Is Britain doing better than EU? I know nothing but that seems like an easy comparison, right?
Britain erred on the side of faster rollout: many countries criticize them for rushing AZ's vaccine approval process actually.
Because Britain somewhat rushed the vaccine rollout, its probably not a fair comparison to other countries. USA vs EU is probably a better comparison (but maybe not, because USA has a *dominating* industrial base and can physically make more things than most other countries)
IIRC, there were well over 20+ vaccines in the USA alone that were being developed. I dunno about other countries... it turned out that the mRNA (Pfizer / Moderna) and adenovirus (J&J / AstraZeneca) seem to have been the fastest at production.
Everyone who spent $Millions on other vaccines are still waiting for those tests to finish. Only if you were lucky enough to pick Pfizer / Moderna / AZ / J&J are you actually winning in the vaccine race right now. At this point, its looking like if you bet on the wrong vaccine, you lost your entire investment.
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USA spent billions on building "all the above". We have millions of AZ-doses sitting on the shelves, waiting for final approval (final tests just finished this past week).
UK ordered 4-doses per person (when only 2-doses are needed, and even though its not known if children can safely take the vaccine yet). That's another reason why UK is so fast: they aggressively bought extra vaccines at an extreme rate. UK plans to either sell, or donate, those extra vaccines later on.
By buying so much extra vaccine, UK ensured that they are at the front of the line when it comes to vaccine supply from the various companies.
That German Biontech was allowed to partner with Pfizer will probably have cost 100000 European lives at the end, while saving 200000 American ones.
If pandemic lockdowns cost about 10% of annual GDP, then pre-allocating 1% of GDP to vaccines seems pretty conservative if anything. That means something like $100-200 billion for the US or EU.
The EU should have just pre-allocated $100 billion on vaccines. That would have been enough to secure every adult a vaccine from the big four manufacturers, plus leave a big pot of money leftover for contingencies.
The lockdown is actually merciful for many businesses; it's cheaper to close a restaurant entirely than run it at 50% capacity, and it's the only way conventions and other events can get out of their contracts with their venues.
> By comparing counties with and without restrictions, the researchers conclude that only 7 percentage points of the 60 percentage point overall decline in business activity can be attributed to legal restrictions. Most of the decline resulted from consumers voluntarily choosing to avoid stores and restaurants.
Also compare: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/12/03/9423037...
That NPR article proceeds on the very unlikely assumption that unused vaccines will not be reallocated to other countries.
It's also hard to really judge the potential other scenarios in the overall situation; the US production ramp up is going to benefit everyone in the medium term, and it's not really clear that it would have been much different if BioNTech partnered with a different manufacturer (much of the work in the US is being done at purpose built contract manufacturer facilities; AstraZenaca and J&J share some sites...).
Edit: There's also the question of whether potential partners were really interchangeable, or if Pfizer has some advantage in knowledge or whatever.
And overspending by buying a hundred million doses of each of the 20 vaccines STILL would’ve been a massive bargain.
Some like AZ report low top line numbers like 60%, but you can look at the number of severe cases needing hospitalization. It's still approximately zero.
I'm not sure where your $10M number comes from, Canada is spending CAD170M (USD135M).
Almost, but not quiet. As of 3/21 Britain has done 44 doses per 100 people.
Israel is leading with 112, followed by United Arab Emirates with 74 and Chile with 44.31. These countries are all smaller than Britain though, as you point out. No country as big or bigger than Britain is doing it faster.
For comparison, the US has done 37 per 100, while most of the EU countries are between 12-13. Hungary is at 21, because they have not only used the EU provided vaccines, but also using the Russian vaccine.
So 200 doses per 100 people is the finish line. (Except now that USA just released J&J's single-dose vaccine, things got complicated...)
They are pretty close - around 115 right now.
They are hoping to start immunizing 12-16 in about 1 to 2 months.
All of the vaccines passed through the standard clinical trials and phases and were approved by the MHRA using the same process that would be applied to any other vaccine.
The vaccine testing and approval was fast because layers of bureaucracy were removed (e.g. writing proposals, securing funding, finding volunteers).
It's not fair to say that the UK rushed either the approval or the rollout. It's a bit like saying Usain Bolt rushed to win the 100m. Someone has to do it first. The UK approval process is one of the most stringent in the world.
The 3-months of difference between the two countries is pretty pronounced, no matter how you look at it.
2. https://www.businessinsider.com/uk-approved-pfizer-covid-19-...
I remember articles at the time that highly criticized the UK's rollout of AZ vaccine.
3. It probably doesn't matter: the USA has found AZ to be very safe and highly effective: in fact, the USA's trials suggest a 79% efficacy rate (while the UK's own trial numbers were in the 60s). So if anything, the AZ vaccine has been proven to be safer and better in the tests on our-side of the Atlantic.
The issue is that extra 3-months of difference. Whether December 2020 approval was premature or not.
And yet the USA approved the Pfizer vaccine on Dec 11, only a week after the UK.
I'm not sure why there's a 3 month difference in approving the AZ vaccine, but I do know that the USA has some particularly draconian import rules on foreign medicines, especially untested ones, so perhaps extra bureaucracy, and almost certainly a different testing regime for medicines to the UK and EU.
