Sure, if it was approved by the MHRA why not? The UK hasn’t ordered any though and it already has 3 vaccines approved (soon to be 4) and plenty of supply so it’s a bit hypothetical for us. Not so for others, granted. But the key is to get effective vaccines to as many people as possible as quickly as possible so I don’t see any problem of having vaccines from Russia, China or wherever provided the regulator approves them.
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In addition to what @Kopstar says, i think there is sufficient evidence on the efficacy of the Chinese and Russian vaccines to reassure people using it.
I could imagine both may have presented a harder ‘sell’ to the British public and the British government may have been reluctant to use either of them for political reasons - but it has pretty much thrown itself into getting everyone vaccinated as the way to escape any blame over its handling of the crisis - that i could see it clear and use them if necessary.
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Yeah, the only hesitancy I would have is if by taking any vaccines from Russia or China we were then diverting supplies away from poorer countries in greater need. If it had been the case that it was an option pursued I would have liked the UK to have donated five (for example) out of every six doses it bought to Covax.
We are one of the most well-organized countries in the world but we started last of all EU countries and after almost 2 months there only have been 1.3m vaccinations. There is no tempo, a big fuckup by the government, people are still dying because of incompetence. Parliament already send them home but the stay on until the next election in a fortnight. After that, they have to form a new government what will take at least 2 months because of all the coalitions that are possible.
By then they hope the good weather has done the trick and they can say, look we have it under control aren’t we great…
Incompetent motherfuckers.
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He said he would have the policy “the opposite way to the UK Government”.
“I would say we shouldn’t be having international travel, but here is a list of countries where we are confident that things are under control”.
I personally think that is the wrong way of looking at border closures as well. If you are going to do travel corridors at all - and I don’t think they should exist - then the primary reason a country makes it on the list should be if it has as good as, or stricter border measures than the UK. Then, and only then, it should be based on how many identified cases that country has. The country must pass both of the steps to be on the travel corridor.
Border enforcement, ironically, is our achilles heel. It has never been done right. It still isn’t being done right. We have a population that is desperate to leave the country for a holiday the first sign Boris gives them. Which means he really really needs to ease into opening the borders very very slowly. Right now the hotel quarantining system hits the poor hard while £2000 for a hotel stay is nothing for a wealthy person. It encourages those who cannot afford it to have a stopover in a travel corridor country to avoid any enforced quarantine. That’s absolutely nuts. We have to stop using monetary punishment as a means to stop international travel.
I’m watching and waiting for more data to come out of South Africa, or at least countries with the South African variant, as that small sample that showed 21.9% efficacy of the AZ vaccine at avoiding infection is worrying. Yes the sample was small, yes it was in a young age group (avg age 31yrs), and it was looking at stopping infection instead of stopping serious disease. We need more data here. But early signs it potentially could be worrying for us as the AZ vaccine is I assume the primary vaccination given here in the UK now. With our inability to correctly close our borders, and with Boris likely to ease border restrictions at the earliest sign ‘for the economy’, it would be shocking, but expected, of this inept government, for all the hard work to be undone by a lack of patience.
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The most recent data (there will be another update by the end of the week) shows that as at 14 February the breakdown had been as follows:
8.3million Pfizer first doses
6.9million AstraZeneca first doses
0.6million second doses, mostly Pfizer
I would expect that Pfizer doses have been directed to areas where the SA variant has been detected.
This number is now much closer to the official number of coronavirus deaths (died within 28 days of a positive covid test) which was 122,953 as of yesterday than the number of all deaths where coronavirus is mentioned on the death certificate (135,613).
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The President of Ukraine has had the AZ vaccine (from India)
Redemption shot: von der Leyen begins fightback on EU vaccine rollout With Europe facing a possible third wave and public doubts about efficacy, the commission president is under pressure from member states
https://www.ft.com/content/39d31c19-5a3d-4352-9bff-630f7c80e5fa
German chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet meetings tend to be sedate affairs, however one gathering in early February was anything but. Olaf Scholz, finance minister, launched an extraordinary broadside against the European Commission, saying its vaccination strategy had been a “total shit-show”.
The angry denunciation of Brussels typified the political heat emanating from Germany since the start of the year. Policymakers in the ruling coalition and media outlets have slammed Ursula von der Leyen over the EU’s laggardly vaccine rollout — exposing political vulnerabilities in the commission president’s home turf of Berlin.
