Generic Virus Thread

[snowychap]

1 hour ago, sidcow said:

It's not unusual for the BBC to quote Tom Jones. 

Edit:

Edited January 30, 2021 by snowychap

[snowychap]

30 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

though I don't want to mischaracterise

Not mischaracterised - it's certainly a big part of the gist of my argument.

[snowychap]

Just booked my mother's two appointments for her vaccine doses via the NHS website.

Only issue was her first appointment time was taken by the time I got to the confirmation screen so had to choose another. If that's the sum total of 'issues' when dealing with the NHS booking system/vaccination process then that's all pretty good stuff.

[Mic09]

7 minutes ago, snowychap said:

. If that's the sum total of 'issues' when dealing with the NHS booking system/vaccination process then that's all pretty good stuff.

Has there been many reports about vaccine booking problems?

[snowychap]

2 minutes ago, Mic09 said:

Has there been many reports about vaccine booking problems?

I haven't heard of any myself.

I wasn't meaning to suggest that there were problems and that I hadn't encountered them - just that I'd done it for her and it seemed to go absolutely fine and hoped that this augured well for the rest of the process.

[StefanAVFC]

My parents are having first dose this weekend  

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

5 minutes ago, StefanAVFC said:

My parents are having first dose this weekend  

Mine also,  tomorrow.  300 M walk round the corner.  

[Genie]

The centre local to me that has been doing the jabs has been getting very mixed reviews.

Some saying people 80 and 90+ waiting outside in the cold for over an hour. Others saying in and out in 2 minutes and extremely efficient.

I believe that different GP surgeries are doing their patients on different days hence the variance in how they are being managed.

[TrentVilla]

18 minutes ago, Mic09 said:

Has there been many reports about vaccine booking problems?

Only where someone is vulnerable and younger than the normal age restriction, they can’t book until they get a second letter.

[blandy]

1 hour ago, HanoiVillan said:

we have enforced the very same scarcity that we are complaining about in this thread.

I don't see that. The scarcity isn't caused by protection of intellectual property rights, it's caused by availability of capacity in a situation where the world population of billions all need 2 jabs (pretty much), and the time pressure to invent, verify and then mass produce and distribute and inject multi billions of individual doses. The vaccine will be scarce until everyone in the world has been jabbed. It's true that rich western nations are able to jab their populations more quickly because of all the advantages of wealth and Pharma businesses being located there. Equally it's those nations people doing the research and testing and inventing which then benefits everyone.

The vaccines are being "sold" at cost price, isn't it? certainly Oxford /AZ is - it's not a profit thing (in this instance). But profit from medical stuff does fund new research and new discoveries. So ceding IPR is not without drawbacks. If production capability is lying unused in (say) Namibia, there's a way for (say) Pfizer to no cost license the "recipe" to Namibia jab factory without giving up IPR. Or for the UN or whoever (nation) to subsidise Namibia if they can't afford to pay even cost price for the ingredients or  chemists or whatever.

[Milfner]

Had mine this morning. In and out within 25 minutes (including a sit down for a quarter of an hour). All very efficient. 

[LondonLax]

1 hour ago, Mic09 said:

It's a tough one because;

1) 10% of our vaccines is very little considering the EU population

2) morally, why is it better to get a vaccine to a Polish 70 year old rather than a Scottish 65 year old?

3) Why help the EU? Why not India? Why not Mexico?

4) Pandemic does not discriminate, so if your cousin dies next month because of the virus when they could have been vaccinated, are we gonna be ok with it because someone in Spain won't die?

I don't know the answer to these questions but the UK needs to be very careful with addressing those issues because lives are at stake. 

Everyone across Europe is in a similar position with speed of delivery being crucial to save lives and get back to some sort of ‘normal’ society. 

The U.K. got up and running early and is ahead of the rest of Europe. No real dispute about that.

The question then is about what happens now when there are a lot more countries trying to roll out vaccines and more demand than supply. 

How should that supply be allocated from this point on?

