By the sound of that would I be right in thinking AZ doesn’t protect against those 2 varients, Nigeria and South Africa.
The evidence indicates it protects against severe illness and death from the SA variant. Not sure about the Nigerian one, or how potentially bad it might be.
I wondered might those vulnerable, already vaccinated need to be quickly re - vaccinated against the new varients
Understand 30’s to be offered the Modern a vaccine…does this mean all the excess AZ will be given to over 60’s waiting for our 2nd jab…just a note over the stats…
4 in 1 million ,yes I understand it’s sad for the 4, but nobody says anything about the amount of young girls who start taking the contraceptive pill and have blood clotting complications, but they still take it(I did)… Also how many people between 50 and 65 have had heart attacks whilst waiting for the covid jab…and when I get my ‘card’ showing my 2 jabs I will gladly carry it around with me, in case anyone wants to see it, it may not be official but I’ll gladly show it…I’m no clinician/scientist/medic/ or doctor, but I have heard of at least 3 people in my area either being taken off the pill because of blood clotting symptoms, but I don’t think that’s been on the news.
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The other thing about this analogy is that taking the contraceptive pill doesn’t stop other women from getting pregnant, whereas getting vaccinated absolutely will contribute to stopping other people dying from coronavirus.
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Sorry for the rant… 
Don’t worry Australia, the EU may block your vaccines but the UK’s got your back.
More than 700,000 AstraZeneca doses secretly flown to Australia from Britain
For our free coronavirus pandemic coverage, learn more here.
By Bevan Shields
April 8, 2021 — 6.41am
London: Hundreds of thousands of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine have been flown from the United Kingdom to Australia but the source of the shipments was kept quiet to avoid any controversy in coronavirus-ravaged Britain.
The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age can reveal Australia’s early rollout has been propped up by 717,000 doses manufactured in the UK rather than from factories in Europe as widely believed.
The need to source jabs from the UK underscores the difficulties Australia and AstraZeneca have faced in extracting supply from the EU under the bloc’s tough new export controls. It is now known that not a single AstraZeneca dose has been exported to Australia from Europe.
The first 300,000 UK-made doses landed at Sydney Airport on February 28 – one month after the European Commission introduced new curbs limiting the export of vaccines produced on the continent.
The Morrison government said at the time that the shipment had come from “overseas”, which was presumed to be continental Europe, a major hub for production.
Another large batch arrived on an Emirates passenger plane in March, well after Italy and the European Commission formally blocked an application by AstraZeneca to ship 250,000 doses to Australia.
Australia is still owed 3.1 million doses from overseas and on Wednesday demanded the European Commission give the green light for their immediate export.
AstraZeneca’s decision to send vaccines from the UK instead of jumping through hoops in Europe kept the Morrison government’s vaccination program afloat but could present trouble for Prime Minister Boris Johnson in Britain.
Unlike the European Union, the UK government does not have a direct right to approve or reject vaccine exports. However government officials have known about the Australian shipments and never publicly disclosed them.
While the UK has sent vaccines to its overseas territories such as Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands, Australia is thought to be the only country to receive AstraZeneca vaccines made in British factories.
The UK has domestic production capacity, but has been heavily reliant on vaccine imports from Europe and India.
One senior Whitehall official stressed the shipments to Australia was never at the expense of the UK’s rollout, which has been one of the world’s fastest. Three in five adults in the UK have already been given at least one dose since the program began in December.
The official declined to be named because they were not authorised to talk about the issue publicly.
Downing Street did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.
On February 28 – the same day the first 300,000 UK-made doses arrived in Australia – Britain recorded 8800 new infections, well down on the January peak of 60,000. By late February more than 30 per cent of the UK population had been given at least one vaccine dose – one of the highest rates in the world.
Johnson’s government has repeatedly said the coronavirus pandemic requires a co-ordinated global vaccination effort and has also warned against the pitfalls of so-called vaccine nationalism.
The European Commission gave itself sweeping powers in January to block vaccine exports if AstraZeneca failed to meet its contracts with the bloc.
London and Brussels have been at loggerheads over vaccine supply after European leaders accused AstraZeneca of prioritising post-Brexit Britain ahead of Europe’s 450 million citizens.
In early March, European Council President Charles Michel claimed the UK had “imposed an outright ban on the export of vaccines or vaccine components produced on their territory”. That claim was wrong because doses manufactured in the UK had already been exported to Australia a fortnight earlier.
The UK government swiftly denied Michel’s claim of an “outright ban” and stressed it had not blocked any exports. However it has repeatedly refused to say whether any vaccines had been sent abroad and if so, where.
Australian Health Department secretary Dr Brendan Murphy told Sky News last month that Britain had “helped us a lot” but did not say how.
The revelation that Australia had received AstraZeneca doses made in Britain could explain why Italy and the European Commission blocked the shipment of 250,000 doses in early March. It is likely that European officials knew then that the doses that had arrived in Australia in late February originated in the UK.
A commission spokesperson on Wednesday said Italy blocked the export because “AstraZeneca is not meeting its obligations in the EU”.
“So far, the company has delivered much less than what was foreseen,” the spokesperson said. “The pandemic continues to be very acute in the EU.”
Australia had originally agreed with AstraZeneca to import 500,000 doses but Europe suggested a figure of 250,000 might be more appropriate and have a better chance of getting around export curbs.
But even that application was rejected. The request was the only one knocked back out of 491 applications.
The European Commission might come under fresh pressure to approve the export of AstraZeneca vaccines to Canberra given it is now known that no doses have been sent to Australia from European factories.