Now von der Leyen and Brussels have a shot at redeeming the reputation of the EU vaccine campaign. The commission has launched a continent-wide project to strip out supply bottlenecks and boost production, laying the foundations for an industrial mobilisation aimed at battling the new variants of the virus that are wrongfooting scientists on multiple continents. At the same time, Brussels is banking on a significant acceleration in deliveries, with supplies expected to triple in the second quarter to at least 300m doses.
The coming months will be a test of whether the EU — and von der Leyen herself — can turn the page on the vaccine missteps, and whether pharmaceutical companies including AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson will be able to deliver. The ramp-up is urgently needed not only to counter fears of a third wave of infections driven by virus mutations, but also to prevent a resurgence of the attacks on Brussels from powerful member states.
The headwinds are particularly formidable given public doubts in some EU countries about the efficacy of the AstraZeneca vaccine, leading to mounting stockpiles in Germany, France and elsewhere.
In an interview with the Financial Times, von der Leyen defends her strategy but admits she and her colleagues initially underestimated how difficult it would be to turn vaccine breakthroughs into mass production of doses. While the current quarter will “without any question” remain difficult, von der Leyen argues the picture will change for the better in the second, as a new contract with BioNTech/Pfizer kicks in and as J&J begins shipping following a vaccine authorisation expected this month.
“We will have quite a lot more doses that will have to be administered,” she says. “The problem will, slowly but surely, change from too little supply of vaccine doses into ensuring we administer the doses we have properly and speedily. For the member states there are several logistical challenges to master.”
That message was echoed in a summit of EU leaders at the end of last week, as von der Leyen laid out the bloc’s ambitions in a slideshow to fellow leaders. But proceedings were still shot through with anxiety, as member states peppered her with detailed questions about the rollout and ways of scaling up production.
To leaders’ frustration, the EU has little short-term prospect of catching up with the US, or the UK, which has administered more than four times as many doses per capita. Israel has given more than 12 times as many.
The commission president’s message to leaders was that the EU is taking the right steps, but bitter experience has made countries cynical about the extent to which they can rely on the vaccine giants to perform.
Within days of the summit, some countries are signaling a desire to take matters into their own hands. This week Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz and Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen are travelling to Jerusalem to discuss ways of boosting vaccine procurement with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Meanwhile Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia have either bought or are eyeing Russian or Chinese vaccines, which are not authorised for use by the EU’s regulator.
Brussels vs Big Pharma
The fact that the spotlight is so firmly on von der Leyen herself is no coincidence. From early in the pandemic the commission president, a trained physician, positioned herself at the heart of the campaign. She fronted an international fundraising drive as early as May 2020 and later oversaw the launch of an EU-wide vaccine procurement scheme under the commission’s auspices.
That initially looked like shrewd politics, as scientists in the US, Germany and the UK — as well as China and Russia — reported rapid breakthroughs that raised the prospect of vaccines coming available in less than a year, rather than the normal half-decade timeline.
But early this year it became clear the EU’s vaccine drive was falling behind those in the US and UK, dragged back in part by massive delivery shortfalls from AstraZeneca’s European sites.
The damaging clashes that ensued with AstraZeneca have been a microcosm of the EU’s woes.
The British-Swedish company provoked fury when it disclosed to the commission and member states on January 22 that it would deliver less than a third of the 100m or more doses the European bloc had been expecting by the end of March. The closed-door meeting was emotional, according to people briefed on it. It prompted a withering reaction from member state diplomats, one of whom branded the shortfall a “disgrace”.
Von der Leyen spoke to Pascal Soriot, AstraZeneca’s chief executive. The commission chief was “worried” and focused on how to “pull each and every trigger” to close the supply gap, according to one person briefed on the call. Von der Leyen herself says she has been “very clear” with Soriot that “I want the vaccine doses”.
EU mistrust of AstraZeneca remains palpable, despite a modestly improved offer by the company to deliver 40m doses in the first quarter. The company is continuing to struggle with its EU production. The slides the commission showed to leaders suggest Brussels has not received firm delivery commitments from AstraZeneca sufficient to guarantee its overall target of mobilising over 400m doses from all manufacturers in the first half of the year.
The problem has taken on a new dimension as several big countries grapple with stockpiles of unused AstraZeneca jabs. Merkel and French president Emmanuel Macron have in recent days tried to restore public trust in the vaccine following question marks about its effectiveness in older individuals. Macron in January said that the vaccine was “quasi-ineffective”, but on Friday he insisted he would take it if he was offered it.