1) Should new supply be given to the U.K. first because their contract was earlier, despite the EU also having a contract for delivery with a specified volume and date which came later?

2) Should it be split in proportion of demand between the EU and the U.K. with the EU reviving proportionally more, in response to its larger population?

3) Should it be delivered on the basis of where it is manufactured (i.e. U.K. getting jabs made in Wales and the EU only taking the ones made in Belgium/Netherlands), even though the U.K.’s initial supplies came from Belgium (as will other vaccines).

4) Should the EU get a preferential delivery on the newest orders because the U.K. has already had a bunch and so the elderly in the EU need it more?

There are 4 options there. I’d tend to fall on scenario 2. It’s not clear if the EU are arguing for scenario 2 or 4 and it sounds like some in this thread are arguing for scenario 1 or 3? 

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

4 minutes ago, LondonLax said:

1) Should new supply be given to the U.K.

It's Difficult but the EU did themselves no favours.

The EU's butcher shop analogy was painful.

Think of it as a "Noah boat builders" and its a bit more accurate.

UK,  orders and helps for 3 months with design and build of the boat and to make sure it floats and can do the job.

EU rocks up,  3 months later and boat is almost finished. 

"I'll have that boat there thanks"

 

[darrenm]

My in-laws have both had theirs and my wife has had hers (NHS 'front-line' worker). I now know a lot of people who've had the jab. You'd like to think that it would be having an effect by now along with the lockdown. The cases are plummeting but deaths are still not dropping especially fast. I think it always works out that deaths lag cases by 2-3 weeks and cases have been dropping for 1-2 weeks with the last week seeing a massive reduction. So perhaps by next weekend deaths will be dropping at an encouraging rate.

[HanoiVillan]

21 minutes ago, blandy said:

I don't see that. The scarcity isn't caused by protection of intellectual property rights, it's caused by availability of capacity in a situation where the world population of billions all need 2 jabs (pretty much), and the time pressure to invent, verify and then mass produce and distribute and inject multi billions of individual doses. The vaccine will be scarce until everyone in the world has been jabbed. It's true that rich western nations are able to jab their populations more quickly because of all the advantages of wealth and Pharma businesses being located there. Equally it's those nations people doing the research and testing and inventing which then benefits everyone.

The vaccines are being "sold" at cost price, isn't it? certainly Oxford /AZ is - it's not a profit thing (in this instance). But profit from medical stuff does fund new research and new discoveries. So ceding IPR is not without drawbacks. If production capability is lying unused in (say) Namibia, there's a way for (say) Pfizer to no cost license the "recipe" to Namibia jab factory without giving up IPR. Or for the UN or whoever (nation) to subsidise Namibia if they can't afford to pay even cost price for the ingredients or  chemists or whatever.

AstraZeneca get some credit for a] agreeing some deals with generics manufacturers in India and Latin America to ensure wider distribution, and b] committing not to make a profit off vaccines while the pandemic is underway (though note that according to the FT, company documents show that they reserve the right to declare the pandemic 'over' in July). Other pharma companies have not made the same commitments. Moderna, for instance, garnered some nice press by saying they won't enforce their patents for Covid vaccines, but they haven't actually committed to sharing the science as far as I know.

Your point about 'profit from medical stuff [funding] new research and new discoveries' is truthy; *money* funds new research and new discoveries. Whether that money comes from pharma profits or from government investment is much less important than the fact of its existence in the first place. And during this pandemic, the money for a lot of the vaccine development has come from government funding and pre-orders. For instance, Moderna themselves admit that the US government covered 100% of the cost of developing their vaccine.

On the question of the scale of the challenge, of course you are right that vaccinated the entire world's adult population is a huge task. Yet it isn't clear that governments have reacted with sufficient urgency; they have tended to over-order vaccines from pharma companies (Canada has ordered enough vaccine for the population to be vaccinated 10x over), without doing much to increase production capacity for what is at the end of the day an industrial manufacturing process which could have been sped up. For one thing, you are correct in your ordering of 'invent, verify and then mass produce' as that is largely the order we have done things in, but there was no need for that to be the case; much more mass production could have begun before the vaccines were licensed, as even in the worst case of finding they were completely useless the 'wasted' money would have been trivial compared to the benefit of a faster rollout.

