The BBC is reporting that a UK company has developed a technique for making vaccines that do not need to be refrigerated. This would be a really, really good thing: as it is, most vaccines have to be kept cold, and if you try to imagine the difficulties of refrigerating vaccines when you are, let’s say, tromping through the jungles of Mozambique to vaccinate children in remote villages without access to electrical outlets, you can see the advantages of this approach. Besides making life much easier, it would also allow large cost savings, both by relieving people of the need to carry around the equipment needed to keep the vaccines cold and also by eliminating the problem of wasting vaccines by allowing them to get too warm. It will, according to the BBC, be five years before vaccines made using this technique are commercially available, but when they are, it will be a really big deal.
Also, Uwe Reinhardt has created a Primer for Journalists on health care reform. Speaking now in a non-partisan way: Reinhardt is one of the best health economists now working. He announces his potential biasses on the front page of his primer, but as best I can tell they do not affect what he writes. His goal is to provide a non-partisan summary of the sorts of considerations one should bear in mind when assessing health care reform proposals, one which is accessible to people with no particular expertise in health care economics; and he does this quite clearly, in 29 pages. (He could have done a better job with proofreading, however.) I often wish that there were documents like this on all issues: clear and fair-minded guides to the basics, written by experts. So since one has appeared, I thought I’d alert the rest of you to its existence. (Via Brad DeLong.)
Thanks for the link to the Primer, hilzoy. It’s a great resource.