South Africa suspends rollout of Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine
dw.com
dw.com
I expect that come late summer we'll all be getting another booster of some sort against whatever mix of variants is around. The trick will be prediction although we are helped by the fact that both mRNA and vectored vaccines can be changed and produced quite quickly.
I also think that the emergence of this variant may save lives in the end because it forces to the front of everyone's mind the necessity of vaccinating the entire world and may make it politically easier to ship vaccine to the poor countries of the world before the rich countries have finished their vaccination programmes.
A booster? I don't think I will be able to get my first dose by then...
(I am an amateur not a doctor)
A lot of people should be vaccinated by the end of the summer. But that would require accelerating things a fair bit from the current pace--which would put the 90% mark around Thanksgiving.
In the USA the Biden admin is setting up mass vax sites that currently aren't running(so i expect they will make an impact) and they're promising they can speed up by 50% more.
Also for what it's worth I assumed I was talking to an adult who wants a vax when I made my statement.
I'm not sure at what point we are comfortable enough with vaccine technology to agree to that. There have been a few vaccine candidates in the past that made things worse, we think we understand the flu well enough to not worry about that. However for the new vaccines we don't have as much information.
Although if the virus keeps mutating there will be pressure to bypass the process to approve faster. That pressure is why the flu vaccine bypasses steps, if we did everything "by the book" we wouldn't have a working flu vaccine ever.
Is anything like that being done with covid?
Edit: the Alpha move was to mutate the antibody and the Beta move was to mutate the viral protein iirc.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.31.425021v1....
All the data we have suggests AZ is probably 100% effective at preventing death from the South African strain.
(Mostly) everyone agrees we want to have a vaccine that is:
-safer than not vaccinating
-effective against death
-actually available to use
AZ is all 3 of these in South Africa (and everywhere).
It also provides some additional benefits, like:
-cheap
-no cold storage
-easier to administer
By banning AZ you aren't trading it for Pfizer, you are trading it for no vaccine.
b) Let's say you vaccinate all south-africans with Moderna+JJ+PB, then all the population will be protected.
If you pay the same in both scenarios, why on earth would you choose a)?
So really it is c: you vaccinate everyone with whatever you can get your hands on. Once everyone has had some vaccine you look at data of what is working and give everyone with a less effective vaccine an additional dose of whatever works - which will probably be a new vaccine that doesn't exist yet!
Don't forget that mutations are continuous. We might be looking at another mutation in 3 months as supply catches up that evades vaccines in a completely new way.
I would be careful about assuming that's an option. The vaccines have been tested individually, but have not been tested together. It's not out of the realm of possibility that getting some combination triggers some kind of immune reaction or something else.
> Don't forget that mutations are continuous. We might be looking at another mutation in 3 months as supply catches up that evades vaccines in a completely new way.
This is, sadly, a reason for poorer countries to delay vaccination. If there's going to be a mutation that evades this vaccine, and you can only afford one round of vaccines for everyone, you'd be better off waiting for the vaccine that prevents both.
Based on the last article about this, SA doesn't have the money to do 2 rounds of vaccines. A lot of the money was spent suspiciously, but now funding is limited. It seems that anyone who gets a subpar vaccine is just going to be stuck with subpar coverage.
One complication might be if people getting mild cases end up spreading the variant faster, because they are not incapacitated by it - but it is not as if it is having much difficulty spreading now, despite the serious cases it creates, as it seems to spread before it incapacitates. I don't think this possibility demands that we stop using this vaccine until this issue is unequivocally settled.
people in other groups may be unwilling to take the AZ vaccine, but so long as they are not being coerced to do so, this is not an issue.
The data is not in whether they are effective against death. They didn't test the super vulnerable in the studies. If you look at the places that have high vaccination numbers, you don't actually see any significant drop in covid cases or deaths. If anything, those places are staying high while the rest of the world is dropping. They were released under emergency authorization which means that they haven't fully testing and verified them to the level that would normally be done.
If they are as effective as the hype, we should be seeing significant positive results by now.
I've seen coverage of anaphylaxis, but not death and miscarriages. Anaphylaxis is also extremely rare and causality is unproven.
Would you please provide references for the other severe side effects you listed?
There will be people who die the day after their vaccine, because they are old and fat and will have a heart attack.
There will be people who die of rare diseases within hours of their vaccine, because we are intending to vaccinate the entire world and these things happen naturally and likely have nothing to do with the vaccine.
Until you have data in a control group comparing the rate of these events to the vaccinated group, you have absolutely nothing other than fear mongering.
If you look at places that have high vaccination numbers, oh wait, there aren't any. Israel is leading the world with only about 20% of their population having undergone a full vaccination regimen, and it takes a few weeks after the second dose for immunity to reach its highest level. Given how fast they are vaccinating, a very high proportion of that 20% was given that second shot in the last few days.
In other words, there is no place on Earth where we would expect vaccination to have an impossible to dispute effect on the top-line deaths or hospitalization numbers... yet. Give it 6 weeks.
To your other points about side effects, nearly 100m people globally have gotten at least one shot. The mild side effects which require a day off work are completely worth it, and the severe ones happen extremely rarely, to where a risk adjusted decision even for a very young and healthy person would still be to get the vaccine.
Only one of your points is even mildly valid, that the vaccines haven't been out long enough to know if there are any long term health issues. While we won't know this for generations, because of the definition of "long term," we also have no reason to believe that there would be long term health issues, while we know that SARS-COV-2 infection can DEFINITELY cause long term health issues in a significant minority of people infected.
Lastly, many folks pushing anti-vaxxer propaganda are selling something: usually quack cures. Ignore the parent comment, and focus on the facts.
. . .
Early this week, with the country reporting a clear and sustained drop in the number of people age 60 and older who are severely ill, experts became confident they were seeing the effects of the vaccine. People over 60 were prioritized in the initial stages of Israel’s vaccine rollout, so this was where the signal was expected to show up in national COVID-19 statistics.
“We say with caution, the magic has started,” tweeted data scientist Eran Segal of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, on Feb. 1, noting that COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and severe illness were all falling among the over-60s.
What’s more, follow-up studies conducted by one of Israel’s largest HMOs, Maccabi Healthcare Services, suggest that Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, which has been used for most of the shots given so far, is working almost as well in the real world as it did in clinical trials, with over 90% efficacy after two doses. This was not a guarantee: Drugs and vaccines may perform slightly differently outside of the controlled bounds of clinical testing.