I'm satisfied that the UK MHRA and JVI have satisfactorily assessed the data from AZ, Pfizer, Moderna, (and Novavax). They're world experts in their fields.
That's why process is important: you can get lucky and come to the correct results with an improper process (ex: coin flips).
Your __logic__ applies just as easily to coin-flips / random-chance to make decisions, and therefore your argument is unable to differentiate between a good system and a bad one.
The difference was that Britain invested early on in multiple vaccines, created a whole new government task force with the only job to get the country vaccinated, they collaborated between AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford in trials and the MHRA (which itself is one of the best if not the best medical regulator in the world) was running a lot of the approval checks in parallel which the EU and other regulators didn't do. Additionally the UK evaluated all data regarding the new COVID-19 vaccines and what we historically know from other vaccines that the chances of an initial one-jab strategy were extremely high almost to a point where it would be irresponsible to not first vaccinate as many people with one jab as possible. For once the UK put science and common sense above red tape and nationalistic rhetoric unlike many leaders in the EU like Macron or Ursula Von Der Lying.
I had my first AZ Oxford shot on Tuesday, I’m 40 and have health issues but nothing that is directly affected by COVID (though coughing is dangerous for me).
Second one is due June 2nd, the first dose to as many people paid off, evidence was good it would but it was still a gamble with so many lives on the line.
This was the single most important thing to get right since 1945, by a large margin.
As a EU citizen I must say that the multiple layered structure of the EU is not worse than any other one in normal times but it was a disaster in these exceptional times. Too many indirections, nobody responsible for anything, the people in charge of the vaccination procurement not there because of elections.
Well said. It's obvious to me that the reason that the EU (and leaders of EU member states) are acting unpredictably at the moment is that they very well understand the gravity of this fuck up.
It is an existential threat to the project. Pandemics have ended civilisations in the past.
https://www.politico.eu/article/the-key-differences-between-...
Personally, as a (broadly) pro-european UK citizen - there's a _moral_ case that, sometime soon, we should make the case for exporting doses now we've covered off the most vulnerable in our own country. A dead person is a dead person.
And I'm _utterly dismayed_ that the EU's behaviour has obliterated any chance of that getting off square 1. Johnson is a populist - any move to restrict contractually-entitled exports by the EU will have the red-top press screaming blue murder and will back him into a corner. I'd fully expect a destructive spiral from there on out - starting with him blocking PZ precursor chemicals being shipped to the EU from Yorkshire. We should be shifting the conversation to "haven't we done well; now is the time to help our friends and neighbors".
There are other factors than dose availability though. Putting vaccines into people isn't easy to do on a large scale in a short time window. Vaccine programmes are usually running with a much larger window, with vaccines that doesn't require extreme cold temperatures.
UK seems better prepared for this than many of the EU-bloc's countries.
The other part of the question however is: "Severely lags behind what?". Even with a "slow" rollout, EU countries in general are better off than many other countries in the world. It isn't the case they are trying to keep up with the pack in general, as they are well positioned. It's more that there are a few countries who are doing extremely well on a quick rollout.
One of the many spats about this between the EU and the UK was when an EU functionary incorrectly claimed the UK had export controls and they had to back track[1].
As far as I know, the EU gambled on a French vaccine that unfortunately failed, then ordered other vaccines much later than everyone else.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/6d28903d-3723-45cc-878a-21e1f2d39...
"Two factories in Britain run by Oxford Biomedica and Cobra Biologics are also listed as suppliers to the EU in the contract with AstraZeneca, but no vaccine has so far been shipped from Britain to the EU, despite Brussels' earlier requests."
"AstraZeneca told EU officials that the UK is using a clause in its supply contract that prevents export of its vaccines until the British market is fully served, EU officials said."
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-eu-uk-...
That's a commercial clause, AZ took funding for vaccine development with that clause in it.
That's not an export ban, that was paid for.
Do you expect the EU to watch how AZ fails to deliver on its contract, exports vaccines made on EU soil to the UK and then talk about commercial clauses, in a pandemic?
There's no export restriction, it's more subtle.
UK has funded Oxford vaccine development on condition that UK gets preference for doses produced in UK (if not elsewhere too).
This has exactly the same practical effect as an export ban, but it technically isn't an export ban, hence the recent grandstanding from UK politicians.
I don't think this is particularly to the detriment of Germany. Wasn't Israel vaccinating people before Germany had approved any vaccination?
[1] (https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-said-to-be-paying-avera...)
Jury is still somewhat out about which method is better, and who will finish first. I'd put money on both reaching 70% of eligible people vaccinated with both doses around the same time.
This is one of those situations where "EU" as a concept is a bit of an overgeneralization for 27 loosely-coordinating countries.
The volume of jabs will dictate the outcome more than the 1-now-1-much-later or 1-now-1-soon strategies.
So yes, the UK is far ahead of most other countries in first doses administered, but they're also going off-book for their vaccination protocol in a lot of ways that make it a bad point of comparison for other countries which are following clinical recommendations more closely.
[0] There's some clinical evidence in support of the 12-week gap for the AstraZeneca vaccine, though the UK made this decision before that study had been released, and there is not yet analogous data to support the efficacy of a 12-week period for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, which the UK is also administering on a 12-week gap.