Morning Reading – Wednesday, December 16, 2020
The Vaccine Arrived in a 63-Pound Box, Packed in Dry Ice – The New York Times
“Hospital workers, Cuomo’s people. Every one of us realized at that minute, just how profound that was going to be. We were putting a woman on the moon. It was a lunar landing.”
FT People of the Year: BioNTech’s Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci | Financial Times
The mere fact that a safe and effective inoculation is available less than a year after the genetic sequence for a new, pneumonia-like pathogen was released puts the achievement by Dr Sahin and Dr Tureci, who are the FT’s People of the Year for 2020, alongside the greatest medical breakthroughs of our time.
The genius of Operation Warp Speed was the decision to run the vaccine development process in parallel rather than sequentially.
Three-quarters of states will elect governors in the next 2 years. Here’s a field guide. – POLITICO
Thirty-eight of 50 states — accounting for nearly 85 percent of the U.S. population — will hold gubernatorial elections between 2021 and 2022. A dozen states are likely in play, if not more, raising the potential for one party to expand its influence across the nation.
She is the first woman to manage a successful Democratic presidential campaign, the first woman to run a campaign that ousted an incumbent president, and of course the first person to spearhead a winning ticket in the middle of an unprecedented pandemic.
A wake-up for the world on cyber security | Financial Times
Any IT system, moreover, is only as secure as its weakest link. A central feature of this attack is that it utilised the supply chain, gaining access via software from a commercial supplier.
Christmas Trees Are the Hot New Pandemic Item – The Atlantic
There appears to be a run on Christmas trees. Over the past two weeks, the media have started to pick up on the apparent frenzy, but putting numbers to these observations is a little tricky because the industry is almost charmingly low on data.