As the charts above and below show [see article URL], the decline in severe cases began in mid-January, shortly after a steep rise in the number of older Israelis getting their second vaccine shots.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/israel-cor...
. . .
Only 31 out of 163,000 Israelis vaccinated by Maccabi Healthcare Services were diagnosed with COVID-19 in their first 10 days of full-strength protection, its top vaccine statistics analyst, Anat Ekka Zohar, told The Times of Israel on Thursday.
Maccabi found that an equivalent sample of unvaccinated Israelis was 11 times more likely to be diagnosed with the coronavirus, which allowed it to calculate the effectiveness rate.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/vaccine-found-92-effective-in-...
Care to cite a source? I see the Times of Israel disagrees with you.
Only 10% of positive cases (not including asymptomatic, untested cases) have any symptoms after 3 weeks.[1]
This is not significant compared to say, pneumonia.[2]
>we also have no reason to believe that there would be long term health issues
Medical history is replete with doctors and pharmaceutical companies making this claim for new treatments which ended up having horrible long term effects for many people.
[1]https://covid.joinzoe.com/post/covid-long-term?fbclid=IwAR1R...
Unfortunately, the vaccine review system is not setup to allow such nuanced approvals.
> On 6 February 2021, The Financial Times reported that provisional trial data from a study undertaken by South Africa's University of the Witwatersrand in conjunction with Oxford University demonstrated reduced efficacy of the Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine against the 501.V2 variant. [68] The study found that in a sample size of 2,000 the AZD1222 vaccine afforded only "minimal protection" in all but the most severe cases of COVID-19. [69] On 7 February 2021, the Minister for Health for South Africa suspended the planned deployment of around 1 million doses of the vaccine whilst they examine the data and await advice on how to proceed. [70]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501.V2_variant#Vaccine_evasion
[68] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-astraz...
[69] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-55975052
[70] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/astrazeneca-oxfo...
1. Reinfection is most likely driving the selection pressure that results in antibody escaping variants.
2. SARS-CoV-2 Antigens are present in the gut of many individuals for months after the initial infection.
(Scroll down past the first few paragraphs)
But Nash equilibrium is still more powerful than everything else ...
Once a country reaches herd immunity, then by all means get vaccines to other countries, but until then non-vaccinated people are fungible.
Really, it's in virtually every country, so there's not a place on Earth where it's not mutating.
Natural reservoirs of covid-19 means we'll all need boosters yearly for the rest of our lives.
[1]And we know the issues with that standard https://xkcd.com/1217/
Source: https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1358486648359591937/pho...
Agreed, although to clarify and be more precise, it also doesn't prove it's not effective. It effectively says that the sample was too small to tell anything.
> (it is not significantly different from 0% effectiveness).
This statement isn't true - it means that they are 95% sure the range of possible values is between -50 and +60, but it does not mean that the average of those two values is correct. 0% effectiveness is possible, but was not shown in this study.
It is going to be quite a while.
The main question that seems to remain is effectiveness in over 65s. Essentially not enough older people became sick in either arm of the trials (e.g. due to lockdown) to make any conclusion. However there is definitely indirect data (antibody titres) to infer that efficacy is not reduced in older population.
The interesting question that needs to be answered is: to what degree does it work, and for which groups? Of course it would be possible to just widely distribute the vaccine (since I consider it safe) and run the study to answer that question in parallel. In the worst case, you widely distributed an expensive placebo. Don't know if that is a good idea overall however.
Can other options like the adenovirus-based or J&J ones be expected to cover a broader spectrum of mutants?
(And why are so many people downvoting these questions? I'm genuinely curious, and I really tried not to offend any sensibilities, but did I say something wrong? Oh god why do people always hate me so much? Is it possible to say or do anything right anymore? Maybe it's time to quit social media...I'm out, y'all are cruel.)
GSK has recently announced plans to produce a multi-valent mRNA vaccine for distribution next year so mRNA is not necessarily limited to a single variant. https://www.gsk.com/en-gb/media/press-releases/gsk-and-curev...
Once we have herd immunity through vaccination (since natural immunity is rather hit-or-miss) I would hope the rate of mutations slows down significantly.
Also been worried that mass vaccinations might short-circuit the mutate to less severe variant process that happens in nature. By taking the advantage away from the current spike configuration we might give an advantage to a worse variant that would naturally have died out (out compete by its parent variant)..
Disclaimer; I'm more qualified to write a science fiction novelette on this theory than a medical paper, so take all this with a big grain of salt.
You'd think it'd be easier to say whether people are getting reinfected after catching COVID the first time, but the testing data is sparse enough that there doesn't seem to be any confirmation on whether it's widespread or just isolated cases. Most notably in Manaus, Brazil, where one of the new variants has been spreading.
I'm definitely not qualified to make anything other than wild guesses on this subject, but everything I've read suggests that scientists are scratching their heads as well. Conventional wisdom is that the spike is the easiest to target, so whether the human immune system picking the N protein is a mistake or brilliant move seems to be up in the air. Some reading: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-020-00480-0
Mutating to a less severe variant: Given that SARS-CoV-2 already has delayed symptoms and a high percentage being asymptomatic cases, I'm not sure there's much pressure to make it milder. Also the overall spike design is what gives SARS-CoV-2 its higher infectiousness compared to the original SARS, so one would hope that mutations to it (to avoid existing antibodies) would tend to make things less effective, although unluckily the virus has been discovering some new configurations that are both more infectious and also less protected against by the existing vaccines (especially the 60-70% ones). Paper on infectivity of variants: https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674%2820%2930877-1.pdf
In that respect mRNA vaccines or live vaccines have an advantage.
I believe the immune response is mainly triggered by the spike protein. If the spike protein of the variant is different enough to cause a degree of vaccine escape, then the spike protein of the vaccine should be different enough to not get immediately cleared from the body.
This is based on what I've understood from listening to interviews with prof. Sarah Gilbert, head of the Oxford team.
When you get your second dose, you already have some antibodies against chimp adenovirus, which will potentially destroy some of the vector before it has a chance to be taken up by your cells. Third or fourth booster shots against coronavirus variants using the same chimp adenovirus vector would trigger worse reactions, destroying some portion of the vector before the payload can be delivered. The Russian Sputnik vaccine tries to reduce this likelihood by using different adenovirus vectors for each dose.
