When you stop and think for a few minutes, do a little deep thinking on the risks involved, it beggars belief that most of the human race is fine with having their security guaranteed by weapons that would absolutely annihilate the entire population i Liverpool if centered in an airburst above the city center. Not that I have any fantastic alternative solution, I suspect there would be much more large scale wars and massive amounts of suffering without those nukes, but even so. The risk of miscalculation and losing this world on ours by random mistake is pretty large. If current events just go on, I doubt we will survive another century without a thermonuclear war. The weapons are simply too proliferated today, mistakes are bound to happen some time in the future. Maybe “Threads” will be futuristic, despite the world being a different place than under the greatest tension of the Cold War.
So yeah, that’s my “Feel Good” message for the day I guess.
The number of people being vaccinated in the UK daily has doubled in the space of three days. It went from 145,076 on Monday 11 January to 316,694 yesterday. That last daily number is equivalent to the total number of people vaccinated in France (318,216).
If the UK was able to sustain an average daily rate of 300,000 that will exceed the government’s target of 15 million by the middle of February. Hopefully this won’t produce complacency and that efforts are made to increase these numbers even further.
I estimate that more than half of the UK population over 80 (ie more than half of 2,996,971) have now received their first dose.
I am truly amused that the food kit, presumably aimed at the absolute essentials, includes fenugreek and coriander. I don’t think we even have fenugreek in the house.
Vaccination and sequencing samples are two things the UK is clearly doing well. To me, if I lived in the UK, that would just make me more angry at the dismal overall performance. The systems and the training to execute were there for the UK to be one of the world leaders in how to confront this pandemic. Smart, dedicated people have been working themselves almost to the grave, and seeing their efforts squandered.
100% agree with you. We ought to have been able to produce a robust and leading edge track and trace system given our tech ability and systems already in place, the decision to allow our PPE stocks to deplete in the year up to the beginning of the pandemic was clearly disastrous, the shambles about PPE procurement and distribution, the huge failure to ring-fence care homes and segregate covid-infected patients from the general hospital population, the ineffective lockdown measures (both too little and too late on at least two occasions), the failure to impose adequate (read any) containment measures at the major entry points and international travel hubs, the distinct whiff of corruption…all of these ought to leave anyone seething and champing at the bit to hold the relevant people and organisations to account. Nobody expects perfect, but the minimum we ought to expect is competent and transparent.
Some decisions have proven to be positive (the multiple pre-orders of several different vaccines whilst in production, for example - and opting out of the EU procurement scheme for those) and hopefully the UK will benefit from the steps being taken now regarding vaccination and being at the forefront of gaining an understanding of the virus (and its mutations) but it’s an absolute tragedy and a scandal that so many have died unnecessarily to get to this point.
Just when I thought that Germany’s strategy to sit on the second doses because there might be production shortages might be overcautious - there are production shortages. The Pfizer factory in Belgium that has been delivering to Europe (and Canada,I think?).
Positive news is that the factory in Germany that Biontech bought has been approved for production and apparently should get rolling in a few weeks.
Sad but true story: it was revealed recently that virologists wrote a letter to German health minister Spahn - in November 2019 - that there was an absolute need to massively ramp up the funding for sequencing. Dude never answered and it took him until like a week ago to do something about it.
I was actually surprised to hear how cheap that is, which makes the almost unbelievably low budget an even bigger scandal imo.
The vaccine, as some are saying, is the best protection that the country has against the incompetence of Johnston and his cronies. I’m getting mine in the morning, second jab later in March.
Canada has been getting Pfizer from Belgium and the US, but largely Belgium. Our portfolio is heavy on Moderna, but Moderna’s production is mostly in Switzerland, where Pfizer’s is roughly 50/50, largest facility Belgium, 3 facilities in US. Weirdly, the Trump administration turned down 100M Pfizer doses late last year, so Pfizer has more US production than they can place.
Just sort of an oddity that US contracts skew away from the vaccines actually produced in US, but the expectation is that the US will do what the US does and stop Pfizer from exporting.
There is a numeric solution to the reserve problem - you don’t 1 for 1 2nd dose reserves as long as there is some sort of flow. Obviously, that reserve must scale upward to account for flow uncertainty and be sized against that flow. But the storage difficulties alone make that worth doing.
Good for you! Our pipeline has 3 phases, with Phase 1 being care homes and front-facing health workers (though a scandal is burbling away at how one of the hospital systems placed their entire senior management in Phase 1). Phase 2 moves out to essential workers, over-70s not in group living, and other at risk populations. Phase 3 is general population, and that is not really expected until perhaps May.
More or less planning to live like a bear. Stay in my cave until the snow all melts, then come out and head into the woods until September.
I’m senior management but regularly on the front end in many care sttings incl private/elderly nursing homes, so don’t mind taking the opportunity to get jabbed… Think it’s the pfizer one.
