Covid-19 Vaccine - Where, How & Costs

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This is a national defense issue. Ideally, a robust global monitoring system needs to be put in place with sharing of data. The US military was working on their own vaccine but I have seen nothing further about it.
 
In the United States, new pills for various ailments are advertised on TV regularly. After hearing the side effects, I think I would avoid them, especially when one is death.
 
edwest said:
In the United States, new pills for various ailments are advertised on TV regularly. After hearing the side effects, I think I would avoid them, especially when one is death.
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Any and all drugs are potentially fatal. A high dose of most drugs, for instance, is very bad for you (Panadol causes permanent liver failure), and nearly all drugs can trigger fatal allergic reactions in a tiny minority of people. And pharma companies are required to list all important side effects, not just all likely ones.
 
Plans and unavoidable production delays often go hand in hand. This happened in the US as well. But the EU is already planning on welcoming back American tourists this Summer.
 
edwest said:
Plans and unavoidable production delays often go hand in hand. This happened in the US as well. But the EU is already planning on welcoming back American tourists this Summer.
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I am quite prepared to cut a vaccine producer some slack, but AZ's performance has just been unacceptable, even with all the good will in the world! We are now almost half a year into the vaccination campaign, and it has still not been able to sort its supply chain out. And not by a slight margin either, AZ was supposed to deliver 180M doses to the EU in the second quarter, but that will only be 70M in reality - not even half the amount it pledged! To put this into perspective, even if of those 60M doses the USA will soon release were given to the EU in their entirety, it wouldn't make up for just the Q2 shortfall, leaving an almost 30% gap. Never mind the first quarter, where AZ supplied only a third of what it promised. After all these months, I really struggle to see how EC negotiating and contracting failures, if any, could still be held responsible for this fiasco. Is the EU supposed to simply let it slide?

Not that I'm proposing that any of the US doses be given to the EU at this point - I think India would benefit more in the current circumstances!
 
I can understand the frustration but I doubt the average person has access to the contracts. One hopes a proper inquiry will be launched.
 
If every country does not have a backup plan regarding medicines, related ingredients and vaccines, now is the time. Political leaders have friends and family, and themselves to think about. For a time, Canada was considering setting up its own vaccine production facility. Producing cheap drugs needs to be seen as a vulnerability in some cases. And that includes non-drug products.
 
chimeric oncogene said:
I think the contract they negotiated did not have penalties for failing to meet the targets.
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Contractual penalties is one thing, suing is another. More troubling is that I've seen suggestions the contract contains language to also limit AZ's liability in court for certain things, most recently in the article Grey Havoc posted. That *would* make things difficult, obviously!

Also strange that the contract apparently puts Belgium as a country on the hook for some supplies, but since the Belgian Novasep plant seems to be the only EU site running reasonably well, the EU appears to have dodged that bullet. Most amusing (in a sardonic sort of way...) is the implication that many of the idiosyncrasies of the AZ contract hark back to the earlier D/F/I/NL agreement. So the contracts inked *later* and solely drafted by the EC with BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna are better, but people still consider the EU joint effort to be the problem here?
 
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Grey Havoc said:
https://www.politico.eu/article/belgium-was-warned-eus-astrazeneca-contract-lacked-teeth-documents/
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The opinion also raises questions about the naïveté of EU negotiators, who signed a deal that, compared to one the U.K. inked, didn't spell out specific consequences if the drugmaker under-delivered. The contract even has a clause saying the Commission cannot sue AstraZeneca if it doesn't deliver on time — a clause lawyers believe the Commission will seek to invalidate in a Belgian court.
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Well, le ridiculE(U) ne tue pas* as they say in French (sadly, Covid-19 does).

*what's ridiculous doesn't kill
 
And if and when it turns out that it was not a problem with the AstraZeneca vaccine itself after all, all hell will break loose.