Asked whether the commission would review its position, the spokesperson said: “It is important to note that since the implementation of the export authorisation system, Australia has received more than one million doses of vaccines from the EU.”
Those one million doses are Pfizer jabs. Pfizer is largely meeting its contract with the EU so its exports are not being blocked.
AstraZeneca, which is producing the COVID-19 vaccine at cost for the duration of the pandemic, is facing global pressure to boost supply. It had planned to provide 180 million doses to the EU in the second quarter but will only deliver 40 million.
The British-Swedish company also told the Morrison government in January that it could only provide 1.2 million offshore doses in February and March instead of the expected 3.8 million. Only 717,000 doses – the ones from the UK – have arrived so far, leaving 3.1 million doses in the balance.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has blamed that shortfall for Australia’s failure to meet a target of vaccinating 4 million people by the end of March. He vowed on Wednesday to write to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and AstraZeneca to seek the release of the doses.
The commission’s spokesperson said any future export requests “will be assessed on a case by case basis”.
More than 50 million AstraZeneca doses will be made by CSL in Melbourne. The company forecast in February that it would release 2 million doses by the end of March and then release 1 million doses a week after that. But so far, the company has released 1.3 million doses.
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Mmmm, a disappointing 54.509 for the day, week total so far is 144.243.
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Last week I paid £250 for 2 X PCR tests as required for my daughter to come over from Paris. Her baby’s crèche has closed for 3 weeks and she desperately needs childcare so she and her partner can work. These tests are to be carried out on days 2 & 8 in the UK.
She also paid 50 euros for a PCR test in Paris before travelling.
What hacked me off though was that she was then able to travel on the Eurostar without anyone at border control checking paperwork or even asking if she had complied with the UK entry requirements. 
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Did she have to show the paperwork to get on the train? Not sure how the system works there but we’ve been through immigration for the arrival country whilst still in the departure country before now.
This has been one of the main problems throughout (particularly as concerns AstraZeneca). Yes, it has been disgracefully maligned but even the non-partisan communications have so often been vague or confusing, further undermining precious trust that was already under attack.
It simply beggars belief that two press conferences scheduled simultaneously by the main regulators in Europe giving statements on the exact same area of concern did not coordinate their advice.
There is simply no reason why both regulators could not have issued exactly the same advice. Add bloodclots as a rare potential side effect to the information leaflet and advising a preference for an alternative vaccine to those under 30.
Consistent position, give confidence, minimal impact on vaccine roll out both in the UK and the EU/EEA.
But no, one did one thing and the other did something else, potentially leaving people thinking that one or both of the regulators don’t really know what they’re doing.
Yes UK border control is at Gare du Nord but she wasn’t asked to show test results at all…
Symptoms include thinking you’re doing a great job of running the country when you’ve actually killed 130,000 people.
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Serious question. Do you believe under a different government or different leader, there would have been no deaths at all? If so, what do you base this assumption on?
I find it hard to believe you think every single one of those deaths would not have happened but for this present government.
What for you would be an acceptable number of deaths then?
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Sorry to wade in but the simple truth is that the death numbers and financial impact of Covid in the UK rest at the feet of Boris.
Difficult to say how many are a direct result of his action / inaction but to my mind its possible to draw comparisons with places like New Zealand, Australia, Japan for example. The UK is way over those places. The UK has not managed the virus well. It has managed vaccinations extremely well, but protecting citizens before the vaccine was available was a car crash.
Imagine playing like we did against Real Madrid in a game that lasted for 12 months. It’s that level of disaster.
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There is a perverse reality that one of the reasons the vaccines were able to be provisionally approved so quickly was because the case load was high. That means you can get the outcomes youre looking for in the studies much more quickly. I’ve seen some people try to retcon that into a justification for the Laissez-faire approach taken in 2020.
That’s awful but not unexpected these days.
Sadly it doesn’t even stand up to scrutiny if you look at things from a financial stand point.
I disagree. Quite apart from the fundamental geopolitical differences one of the remarkable things about this is that the UK went into lockdown weeks before New Zealand did.
That doesn’t mean that the UK couldn’t/shouldn’t have done more and done it earlier, it should, but it cannot be compared to places like NZ, Japan and Australia. Much more relevant to compare it to other similarly sized European countries: Italy, Spain, France and Germany being the more appropriate comparators.
There is no ‘perfect’ but Germany handled the first wave as well as anyone and there are clear differences there, particularly with regard to efficient test and trace from early in the pandemic. Despite having a greater population it has suffered nearly 50,000 less deaths (although the gap is closing now).
In terms of the second wave the UK situation has been massively impacted by B1.117 (the UK variant), which is now also becoming dominant in the continent with similarly disastrous results. Notwithstanding they have had more notice of this variant, how it operates, what measures are needed to contain it, than the UK did of the original strain.
I don’t know what would constitute perfect here. Perhaps half of the deaths we’ve had? But then this is with hindsight - had we not made avoidable/predictable errors then perhaps maybe a third of the deaths we’ve had would have been avoided? Equally, another government may not have pursued the aggressive vaccine procurement approach that we’ve adopted that is already saving 10s of thousands of lives that would otherwise have been lost.
The reality is that whoever was in government their decisions would have cost lives. The focus needs to be on learning lessons from this, making sure that what investment that has taken place is not wasted so that a legacy can be left for the benefit of future pandemics (etc).
Where the government needs its toes held to the fire is over corruption. The whole chumocracy. I think people can be forgiven for making errors of judgment made in good faith, with the best intentions. Unforgiveable is misusing your position for the advancement of yourself or your friends.