It is the reddit effect. At first Reddit was like HN populated with highly educated people. As it got more and more users it democratized: The vote of a know-it-all 16 years old is the same as the one from a PhD in the field. In fact there are thousands of non experts for each expert, so they always win in a public space.
We add to that that we are using text, we do not carry intonation and other emotional information and lots of people will misunderstand whatever you say.
So the more popular a place like this becomes, the most degraded it becomes.
Do not take that seriously. I had great karma when I posted my real identity years ago and now lots of my comments are downvoted too, and I am the same person. I did not care then and not care now.
Unfortunately mRNA vaccines will not be a universal solution for all countries, it will only be applicable for a few rich countries.
The flu shot for example isn't an mRNA vaccine but rather the strain they think will be dominate.
Regardless, we will be wearing masks and social distancing for a long time (years) to come.
Covid wild-type was/is bad enough to crush global hospital systems so that's really a big issue. It will take years to train more doctors and nurses to run covid wards if that's something we decide to do.
Also things won't go back to normal because our hyper-globalization and world wide travel has definitely increased the risk of pandemics. So we have to think of the next unknown one, use technology to prepare as well as implement risk reduction processes. Covid testing for international travel will probably never go away.
___
There's some important details not mentioned in the article, which make this more of an emergency than a reader of just the article will notice.
Allow me to paint some back story, but the summary is this:
- We (our country) got 1 million doses of this vaccine last week, being ill-prepared and flustered to get our act together
- These doses expire in April, we do not have a roll-out strategy because politicians played politics (I'll explain below)
- We are broke, and the trust between people and gov is diminishing quickly
Initial Lockdown (March 2020)
Many people were initially positive when our first lockdown started. The President set up a "Solidarity Fund" [0], with initial donations of ~$70m USD (R1 billion) from a few wealthy families in the country.
The government 'diverted' funds to the PPE roll out, and the President expressly said that there wouldn't be looting [1] of funds.
The government put us in a quasi-martial-law with a committee called the NCCC [2] (name can be found in the link), parts of which have been taken to court, because of arbitrary laws/rules, and a very apparent power-grab by the ruling/governing party. Some of the bizzare things that came out of this NCCC:
- A ban on cigarette sales, not substantiated by anything scientific at the time. They lost the court battle, but true to form, are appealing [3].
- Regulations on sales of winter clothes. Arbitrarily defining the details of clothes that can be bought or not, what aisles to be used. It was as ridiculous as talking about crop tops and tights [4].
- Instituting racist policies to only help certain businesses [5]. I feel obliged to say that I'm an African black, and I agree with the sentiment that this was unConstitutional, as we all should enjoy the same rights. The gist of this was that the President said something like "this is a chance to redistribute wealth by only supporting black businesses".
The above has been met with criticism, and has eroded trust.
PPE Looting/Corruption
Now, one only needs to search for "PPE Corruption South Africa" to get stories about articles almost-daily.
- Premiers (leaders of provinces) have been implicated or accused
- President's spokesperson has been suspended, and has failed to submit her financial interests [6]
- As of October 2020, at least $700M USD is under investigation for being looted for PPE [7]. Politically connected people were setting up companies, selling 100ml of sanitisers for up to $3000 USD, all sorts of horrors.
Anecdotally, one of the provincial ministers (MEC) of education, has been up in arms against a white-owned/run trade union called Solidariteit, for deciding to build their own techno-university with private funds.
The university was to cost ~$20M USD, and has been completed after around 2 years.
I mention this, because this MEC's department spent ~$30M USD 'fumigating' schools that were closed during the lockdown.
The criticism has been that the virus doesn't last long enough in sufraces to warrant this waste. He is unable to account, trying to use 'processes' to shield himself [8].
Funding The Vaccine
Now, back to the vaccine. The SA government is part of the COVAX programme [9]. They 'missed' the deadline to make a deposit twice last year [10]. The Minister of Finance will disagree with this, but for the Solidarity Fund, and other NGOs to step in, is troubling.
There have been discussions from our Treasury, to raise taxes to fund the vaccine [11]. This comes in the midst of irresponsible behaviour by our government, that has contributed to the closure of a lot of companies.
I need not bore the reader with details, but we are broke, our unemployment is rising (even the Statistics SA are stymied from gathering stats, because they're under-funded).
A pause of the vaccine rollout makes medical sense, but given that the doses that we've paid for and received 1 million doses (for a country of 58+million) [12], and have no roll-out plan [13].
So, how is a government that has looted more than enough money to pay for enough doses of the vaccine (less than the $700M USD 'under investigation') to the point of not being able to pay a mere deposit on time, going to fund alternative vaccines?
EDIT: Medical aid/insurers talked about sourcing the vaccines for their members, but government and the public at large seemed to initially be against this move. I don't know what's changed, but the private medical insurers are now helping government with administration instead.
It's a shame that Africa suffers, while it has the resources to alleviate poverty.
If you've read this far, this has been opinions of mine, with some articles to provide context. I'm no reporter. Thanks
___
[0] https://solidarityfund.co.za/
[1] I can't find a reference to this anymore, there's just so much noise about the actual looting, that the initial promises are hard to find. I'll update if I find an article or tweet from Presidency.
[2] https://www.news24.com/news24/southafrica/news/govts-coronav...
[3] https://businesstech.co.za/news/lifestyle/459136/governments...
[4] https://www.sowetanlive.co.za/news/south-africa/2020-05-14-g...
[5] https://citizen.co.za/business/2259481/confirmed-guideline-t...
[6] https://www.news24.com/news24/southafrica/news/khusela-diko-...
[7] https://businesstech.co.za/news/government/442058/r10-5-bill...
[8] https://twitter.com/SundayTimesZA/status/1355806487650689024
[9] https://www.who.int/initiatives/act-accelerator/covax
[10] https://businesstech.co.za/news/trending/457668/south-africa...
[11] https://businesstech.co.za/news/government/461548/south-afri...
[12] https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-02-08-south-afr...
[13] The health minister was asking health-care practitioners on Twitter last week, to register themselves. There's been overall criticism by HPCs that they're in the dark about doses coming in just a week. This is something that should have started last year already. https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2021-02-03-340...
So, anyway, agreed with your arguments and thanks for the additional ones I didn't know about. It's important for all South Africans to understand the difference between background and your own future. Many other countries do have this kind of unity, but at historical price of a lot of wars. In SA we essentially avoided war at the cost of multiple identities, and this is something we should draw on for the better.