[sidcow]

I think the point is that by mid to late February the UK should be out of the really out of the danger zone with all of the most vulnerable groups who account for 95% of all hospitalisations and deaths. 

So the question really is do we then help out another country who still has substantial numbers of at risk people likely to die before we start vaccinating people who are very unlikely to get seriously ill. 

However as we have seen (one poster on here described his own experience) merely that you have not needed to go into hospital does not mean you are perfectly OK and long Covid can be nasty to live with. 

And of course we still need to have enough supply to get second shots into people. 

At the end of the day there really isn't a right answer to this is there. Unfortunately industry can't snap it's fingers a d have all the vaccine that is needed day 1.  There was probably always going to be a bun fight and unanswerable moral dilemmas. 

Many many more are going to die and it's going to be a long time before we see Bill Gates funded teams going into third world countries to save the lives of the poorest. 

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

50 minutes ago, Genie said:

The centre local to me that has been doing the jabs has been getting very mixed reviews.

Like Amazon reviews  

"Missed my arm completely"

"Went in my ear"

"Best Vaccine ever!"

"Too cold"

"I'm bl1nd nuw"

[Genie]

25 minutes ago, darrenm said:

My in-laws have both had theirs and my wife has had hers (NHS 'front-line' worker). I now know a lot of people who've had the jab. You'd like to think that it would be having an effect by now along with the lockdown. The cases are plummeting but deaths are still not dropping especially fast. I think it always works out that deaths lag cases by 2-3 weeks and cases have been dropping for 1-2 weeks with the last week seeing a massive reduction. So perhaps by next weekend deaths will be dropping at an encouraging rate.

Last week Boris said we should see the impact of the vaccines in the daily data within 2 weeks.

[magnkarl]

1 hour ago, blandy said:

I don't see that. The scarcity isn't caused by protection of intellectual property rights, it's caused by availability of capacity in a situation where the world population of billions all need 2 jabs (pretty much), and the time pressure to invent, verify and then mass produce and distribute and inject multi billions of individual doses. The vaccine will be scarce until everyone in the world has been jabbed. It's true that rich western nations are able to jab their populations more quickly because of all the advantages of wealth and Pharma businesses being located there. Equally it's those nations people doing the research and testing and inventing which then benefits everyone.

The vaccines are being "sold" at cost price, isn't it? certainly Oxford /AZ is - it's not a profit thing (in this instance). But profit from medical stuff does fund new research and new discoveries. So ceding IPR is not without drawbacks. If production capability is lying unused in (say) Namibia, there's a way for (say) Pfizer to no cost license the "recipe" to Namibia jab factory without giving up IPR. Or for the UN or whoever (nation) to subsidise Namibia if they can't afford to pay even cost price for the ingredients or  chemists or whatever.

The thing is that big pharma have other ways to make money out of this. They say they are doing it at production cost, however for example in Israel they've traded rights to essentially personal information for all citizens for 10m jabs. It smells iffy at best.

Quote

Reasons behind this roaring start are fast emerging: Netanyahu revealed on January 7 that Israel struck an agreement with Pfizer to exchange citizens' data for 10 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine, including a promise of shipments of 400,000-700,000 doses every week.

With the track record of some of these companies we really shouldn't be so naive.

[fightoffyour]

3 hours ago, Amsterdam_Neil_D said:

Like Amazon reviews  

"Missed my arm completely"

"Went in my ear"

"Best Vaccine ever!"

"Too cold"

"I'm bl1nd nuw"

If it was an Amazon answer it would just say:

”don’t know sorry haven’t had it yet.”

4 hours ago, Milfner said:

In and out within 25 minutes (including a sit down for a quarter of an hour). All very efficient. 

 

Nothing more to add except that after catching up on this thread from yesterday I want some chips now, but I’m not willing to pay more to have them hot since I think that should be as standard.