Von der Leyen is noticeably terse when discussing AstraZeneca, saying “if they deliver that’s fine — after the recent experiences deeds have to follow the words”.
AstraZeneca’s Soriot said last week that his company was doing “everything that we can” to meet the 40m first-quarter target. It has said it “aims to deliver in line” with the 180m shots expected by the bloc between April and June, by sourcing half of those from outside the bloc. That move requires both available supply and the EU’s approval.
Von der Leyen admitted to mistakes of her own in early February in a European parliament hearing — a belated gesture, according to some critics. The key miscalculation the commission made, she suggests now, was in “expectations management”.
“If you order vaccines for 500m people there’s a limit to what you can scale up in a certain amount of time,” she says. “With vaccine mass production, upscaling is certainly not a linear process. There are a lot of problems at the very beginning until you have a stable process. So, looking back, most of us underestimated how many difficulties there are at the beginning.”
But Von der Leyen denies any fundamental errors of strategy, disputing claims that the EU underinvested early in the process. Time was simply too short following the discovery of the new vaccines to “really exponentially increase the production capacity”, she says, and an extra billion euros for a company would not have changed that.
This assertion has been questioned by analysts. Airfinity, a life sciences analytics company, says the US and UK spent significantly more upfront per capita than the European bloc on vaccine development and building up manufacturing capacity, when the risks were highest and the investment counted most. While the published data is incomplete and some of the criteria subjective, Airfinity estimates that the UK allocated at least four times as much as the EU - and thus gained an edge in early jab supply.
As for claims that the EU was too slow in signing contracts, von der Leyen cites “interesting evidence” that AstraZeneca’s contract with the UK was signed the day after the one it struck with the EU in August. “So this point doesn’t count any more,” she says. Sceptics counter that this is a red herring, as the crucial intervention was the production deal London agreed in principle with the company in May.
While the EU was criticised for sticking with a longer drug authorisation process than the UK’s accelerated emergency procedure, von der Leyen argues this was also the right call. She cites the potential safety risks of injecting biologically active substances into healthy individuals.
Nevertheless, Viktor Orban’s Hungary has broken ranks and embraced Russian and Chinese vaccines not approved by the European Medicines Agency, while the Czech Republic has said it intends to approve use of the Russian Sputnik V jab. Slovakia has agreed to buy 2m doses of it.
German frustration
The idea that Brussels has learnt its lessons is not something EU politicians are taking on trust — above all in Germany. With elections looming in September and the retirement of Angela Merkel as chancellor after 16 years also imminent, politics in Berlin has become more volatile. No topic is more explosive than vaccine delivery, and the fact that the EU has fallen behind its former member-state the UK is proving particularly irksome.
By joining the EU vaccine procurement scheme, Germany, like other big member states, sacrificed its ability to emulate the UK and make its own deals. Markus Söder, one of Germany’s most powerful politicians and like von der Leyen a member of the centre-right CDU/CSU, publicly lambasted the commission’s rollout last month. The EU had ordered “too late and too little” and had been “stingy” in its negotiations with the manufacturers, he claimed.
In private senior German politicians have been even more disparaging. “The vaccine programme was a real opportunity for the commission to show Europeans it could act decisively and intelligently in a crisis and it squandered it,” says one senior CDU MP.
For some, von der Leyen — a protegee of Merkel — makes a tempting target in an election year. The daughter of one of Germany’s most prominent regional governors, von der Leyen is the closest Germans get to political royalty.
She spent her early years in the rarefied atmosphere of Brussels, later studied medicine and had seven children. Entering politics in her early forties, the “Powerfrau” and “Supermutter” enjoyed an extraordinary rise and appeared destined for high office.
She became Merkel’s longest-serving minister and was routinely spoken of as her potential successor. But such speculation ebbed away during her time as defence minister, a job that is often described as the “ejector seat” of German politics. Managing a ministry that employs 250,000 people was always going to be hard, but years of austerity had left it severely depleted and even now the army remains badly equipped and under-resourced. Despite her best reform efforts, military procurement remains a problem area. “Some people even say it [the ministry] is ungovernable,” says Christian Mölling, a defence analyst at the German Council on Foreign Relations.