The “real” crime rate for middle and upper classes is far lower than reported numbers suggest.
I would hope HN is one of the few places where we can talk about sensitive issues like these in a civilized way, without microaggressions and trying to look at it objectively. I don't mind downvotes although I prefer rational arguments.
Your statement rests on the latter understanding, but that's inadequate for South Africa. There has not been centuries of injustice meted out to white people in addition to name calling. Even unintentional prejudice now from white people ends up affecting black people in South Africa far worse than hatred that just stops at words.
> There has not been centuries of injustice meted out to white people in addition to name calling
Does that mean there was no injustice during medieval times, or before?
I would support directly electing MPs. Then political parities report directly to us!
The other extreme is kind of like the US. Pre elections along party lines to choose a candidate that is the directly elected by the electorate. Ver democratic, not blurred lines between government branches. Ignoring stuff like the elctoral collage, the Senate and Gerrymandering, this system is very prone to fall prey to populism.
I guess as long as it works, both solutios are fine. I personnally like the French system a lot. Directly elected Presidents, seperate elections for parliament. I am not judging these systems by the governments it produces, so.
They way it works in Norway and Sweden at least is that while you vote for a list of candidates drawn up by the party, you can also select your preferred candidates on that list and as such affect which candidates on the list get seats.
I used to be of the opinion that it was fairer. I no longer think so. I agree with former PM Paul Keating, who referred to the Senate as "unrepresentative swill"[1]. When I first heard this view, I thought Keating was nuts. What could be better than PR for giving minorities a voice? All you need is portion of votes and you get a seat. Seemed pretty fair to me, and allowed members of minor parties to have a say in the passing of bills into acts.
But that's the problem. Very often a few minor party seats hold the balance of power. The 2 major parties are deadlocked in disagreement over some legislation and whether it becomes law or not falls into the hands of a few senators represented by a minority. So oftentimes the "uprepresentative swill" get to pass law, or not.
In Finland we have 3 major parties, so some version of A+B, A+C, B+C is usually in power. (Except now, when it's 1 major and 4 minor.)
This is partly because the major parties are so partisan they refuse to agree on anything out of principle.
Edit: and when I say principle, I mean shear bloody mindedness.
But on issues that are pertinent to each party's ideological position and the expectations of their members/voters, they will take strongly opposed positions.
This is important, so that voters have different options to choose from, and that each party must argue convincingly for their policies when campaigning.
If the parties are in consensus on most things, you end up with something not so different to one-party rule, and possibly endemic corruption.
That’s a feature, not a bug.
One way to do this would be to have 90% of the MPs elected in 3-6 member STV constituencies, with every candidate belonging to a party list. Then total the number of 1st preferences each party list got, and allocate the remaining 10% of the seats to the parties to maximalise proportionality (e.g. by d'Hondt). The top-up candidates elected fro each party will by losing candidates from that party who got the highest vote share.
That way, each party will get a number of MPs proportional to its total support, and the individual MPs elected will be the ones the voters most like.
Choosing MPs by party lists means the MPs have to be loyal to the party, not the voters.
Labour could put up a dead dog in Bootle and would get elected. Conservatives could put the same up in Christchurch and win.
To implement PR,
First, you make the constituencies larger - about 5 times the size now. For example instead of having 4 constituencies on the Wirral you have 1, or 1 in Cornwall instead of the 6 now. Those constitutencies elect more than 1 MP (4 in the Wirral, 6 in Cornwall)
Then you number them in preference order.
This results in the people electing individuals (so preferring a locally popular candidate over a parachuted candidate), but also ensures that if 54% of Cornwall constituency want Tory, 23% want Labour, 19% want Lib Dem, 4% want others, you'd end up with something like
3 Tories 2 Labour 1 Lib Dem
Which is far more representative of the wishes of the people of Cornwall than currently, where 6/6 MPs are Tory on 54% of the vote.
people in support of the current establishment like to smugly pronounce it proof that what the people believe is therefore "wrong" if no educated politicians support it (to the tune of "Reality has a well known liberal bias"); but even if this was the case (I'm sceptical) - it kind of undermines the ability of the political system to support a representative democracy that is actually representative.
that said, maybe there is better representation, and it is just suppressed. As Brexit gained quite a few politicians flipped. That said, why did it have to take so much effort for something supported by about half the population, and even now the best we have if Boris - not a true Brexit supporter, but a flagrant populist who support whatever will get him ahead.
In other words, whilst PR will help you get a representative of your favourite party in, it will also help get representatives of parties who you really don't want in.
Initially, it sounded like it had corruption potential built in, but in reality it's not that dissimilar to UK elections. Candidates are selected by their party and we vote for whoever we're given. The difference is that we know who might be elected ahead of time and debates can focus on personal records as well as party agenda.
There's 2 systems. The one you mention is municipal (lowest level), and then there's a purely political-party based one.
Municipal
A ward can elect a political party member, or an independent candidate. The elected candidate who wins, gets a seat in council.
> Once you win that area, the party nominates a set of candidates to represent that area, but this set isn't known at voting time and the order the candidates are chosen is somewhat arbitrary.
Parties also send a candidate-list to the elections body, before the elections. 50% of the council seats are determined by apportioning within these lists. This is meant to be fairer on smaller parties who might otherwise not get enough votes to get a councillor in.
The system is accepted (opinion), and doesn't seem arbitrary as there's rules that allow independent verification.
Provincial and National
These are purely party-list based (perhaps similar to UK then), instead of the 50% split above. Similarly, party lists are known before the elections, and are immutable throughout the 5 years (only get removed if you die or resign from your party, but can't be moved up or down).
There's again some process to determine how many people on the list per party, go to Parliament and the provincial equivalents. So, to your last point; we also know whom we're getting before the elections.
There was a Constitution (supreme) Court ruling last year that requires the next national elections to allow for independent candidates. The sentiment from those interested in our polls, is that the same hybrid municipal system might get chosen.
This sounds very similar to the AMS system used in Scotland and Germany.
Brexit and Trump clearly prove people will vote against their best interests if properly influenced.
Does "influenced" include not wanting to be ruled from Brussels? In fact, it was EU supporters getting the majority PR budgets and political support.
We accidentally built the paperclip maximizer AI, and it doesn't give a shit about collateral damage.
The only way your statement can be true is if you hold the position that you know what is in their best interests and they don’t.
