Vaccine

Thursday

Richard Dobbs

A race against time: can the vaccine outpace the virus?

The next three months may well prove to be the hardest of the whole pandemic. The new variants of Covid-19 appear to be the wrong type of game-changer. After our national lockdown in March, infection levels started falling because of extreme measures — including closing schools, places of worship and non-essential retail. But the infectiousness of the ‘Kent strain’ suggests that as it becomes prevalent, a new lockdown might be unable to contain it. When ministers first locked down, they did so in the expectation of taming the virus. This time, it’s more in hope. Boris Johnson didn’t show us any graphs when he announced the latest lockdown. He didn’t

Wednesday

Constantin Eckner

Merkel’s government faces civil war over vaccine failures

European health ministries have not been happy places of late. Earlier this week, the German daily Bild reported a spat between national governments and the EU, frustrated at the bloc’s failure to procure vaccine doses in any serious numbers. That failure has now ricocheted back from Brussels, destabilising Germany’s increasingly fragile coalition government. So infuriated are Angela Merkel’s junior partners that they are now calling for a parliamentary inquiry into Germany’s vaccine failures, centring on one of her possible successors. Problems began when health ministers in Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands (the four countries with the most advanced pharmaceutical industries in the EU) joined forces to try to get

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Boris Johnson’s justifications for lockdown

Boris Johnson this evening tried to give a little more background to why he had called England’s latest lockdown – and why he had confidence that this really was the darkness before the dawn. The Prime Minister told the Downing Street coronavirus briefing (yes, we are back in that sort of lockdown) that more than 1 million people in England are now infected with Covid – around 2 per cent of the population, according to the ONS – but that as of today, the same number of people in England, and a total of 1.3 million people across the UK, have received the vaccine. He had to explain why he

Robert Peston Robert Peston

We need to cut vaccine red tape

As I mentioned on Monday, in a fortnight AstraZeneca will be putting 2 million doses of its coronavirus vaccine into vials every week. At that point the limiting factor on how many people can be vaccinated will switch from manufacturing to distribution – and in particular how long it takes to ‘process’ each person who turns up to be vaccinated. It allegedly takes three times longer in the UK than in Israel to do the on-site paperwork for each vaccinated person. Which, if true, means the UK would be processing a smaller number of people than it could be vaccinating every day. And in the current raging epidemic that would

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Britain has two key advantages in the vaccine race

Everything now turns on how quickly the vaccines can be rolled out. When this lockdown ends – and when all the restrictions can be lifted – depends on how fast people can be immunised. Last night, Boris Johnson set the state the target of having vaccinated 13 million people by the middle of February so that the lockdown measures can be eased later that month. There is an understandable scepticism about this target —people remember when test and trace was meant to prevent the need for a second national lockdown.  But the UK has two great advantages when it comes to rolling out a vaccine. First, it has a domestically-manufactured

Monday

Jonathan Miller

Emmanuel Macron’s desperate New Year wishes

Emmanuel Macron was not quite his cock-a-doodle-do self in his New Year’s Eve broadcast to the French people. This, the fourth presidential broadcast of the plague year, saw Macron, in black suit and black tie, resembling a small-town funeral director attempting to conjure optimism. Macron promised a France on the comeback by the spring, with new economy jobs and a European recovery fostered by an ever more ambitious European Union. The reality is that much of the country is under a 6pm curfew. Everywhere, bars, restaurants and ski resorts are shut. Pension reform has gone. Unemployment, deficit and debt are massively up. There’s been close to a 10 per cent

Peter English

The UK’s vaccine approach isn’t ‘anti-science’

In order to vaccinate as many people as possible, the government has decided to change the length of time between the first jab and the second. What’s more, there has even been a suggestion that — in exceptional circumstances — the NHS could use a different vaccine for the second jab from the one used in the first. Cue a wave of criticism, not least from medical professionals and academics, concerned the government is pushing for something different to what the science suggests. The New York Times reported that the government’s decision had ‘confounded’ experts, while the MP Claudia Webbe called the move ‘dangerously anti-science’. Under their licences — the guidance

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Could the South African strain affect the vaccine?

Today begins the second phase of the Covid-19 vaccine programme, with the first members of the public receiving doses of the easier to use Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. But will the effort be thwarted by the emergence of two new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the Kentish strain and the South African strain? Yesterday, Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at the University of Oxford, gave his opinion. The Kentish strain, he said, does not greatly worry him. Although it has mutations that appear to make it more transmissible, they should not, he says, interfere with the working of any of the vaccines. More concerning, he believes, is the South African

Friday

Seth J. Frantzman

How Israel became a world leader in vaccination

On a cold night three days before the end of the 2020 I drove down to Jerusalem’s Pais Arena. The area is usually a sports venue, next to Jerusalem’s stadium and mall, but in December it was transformed into a centre for mass vaccinations, open from morning till ten in the evening. By the first day of 2021 Israel had vaccinated more than 1 million people in two weeks, an unprecedented number, making the country a global leader in vaccinating against Covid-19. I was one of those who received the first jab of the Pfizer vaccine. Israel’s path to this milestone has been a rollercoaster of lockdowns and struggles over the