On another note, via the The Grumpy Economist blog:
... as the vaccines came to market, some vaccine makers insisted on sweeping liability protections that further imperiled access for poorer countries. The United States, for example, is prohibited from selling or donating its unused doses, as Vanity Fair has reported, because the strong liability protections that drugmakers enjoy here don’t extend to other countries...
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Pfizer has reportedly not only sought liability protection against all civil claims — even those that could result from the company’s own negligence — but has asked governments to put up sovereign assets, including their bank reserves, embassy buildings and military bases, as collateral against lawsuits.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/opinion/covid-vaccines-poor-countries.html
 
The facility has not yet been authorized by the Food and Drug Administration for vaccine production. And according to a facility inspection report released by the FDA last week, Emergent is unlikely to get that authorization quickly. FDA inspectors logged a slew of significant failings and violations at the plant, including improperly trained staff and ample opportunities for contamination. The inspectors also reported that Emergent failed to thoroughly investigate exactly how millions of doses of the J&J vaccine and AstraZeneca vaccine became contaminated.

As such, “there is no assurance that other batches have not been subject to cross contamination,” the inspectors wrote in their report. That is, the quality of the 10 million AstraZeneca doses the US already has is now in question.
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Federal lawmakers, meanwhile, are investigating whether Emergent used ties to the Trump administration to unduly earn millions of dollars’ worth of federal grants, despite a long track record of failings and persistent quality-control problems.

In the best-case scenario, the FDA’s quality check is expected to wrap up in the coming weeks. Once that’s complete—if the doses are found to be of high enough quality—the doses can begin to ship out. If all goes well at Emergent’s Baltimore facility, 50 million doses at various stages of production are estimated to be finished in May and June.

The timeline is agonizingly slow to help with India’s current situation.
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https://arstechnica.com/science/202...of-jj-vaccine-is-holding-up-vaccine-to-india/
 
Such a great news for all that are lucky to be in a similar case.
Here, even if we have bars open (terrasses) only during business hours, it's a refreshing sight for all.
Having been active during most lockdowns, I can't emphasize how much better it is to see ppl relaxing outside, enjoying early spring sunny days instead of crossing one after another empty street on my way to work.
 
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Flyaway said:
Grey Havoc said:
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/apr/25/china-nixed-biowarfare-meeting-coronavirus-queries/
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Is that The State Department calling out the WHO more than anything?
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If the Chinese had reason to believe it was of their own bioweapons or an experiment gone bad, they'd have locked down Wuhan on Jan 1, with none of the hand-wringing and last-minute locking-down two days before Chinese New Year, when people were already scattered from one end of the country to another to visit relatives.
 
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chimeric oncogene said:
Flyaway said:
Grey Havoc said:
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/apr/25/china-nixed-biowarfare-meeting-coronavirus-queries/
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Is that The State Department calling out the WHO more than anything?
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If the Chinese had reason to believe it was of their own bioweapons or an experiment gone bad, they'd have locked down Wuhan on Jan 1, with none of the hand-wringing and last-minute locking-down two days before Chinese New Year, when people were already scattered from one end of the country to another to visit relatives.
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But we also have to factor in the way the CCP hierarchy encourages obfuscation from officials further down the feeding chain, as seen by the Wuhan party officials stimying attempts by medics to alert their coleagues to the potential pandemic in the offing.

Besides, this news report probably does not directly bear on the pandemic, more on the CCP trying to avoid bad publicity and difficult questions.
 
I don't often comment on things like this so read into my post what you will...

The facts [as they appear to me] are that the Chinese government knew they had a problem (and I make no speculation as to the source) long before they went public. That is immoral and unforgivable.
 
DWG said:
If this was anything more than posturing the EU wouldn't accept a month's delay until the next hearing.
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On the other hand, this is the European Commission we are talking about.
 
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Flyaway said:
The gist of this article is that human behaviour is probably the biggest factor in the huge Indian wave. But that it’s hard to know what’s going on with the variants over there as India just isn’t doing enough genomic monitoring.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/...iant-is-adding-fuel-to-indias-covid-19-crisis
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It's not just India not doing enough Genomic Surveillance:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00908-0
Bear in mind that the UK has regularly been delivering something over half of all sequences worldwide, despite our representing less than 1% of the planetary population. There are a handful of countries doing even better than the UK, but Denmark's about the only one with a significant population.

And even when you spot variants, it takes time and monitoring trends in the number of times they crop up to know whether they are significant, and even the ones you think are significant may turn out to just fizzle out in the end (there was one came out of Spain last summer that did precisely that). We'd sequenced B.1.1.7 (the UK/Kent variant) months before we had the trend data to know it was significant.

ETA: Another Nature article pointing out a particular problem with Genomic Surveillance in the US - it isn't joined up at the national level, on top of which there are major differences in sampling rates between states:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00564-4
 
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