Been there. Watch out for these traps:
a. FPTP (first-past-the-post): this is a truly horrible system. In a FPTP system, the person currently occupying the position (regardless how corrupt) has a huge advantage, and it pushes everything towards a two-party system where there isn't a third option (then, all they need is to give you two equally bad options, and you're screwed for good). It's also easy to introduce "distraction candidates" to just chip away votes from competition.
b. Even two-rounds or instant-runoff "winner takes district" system is not ideal; what happens here is that the small parties are strongly disadvantaged. You _need_ to have a very strong local voice, to win any one district. So for instance a general party that tries to talk to educated youth won't make any dent - they're spread across regions, and likely won't get past 10% anywhere
Proportional systems have huge flaws but really are the lesser evil. Ideally you should have something like an open list (where you vote the party, but also the order of preference within said party). And/or primaries for parties/ to decide the list of candidates & the order in the list, for said candidates.
As an example how this is implemented in NL: in elections, all individual candidates are on the ballot, organized by party (yes, the papar ballot is massive -- one of the main criticisms of this system). The candidates are ordered by preference as determined by the party itself, and in general, if a party wins 8 seats during election, that means the top 8 candidates on the ballot take their seat.
The lead candidate (also the face of the party campaign) is ranked #1, and people usually vote for #1 if they only care about voting for a party, not an individual. But people can vote for a non-#1 position (called a preferential vote), and if a specific candidate receives more votes than a pre-determined threshold, they're bumped on the candidate list. This allows voters to influence the resulting body composition not just by party, but by individual member.
Some stats from the last national election are on the Dutch Wikipedia page (but not included in the english translation) [0]:
- 150 seats in total
- 46 candidates have met the preferential vote threshold in total
- 3 candidates could not take seat because their party won 0 seats
- 4 candidates took seat at the expense of a (initially higher-ranked) candidate from the same party
- the remaining 39 candidates would have taken seat anyway because of their original party rank
[0] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samenstelling_Tweede_Kamer_201...
We're serial complainers. Maybe it's the ever-present cloud of former british colonial rule and their custom of complaining ad nauseum.
Yes, we are corrupt. Yes, we made absolutely brain dead decisions. Yes, we are headed into a black whole of a failed state (experiment?)
But the bullshit pulled by AZ isn't surprising - given how little regard most of the world has for the continent and they should be called out for it. The vaccine wasn't a generous donation.
But we aren't helping ourselves either.
If you are corrupt, please do the right thing and turn yourself in to the authorities.
Note that AstraZeneca's agreement with Oxford is that it will manufacture the vaccine on an at cost basis for as long as the pandemic lasts (and no sooner than July 2021).
While it's not a donation, it's also not being sold for a profit; they may be able to make a profit in the future.
Source: https://www.ft.com/content/c474f9e1-8807-4e57-9c79-6f4af145b...
The Guardian claims that an official claimed that they were told by AZ that the discrepancy is due to European countries having paid for R&D, but anybody in the chain could have been lying.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/22/south-africa-p...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-safric...
At least you are getting it. We Europeans seem to have pre-funded production and now it turns out much of it is shipped to higher-paying customers first, and we must wait until "production issues" are solved.
Also, put another way, those EU countries are probably getting charged less than the average costs to actually make the doses themselves. That's fine.
An issue is that R&D is a fixed cost rather than a variable cost, so determining how the R&D costs are to be split among AZ's customers is pretty hard and potentially prone to abuse. Are they to be split among all expected customers before the pandemic ends? All expected customers during the lifetime of the vaccine? During the lifetime of this family of vaccines?
Given that apparently it makes up the majority of the price, it's quite an important detail.
The article's headline says "Confirmed: Guideline that government will only help ‘51%-black-owned companies’ is fake", although on its face this seems to contract the point I understood you to be making. Maybe I've misunderstood something?
The back-story here is that there was a draft policy that got leaked, and there was outrage about it. Given that it wasn't published yet, gov was able to retract it, and say that the draft was fake.
Whether it was genuine or not, remains speculative I suppose.
The eventually settled-upon directives were better than the initial ones, and the article at [0] seems balanced enough (Points 3-7 are most relevant).
[0] https://www.lexafrica.com/2020/05/bbbee-criteria-for-governm...
The biggest piece that is broken in our country is our Justice system. None of the evil people will put one foot in jail. Our democracy/gov is a sham. It's just theater at this point. They are all actors, being paid to extract value from us (aka your labour). Their bosses are not in South Africa..
I saw a picture the other day of the Police Minister sitting next to Ace and having a laugh. It is revolting. That person completely raped one of the Provinces and now he sits in parliament making jokes with the person who should lock him up.
Stuff like that. Loads of it. It doesn't feel like a real country anymore at all. At least until some form of justice prevails, until then it's all just lies and corruption.
I completely disagree. SA faces the same problems that other countries do, just more of them at the same time. Corruption networks are hard to penetrate if it's the government itself that's corrupt. Our institutions aren't as strong as most developed countries.
> Our democracy/gov is a sham
Our democracy works very well. There is a lot of faith in the process and we haven't had an armed group storm the parliament (yet). The electorate is satisfied with the country being run by a corrupt party (57.5% voted ANC). This is unfortunate, but it's also the definition of democracy. People get what they vote for. That process is working very well. You (and I for that matter) don't like the outcome, but we don't represent the majority.
Where is this negativity coming from? From the outside, it looks like you're doing something right.
As a _people_ we have worked together to do wonderful things.
The government has done one good thing, and one brilliant thing, and many many stupid things.
The good thing is job support. Its not perfect, but its almost at a par with the wider continent.
The brilliant thing is taking a risk with the various vaccines. Paying for doses regardless of outcome makes sense. The cost of the unused doses/useless doses is nothing compared to the loss of 1 million jobs.
But.
The lifting of the second lockdown. The in inability to monitor isolation, the inability of the tracing infrastructure to predict winter. The sheer vindictiveness of the late third lockdown.
40% of all deaths happened because Boris wanted to "save" Christmas. He couldn't stomach the decision to cancel it, even though it was obvious from october. He dithered, dithered and dithered until there was no choice.
I can forgive the first lockdown lateness, we didn't know. Second lockdown not so much. Taking councils to court to force them to re-open schools even though the local hospitals were running at 190%, un-fucking-forgivable. I say this as someone who is vaguely right of (british) centre.
