18:26
there was for strange reasons, this enormous amount of interest generated over the summer. And because there were a lot of people in the Indian press who were interested in keeping that story going, and in pinning blame for the young actor's death on her. The worst thing they could find was buying marijuana, smoking it with their friends, and they tried to drum up a great big storm about that it didn't really work. She's now out on bail, and there's not much interest in prosecuting are further I expect that this little moral crusade against marijuana is going to disappear about as quickly as it came.
19:00
So to your mind, this isn't the beginning of a grand groundswell against ganja.
19:05
No, I think surely not. The most interesting thing about India's history with cannabis as an intoxicant is that it's continuous. For the past 3000 years really, without break, some Indians have been getting high and thinking highly of it. That's not the case elsewhere in the world, Europe and other parts of the world that were introduced to marijuana Long, long ago, effectively forgot about it until the 20th century, and were gripped by it in a way that India never really was. for India has made its peace with pot, long time running now, and this little country attempt and the media is sure to disappear.
19:42
Alex, thanks for going into the weeds on that one for
19:44
us. Sure. Thank you, Jason.
20:01
That's all for this episode of the intelligence. If you'd like us, give us a rating on Apple podcasts, and you can subscribe to the economist@economist.com slash intelligence offer. The link is in the show notes. See you back here tomorrow.