Von der Leyen’s elevation to commission president in 2019 therefore came as a remarkable turnround. Yet her position in German politics remains a precarious one that has not been aided by the vaccine setbacks. She has an image of being a loner, who has never shown enough interest in local politics, in the Christian Democratic Union’s grassroots, the world of volunteer activists and campaigners.
“You can’t imagine her at a beer festival, slapping backs and pressing the flesh,” says one CDU official. This tendency has been on display in Brussels, where one attendee at a pre-lockdown drinks reception recalls von der Leyen making her excuses rapidly after addressing the guests — in contrast to her gregarious predecessor Jean-Claude Juncker.
This reserve helps explain why she lacks a deep well of support in Germany and in her own party. This could leave her vulnerable again if future crises erupt — especially after Merkel exits the stage in September.
“She prefers to storm ahead, without consulting anyone, and do everything herself,” wrote Ulrike Demmer and Daniel Goffart in a von der Leyen biography that appeared in 2015.
Bloc support
In Brussels her reliance on a tiny circle of trusted lieutenants imported from Berlin, including her powerful head of cabinet Björn Seibert, has irritated other commissioners.
This issue was highlighted during an embarrassing episode in late January, when the commission briefly pushed vaccine export proposals that would have entailed an incendiary override to the Northern Ireland protocol of the UK Brexit treaty.
Brussels withdrew the offending clause within hours of the Irish and British premiers raising the alarm. Von der Leyen acknowledges now that “more scrutiny in the process would have been better”, but while she is sorry about that she insists: “In the end the result was good. Period.”
The president’s management style is entirely consistent with her practice in Berlin, observes one senior EU diplomat, who therefore sees little reason to think she will change it. While the early weeks of 2021 were difficult ones for her vaccine strategy, with excessively “melodramatic” public battles with AstraZeneca, the diplomat says criticism among member states has now died down.
“The commission is on the phone all day with all the suppliers — they are really working hard,” the person adds. “They are where we want them to be.”
That verdict was reflected in the Thursday summit, where many leaders expressed support for the EU’s vaccine procurement efforts — perhaps unsurprisingly, given that member states fund it and are closely involved at every step.
For smaller member states, the EU’s decision to buy as a bloc represents a lifeline for which they are grateful. The alternative of going it alone, says another diplomat, would have been far higher prices for small capitals and later deliveries.
“Despite the criticism that has been levelled, the EU has done a very good job with the procurement of vaccines,” says Chris Fearne, minister of health for Malta, the EU’s smallest country by population. “Twenty-seven member states managed to come together to negotiate and procure vaccines together. There is a structure that’s going in the right direction.”
Von der Leyen’s commission is now working on an EU version of the US’s Barda, the government agency that invested billions of dollars in vaccine candidates, as officials seek to transform the EU’s ability to respond quickly to health threats. But the president, internal market commissioner Thierry Breton and health commissioner Stella Kyriakides face an enormous task to battle virus mutations, forestall supply chain shortages and lay to rest doubts about the commission’s handling of Covid-19 vaccines.
“We have to work on a system that has capacity that you can always trigger,” von der Leyen says. “The moment such a virus hits, Europe must be able to develop, approve, and scale up rapidly and for that you need the capacity. So we’ve learned our lessons in the last months.”
Wtf…is this the longest post ever?
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Are you allowed to copy articles from the FT in full? 
There are times I have wanted to do so but feared it would get TAN into trouble.
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It’s not pay-walled - and I’ve provided a link so don’t see the issue? I’m learning that where possible it’s best to put the full article otherwise many just don’t bother to click the links and read the articles.
It can’t be because I’ve just copy and pasted it all and I don’t have an FT account.
Weirdly, it’s asking me for a subscription now. I wonder if it was free for a bit? Or perhaps it was originally put as part of the free coronavirus content but has since been categorised as political?
Strange, because the Big Read series of articles are never usually free to read. I have to use my gift credits to share them with non-subscribers.
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The FT articles are free to read when linked by Twitter (For all COVID articles)
Going via google or TAN you hit the pay wall.
Even though it’s the same URL, the FT must determine the linking site. That’s how I bypass their paywall.
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Had my first COVID shot this morning. The process was shockingly smooth and swift. Kudos to the healthcare workers and the government.
Haven’t been in this thread for weeks. Hope all of you guys are doing fine. Take care.
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In contrast to that
How can you gain any traction against this virus when officials simply wont learn after 12 months stacking bodies?
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