In short, its not an embarrassment of being british. Nothing of the sort, I just wish that our political class would stop tarnishing our country by being so terminally shit.
We should all celebrate a vaccination program being effectively rolled out. It looks like the UK, including government, has handled this well. Credit where its due, etc.
It's not a surprise that many of us were skeptical given the poor handling of so much else. But the UK government completely fucked its pandemic response overall and 100k people are dead. This is a terrible outcome, and I'm honestly kind of concerned that they'll get away with it in part because there will be so much collective loss of memory in the wake of a successful vaccination rollout.
Israel: 24%
USA: 2.75%
Denmark: 2.35%
Slovenia: 2.05%
Malta: 1.98%
Italy: 1.87%
and way down the bottom
UK: 0.73%, just below Romainia.
"What share of the population has been fully vaccinated against COVID-19?"
The UK has decided to skip the second dose, which wasn't tested and wasn't recommended by the manufacturers. It's a massive gamble.
If there isn't enough vaccine to go around (which there isn't) giving people the recommended 2nd dose is also a gamble.
> The UK’s strategy to delay the second dose of both ... vaccines is so that more people can be vaccinated with their first dose rather than giving a smaller number of people both doses. The hope is that this will save more lives
-- https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/01/20/revisiting-the-uks-stra...
Do you think the advantage of the 1st vaccine is less than that of the 2nd? i.e that it is better to have 1 person with the recommended 2 vaccines, and another with no vaccinations; versus, two people with only the first vaccination.
It's a big gamble that it won't lead to more vaccine resistant strains.
I'm also not sure there is a big problem:
"Neither bacteria nor viruses evolve resistance to vaccines as easily as they do to drugs, they wrote. Smallpox vaccine never lost its effectiveness, nor did the vaccines for measles or polio, despite years of use."
-- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/27/science/covid-vaccine-vir...
"Why the evolution of vaccine resistance is less of a concern than the evolution of drug resistance" - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6304978/
Given this, I think there is widespread surprise that the vaccine rollout in the UK has been well-handled – because it has. Many of us were genuinely expecting the other shoe to drop, but fortunately good decisions have been taken and this should be celebrated.
Are there any confounding factors that need to be controlled for? Like different viral strains, climates, population densities and centers, testing strategies, data gathering methodologies (e.g. how the dead are counted as 'COVID' cases), population age distributions.
Are you sure you're doing apples-to-apples comparison?
Yes, definitely. Are they likely to knock the UK from "almost worst in the whole world" to "did a good job"? Nae chance.
There will always be at least some from EU promoters, the vaccine saga is the first to contradict some of the "better together" rhetoric against Brexit.
Just look at the vaccine distribution BS; Factory raids, export laws..
In order to promote compliance with the lockdown, we're on a 24/7 diet of bad news.
> British numbers are on par with other European nations when controlled by population.
According to [1], per capita the UK has 2x as many deaths as Germany, 3x as many as Canada and 33x as many as Japan. We've even got 20% more than America.
Admittedly part of that is differences in reporting standards, population ages, and the chance occurrence of new variants - but I don't think anyone will be taking the British response as a model in the future.
Are you cherry picking numbers that you like? Because you're cherry picking numbers that you like. UK is about average compared to developed countries. The per capita deaths are not out of line with the rest of the developed world. Yes, this also means there are countries that did better. There are countries that did worse.
You also ignored the vaccination rate, of which UK is a leading nation.
Why do people feel the need to be negative on this point and single out UK when every country is struggling with COVID. In the US, California has been under a near total lockout and is about the same or worse compared to states like Texas or Florida.
There are no easy answers, and I'm not sure if lockdowns are worth the cost, given the spread that we're seeing.
>Admittedly part of that is differences in reporting standards, population ages, and the chance occurrence of new variants
Yes.
Believe me, I would like nothing better than to report the UK's response had been good.
But if I'd quoted the reported death rates from China and Russia you'd have claimed they were dodgy numbers from dodgy governments; if I'd quoted numbers for Australia and New Zealand you'd have claimed I'd cherry picked remote island nations; if I'd quoted numbers for Taiwan and South Korea you'd have claimed I'd cherry picked countries with SARS experience, and if I'd quoted numbers for Kenya and Iraq you'd have claimed they have young populations and limited testing facilities.
Every single one of those countries has less than half the deaths per capita the UK has, according to that BBC map.
> Why do people feel the need to be negative
What you consider "being negative" is what I call acknowledging factual reality.
When you claim that British numbers are on par with other European nations per-capita, and you offer no citations, then I look at the numbers and I see that we've got twice the deaths per capita of Ireland and Germany, of course I disagree with you.
It's not about UK's response being good or bad. I'm not seeing evidence of any particular COVID strategy working wonders. Especially in the presence of confounding factors like different viral strains, climates, population densities and centers, age demographics, testing strategies, data gathering methodologies (e.g. how the dead are counted as 'COVID' cases), etc. etc. etc.
Are you sure you're doing an apples-to-apples comparison when you just read a number from some internet dashboard?
What is the magic answer to COVID? Masks and Lockdowns? California and New York have been at a mask mandate and full lockdown since March/April. Florida has been largely open throughout the entire time. Texas was somewhere in the middle (though more like Florida). For months Florida and Texas were beaten up by the press while New York and California were praised. I'm looking at their population-controlled case counts and death rates [1][2] and California, Texas and Florida are basically identical. New York has been under lockdown, and their death rate is through the roof most likely because they made one huge mistake in their retirement home policy early on.
It's going to take us years to figure out what happened.
>When you claim that British numbers are on par with other European nations per-capita, and you offer no citations
Come on, we're looking at the same numbers but that's not the point. You can't just do a straight numbers comparison. What I'm seeing is every country struggling with this in pretty much the same way. I'm sure some are doing something better than others. But AGAIN, hard to figure out what that is given its close to impossible to control for all kinds of variables. Talk to me 5 years after the pandemic is over - we'll have some good answers then.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109004/coronavirus-covi... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
I can't claim to have a magic answer, but there are loads of things the government fumbled.
For example, in July the government was claiming to be surprised by asymptomatic carriers even though they'd been well known since the Diamond Princess, right at the start of the pandemic. Perhaps we could have had leadership who were on top of basic, well known facts?
The national track-and-trace system was a shambles - surprising no-one, as it was built by contractors with a long track record of failed projects, overseen by unqualified cronies.
