Dear Colleagues,

More than a year into the pandemic, it’s becoming ever more clear that whoever is not yet an expert in “risk-benefit calculations”   better takes a course soon. (And if you suffer from SCT (“Sluggish Cognitive Tempo”, a possible “new mental health disorder” ) you might want to make it a long-term project, with logframe and all 😊) 

As we’re already sort of in an economic mood, let’s continue. A while ago, some observers suggested WHO urgently needs a ‘Chief Economist’.   Presumably, their underlying rationale was not, ‘now that everything in the world has become a market and for sale (including resource-constrained WHO), we might as well have a “chief economist” to do things properly’ 😊. Still, one might wonder, with recent WHO press releases like “COVAX reaches over 100 “economies” “  (Els Torreele on Twitter: “since when does  WHO  refer to countries, people, as ‘economies’?”), or when reading about Lucy Sullivan’s (rather serious) misgivings around the...