A Data Visualization Newsletter

COVID-19 vaccines were developed in record time and exceeded efficacy expectations, and that’s no coincidence. Scientists in every timezone worked tirelessly over the last year to share findings and work together towards a solution. The Pudding mapped 80,000 publications on coronavirus in 2020 posted to PubMed Central, an online repository for biomedical and life sciences research articles, to show the scale of this global scientific effort.

More than half a billion vaccine doses have been distributed across the globe so far. But the distribution has been far from equal -- over three-quarters of those doses have gone to the world’s richest countries. The New York Times explains how this imbalance came to be, and what the World Health Organization is doing to remedy it.

China has recovered from the pandemic as well as any other country, recording a rare positive GDP growth in 2020. This has pushed it closer to its decades-long goal of catching the U.S. in GDP, which some predict could happen as early as 2028. Bloomberg charts China’s efforts through the years to become the largest economy in the world.

For six days, the Ever Given container ship blocked the Suez Canal, causing an estimated $1 billion in physical and financial damages. A fleet of boats and crews spent days working to dislodge the ship and finally pushed it free last Monday. The Washington Post recreated the rescue efforts in 3D to show how the team successfully moved a 200,000-ton ship.