Perhaps back in March, the decision not to covid test patients being discharged from hospitals into nursing homes wasn't such a smart move?
Perhaps we shouldn't have made the bizarre decision to reopen universities for in-person teaching, sending loads of students travelling up and down the country to live in cramped, shared accommodation.
Maybe it wasn't so smart to have that period between lockdown 1 and lockdown 2, when people were allowed to go on holiday to france and spain - then the government would announce a rules change with 24 hours notice, forcing holidaymakers to race back to the UK? That was some truly weird public policy.
Perhaps the government's announcement that they wanted people to stop working from home and go back to working in offices, a few weeks before the had to call for the second lockdown, wasn't such a smart move?
Maybe when we had a second lockdown we shouldn't have announced an end date for it up front, and ended it when the load on hospitals was clearly still rising. Maybe that way we wouldn't be in our third national lockdown right now.
Perhaps we shouldn't have waited nine months before we started testing truck drivers and others entering and leaving the country? And perhaps new arrivals' self isolation should be something more credible than them giving a pinkie promise?
...
Oh well
There have been reports as far back as 2017[0] that Dlamini Zuma, who for all intents and purposes was the decider of this ban, is personally involved in the huge black market for cigarettes and therefore had personal motivations for the ban.
Linking an old news article to show that this isn't a case of retrospectively looking for dirt, though there are plenty of recent ones too.
[0] https://www.timeslive.co.za/sunday-times/news/2017-10-29-gan...
The link you provide says it was "fake". Maybe I've misunderstood.
What fresh hell in standards is this? If we could turn Covid into "common cold" level illness through vaccines THEN DO IT!
> Nineteen of the 748 people in the group that was given the vaccine were infected with the new variant, compared with 20 out of 714 people in the group that was given a placebo.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/02/07/world/covid-19-coron...
The sample sizes here are small and the results have not been published, so it's too early to draw any major conclusions, but it certainly doesn't look great.
https://www.rte.ie/news/coronavirus/2021/0202/1194681-oxford...
The data suggests it is unlikely that the vaccine reduces infection by >=50% (<5% probability) and a probability close to zero it reduces infection by >=70%.
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
# number of infections, and obs
infect_ctrl,obs_ctrl=714, 20
infect_test, obs_test=748, 19
sample_C=np.random.beta(infect_ctrl+1, obs_ctrl-infect_ctrl+1, 100_000) # sample 100k times from posterior Beta distributions
sample_T=np.random.beta(infect_test+1,obs_test-infect_test+1, 100_000)
# percentage reduction in each sample
perc_reduce = (val_C-val_T) /val_C
# histogram of % reduction in infection
pd.Series(perc_reduce).plot.hist(bins=20)
# how likely, given this data, is > 50% reduction in infection from vaccine
(perc_reduce >= 0.5).mean()
# c. 3%
(perc_reduce >= 0.7).mean()
# <0.1%South Africa has limited health resources and spending them rolling out an ineffective vaccine when they have orders for the Johnson and Johnson one coming next month doesn't make sense.
The vaccine doesn’t seem to protect the people in the study (young people). Young people don’t tend to die from covid. They don’t know if it would work on older people but I would think it wouldn’t either. This doesn’t look like it actually saves lives.
The study may be early to really tell but so far there is no evidence that the vaccine works at all against the variant that is widespread in South Africa.
Just how stupid are we, really? We're all locked up due to a virus that went around the world in months. If there's a variant anywhere that the vaccines don't work on, then this is just a selective breeding program we're setting up. We'll all get the vaccine and then go out and catch the new one because we stopped the quarantine.
In this case, yes, as people are vaccinated, variants that evade vaccines will spread more easily than others. From what we've seen so far, these same variants tend to be more contagious regardless, so that likely would have been the case anyway. By vaccinating though, you achieve a few things. First, you protect people from the variants that are susceptible, saving a lot of lives in the short term. Second, you massively cut down transmissions of the virus, each of which gives it an opportunity to mutate and produce new variants. Third, in most cases, you do provide some protection even against resistant variants.
And finally, just as the virus is not static, neither will be the vaccines. Work is already underway to update all the major vaccines to cover the new variants, and that process should be much faster than creating the initial vaccines (in design, trials, and roll-out). So it will be possible to vaccinate against variants that evade current vaccines.
Yes, it will take a while, and it would be nice if the virus would just sit still and not mutate. But we're still far, far better off with vaccines than without them. You are correct though that other measures will need to remain in place for some time as well.
Any introductory textbook on virology will explain that we can’t cure influenza, rhinovirus or coronavirus for exactly the reasons Hinkley outlined.
In related news, the press doesn’t do interviews with virologists. Instead, they talk to epidemiologists, sociologists and psychiatrists.
That’s strange, since those people aren’t experts on viruses, and they certainly aren’t experts on coronavirus. Where are the articles that consult coronavirus experts? It’s been a field of study for decades.
It may be the case for B 1.1.7 (but around 30%, not the 70% originally flaunted by the UK government and the media), but at this time there are no data on transmissibility of B 1.351 (the variant discussed here).
I think perhaps there's a tendency to make a mental analogy to antibiotics, where it is dangerous to expose pathogens (bacteria in that case) to antibiotics without wiping them out completely, because you encourage resistance. There are a couple differences here though. First of all, we have a limited number of viable antibiotics, but these vaccines can be continually adapted to target changes in the virus.
More importantly though, the interaction between the two is different. It's not that the virus is being exposed to the vaccine and selecting for mutations that avoid it within a host, as bacteria might do in response to an insufficient round of antibiotics. It's simply that the vaccine will protect against the strands it can, which will leave us with the ones that resist vaccines. That situation is better than the one where we're being infected by all strains!
An exception would be if there were vaccine resistant strains that caused more severe illness than non-resistant ones, and that infection with a non-resistant strain also protected against these resistant strains, whereas the vaccine didn't. That isn't the case now though, and such a strain is unlikely to develop, because immunity from vaccines tends to be stronger than natural immunity. (So if anything, the opposite is true - even against resistant strains people are likely to be better off with vaccine-based than natural immunity.)
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/05/astrazeneca-covid-vaccine-wo...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-03/uk-begins-testing-tho...
Also in a scary development a large portion of trial participants in South Africa were actually reinfected with the new strain because it's so different. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/02/05/virus-varia...
There's been only a handful of cases with that variation in the UK, it is not the dominant strain which the AstraZeneca results you referred to came from.
