Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Funding high-risk, high-return technology research often falls to governments, and perhaps

the best record is Americas. Its Blue Sky program called DARPA has been so successful

that lots of countries are now looking to copy it. And, ahead of today's private funeral

of Kenneth Kounder in Zambia, our obituaries editor reflects on his life, a reformer

who railed against British colonial rule, an icon of non-violent struggle, but in the

end not the savior of his country that he longed to be.

Just up though. Russia is in the midst of its third and most severe wave of COVID-19, fueled

by the highly contagious Delta variant. Daily deaths have reached six or seven hundred

the highest figures since the coronavirus struck. The official overall death toll for

Russia has surpassed 130,000, but according to the economist's own figures on excess deaths

throughout the pandemic, the real tally is closer to half a million, which suggests significant

undercounting. Vaccines should be the same in grace. After all, back in August, Russia

was the first country to register a COVID vaccine. It's homemade Sputnik V. In May this year,

President Vladimir Putin described the job as being among the most reliable and safest available.

As simple and secure, he said, as a Kalashnikov assault rifle, and yet despite Russia's

ready supply of vaccines and a mass inoculation drive that started relatively early in December

2020, just 17% of the population has received at least one dose.

The big problem that we see in Russia is there's a lot of vaccine hesitancy, according to

the Lavada Center, which is probably the only really trusted, reliable, independent pollster

in Russia. Back in February, they found that 57% of Russians didn't worry about catching

...