Only Johnson&Johnson data may say something about it for real. Novavax's investigation was underpowered (4000 people, wide confidence intervals), and this one is even more so.
The rest of the evidence comes from antibody neutralization assays in vitro, which although very useful they are not representative of the whole immune response.
Is there any evidence in South Africa that it actually does protect people from dying? If there are only 2,000 people in the study, it might be too small to conclusively say whether it's protecting from severe and lethal cases.
All I've done is skim the article, so I'd love to be corrected by someone with more information. Given that about 1/1,250 of the South African population has died of coronavirus, I'd guess that a 2,000 person random sample over the course of a couple months wouldn't be large enough to expect much in the way of deaths, even with a placebo.
If there were conclusive evidence that the vaccine eliminated deaths from the South African variant while still allowing mild cases, I think the situation would be different. But it sounds like there are still a lot of mild cases without much evidence re deaths.
But masks are easier to manufacture locally than vaccines.
And context is important too. Had there been no patents, are we sure the private investments would have been made 10+ years ago to developed COVID-19 vaccines in record time this year?
Not getting into the point about the efficiency of state run utilities.
Private corporations won't, governments would have too and governments would develop in private, evaluate in private and give it to their own citizens, vaccines would become state secrets.
I swear, in the morning of Europe timezones you get these pointless "just make everything free man" comments. I'm starting to think they're trolls or bots.
I do share the reservations about retroactively revoking protections, although I'm not convinced governments could not co-operate on vaccine development.
When WW2 started, companies in the US were forced to join the war effort and it did not end capitalism.
Seriously?
Not only is the selfishness in the comment questionable, the selfish logic in itself is flawed... You can pretty much count on the SA strain reaching your country at some point, if it's not already there.
The news is chilling no matter what perspective you take - altruistic, selfish, or anywhere in between.
On the one hand there’s people complaining the rich countries don’t provide vaccines to the poor African countries. On the other hand South Africa doesn’t want to use the vaccine for political reasons.
Note also that even if the results of their studies are right, using the vaccine is still much better than not using it.
If they choose not to use it, which according to the article they do, I have about as much sympathy for them as I have for antivaxers. Suit yourself, as long as you don’t require me to quarantine because of your decision I don’t care.
Also funny, the AZ contract is the only one that leaked. And they are by no means the only one to face production ramp up issues.
Biontech is getting the opposite reporting in Germany. That is somewhat puzzling.
EDIT: The South African strain seems to be a challenge, the Novavax and J&J vaccines are also less effective (source:https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/30/two-new-covid-...).
There is good reason to believe it will be efficient on older people, but efficiency for elderly hasn't been proven.
> Also funny, the AZ contract is the only one that leaked.
It wasn't leaked, the EU and AZ agreed to publish it. And it is also not the only one that was published. The CureVac contract was also published.
Only after that AZ clarified what the 8% really mean. And yes, efficiency is not yet proven. Unproven efficiency is quite a different thing from a claimed 8% efficiency so.
I see a real pro Biontech and anti AZ campaign going on in the German media. One that is quite welcome, as it allows politicians to deflect blame. Brexit helps to mud the waters even further. Don't forget, we have elections in Germany this year.
As far as I know, the AZ contract is the only one with additional uncensored parts that was published. AZ is in the defensive now. For no real reasons. And over this discussion, in the EU and also in SA it seems, we totally miss the importance of a smooth vaccination campaign. And the lacking preparation thereof.
> “The real problem with AstraZeneca is that it doesn't perform as we expected. (…) Everything suggests that it is almost ineffective on people over 65. "
Anyone who has paid attention to the response around the failure of the EU vaccination program knows this is pretty standard diversionary politics.
The only way vaccinations will work on scale will be to have vaccines that can be handled by every doctors practice. They are vaccinating million sof people already every year, they have the supply chain in place and the people. I for my part am not counting on vaccination centers and central appointment booking.
Key snippet:
Most of the participants in these studies were between 18 and 55 years old. There are not yet enough results in older participants (over 55 years old) to provide a figure for how well the vaccine will work in this group. However, protection is expected, given that an immune response is seen in this age group and based on experience with other vaccines; as there is reliable information on safety in this population, EMA’s scientific experts considered that the vaccine can be used in older adults. More information is expected from ongoing studies, which include a higher proportion of elderly participants.
We can probably all agree with the EMA's assessment that AZ's effectiveness for the elderly is likely but not convincingly demonstrated yet. Based on this it's reasonable for different national EU agencies to give different recommendations for application to the elderly. For instance, in the Netherlands national agency recommends using Pfifer / Moderna for the 65+ and AZ for 65-.
The EU negotiated badly, and AZ used that to fool them. I think AZ deserves some moral blame here as well.
More fun if it turns out the AstraZeneca vaccine is useless.
Why would AZ agree to a contract to guarantee certain deliveries on a brand new vaccine with unproven manufacturing, on a non-profit basis? It doesn't make any sense.
The other thing which isn't mentioned is the UK's deliveries were also cut, probably even more severely than the EU ones. The UK was originally meant to get many tens of millions of doses by the end of 2020, in reality it was far far less.
https://theconversation.com/astrazeneca-dispute-comes-at-a-d...
> AstraZeneca has reduced its projected vaccine rollout to the EU, despite signing a contract to supply millions of doses, citing an issue with a plant in Belgium. It did not, however, cut its supplies to the UK.
The UK negotiated completely independent supply chain that they paid for up front. It isn't comparable.
If the contract really said best effort everywhere, they may have a leg to stand on, since that seems to preclude using different delivery guarantees in other contracts.
Completely unacceptable and unsupportable suggestion.
The EU had absolute clarity on the differing supply chains for differing contracts with AZ. No amount of contract negotiation increase culture yields in vaccine production lines.
What is Macron going to do when he gets loads of this vaccine in Q3? "Never mind that stuff about it not working, please go get vaccinated?". It's Trump level (remember that guy) irresponsibility.
Macron should be piloried for his antivaxxer comments. France has a serious issue with people refusing the vaccine as it is. Not helped by their deliberately complex steps to give it out.
They have done this because the batch they received has a 2-3 month expiry life. They do not believe they can give that batch out in that timeframe. They have set up almost literally no infrastructure
SAs vaccination plan is to generally beg other countries to do it for them. They already frittered away most of a R500bn IMF loan on absolutely nothing.