Wednesday

Dr Mark Toshner

Let’s bust some vaccine myths

Today is a great day for all of us. The licensing of the ChAdOx vaccine will mean a step change in vaccine deployment and is one of the most significant developments of the year. As is widely known, the vaccine developed is cheap, easy to store and we have enough doses to meaningfully start talking about widespread programmes of vaccination. Now is a good time to address a slow motion and avoidable car crash. Vaccines are not a political issue – don’t let anybody persuade you otherwise. You can see this happening and it affects both our interpretation of vaccine development and, more importantly, the likelihood of having one. The

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

What does the Oxford vaccine approval mean for the UK?

This morning the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine has been approved by the UK medicines regulator, the MHRA. This is almost more of a game changer than the approval of the first Pfizer vaccine, because the UK government has ordered 100 million doses of it – and it is also much easier to distribute, as it does not need to be stored at the same very low temperatures as the Pfizer jab. It means that there really is a chance of life returning to normal in the not-too distant future. Ministers had been very clear in private that if this immunisation didn’t pass, it would mean society would have to work out how to

Monday

Ross Clark

Would it be immoral to raise cash for the NHS by selling £100,000 vaccines?

It is easy to be offended by the idea of the super-rich trying to buy their place in the queue for the Covid-19 vaccine ahead of your granny, and easy to feel a warm glow of satisfaction that they are being rebuffed – all supplies are being held on such a tight rein by the NHS that private clinics can’t get a look in. But would it really be such a bad idea if a handful of very wealthy individuals were allowed to have the vaccine ahead of schedule and raise some very useful cash for the NHS in the process? If we are going to vaccinate our way out

Wednesday

Philip Thomas

Could 30 per cent of Brits have some Covid immunity?

How big is the job of vaccination? The aim is herd immunity, to protect enough people so that the virus starts to run out of people to infect and rates fall. This is expected to happen when between 60 to 80 per cent of the population is protected, so quite a job for the NHS. Until this is achieved, ministers seek to use lockdown as a tool to keep the R below 1. This means the cycle of lockdown and release could be with us for some time, especially in light of the new ‘mutant’ strain of the virus. But are ministers seeing the whole picture? As a professor of

Friday

Ross Clark

Brits don’t appear to have been influenced by anti-vaxxers

Has the influence of anti-vaxxers been hugely overstated? That is one interpretation of the Office for National Statistics’ latest survey on social attitudes towards Covid-19 and the government’s efforts to tackle it. While fears abound that people might refuse the vaccine, with their minds turned by lies disseminated on social media about Bill Gates wanting to impregnate them with microchips, there is scant sign that the British public is becoming anti-vax. Across all adult age groups, 78 per cent say they are ‘fairly likely’ or ‘very likely’ to take the vaccine if offered it (and it is government policy that all will be offered it in time). More importantly, perhaps, that

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the year: Coronavirus, falling statues, banned Easter eggs and compulsory Scotch eggs

January Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, signed the EU withdrawal agreement, sent from Brussels by train. Sajid Javid, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, promised ‘an infrastructure revolution’ in the Budget. An American drone killed Qassem Soleimani, an Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard commander, near Baghdad airport. Iran carelessly shot down a Ukrainian airliner taking off from Tehran, killing 176. Bush fires raged in New South Wales. Cases of acute viral pneumonia were noticed in Wuhan in central China. February Eighty-three British evacuees from Wuhan were quarantined on the Wirral. The Department of Health classified Covid-19 as a ‘serious and imminent threat’. In Hubei 68 million people were made to stay at

The Spectator

Ring out, wild bells: 2021 will be a year of renewal

Save for those old enough to have lived through the second world war and its immediate austere aftermath, it would be hard to remember a Christmas which felt less festive. Or a new year that brings such foreboding. In spite of the severe restraints on our lives, which have been in place for months now, it seems likely that we will see some sort of third coronavirus wave with a third lockdown also on the cards. And at the same time, Britain will be embarking on a Brexit adventure that many people still see as reckless and unwanted. Yet if we look a little beyond the immediate future, things begin

Carl Heneghan and Simon Clarke

Is zero Covid achievable? A scientific debate about the virus

Throughout the year Carl Heneghan, professor of evidence-based medicine at Oxford, and Simon Clarke, associate professor of cellular microbiology at Reading, have written for The Spectator about the virus and the government’s measures to contain it. They have had very different outlooks, but can they agree about what will happen next? They start by looking back at their early predictions. CLARKE: During the first wave I said: don’t lock down too quickly because there will be a cost. People won’t like it. But if we had acted sooner, perhaps we wouldn’t have been locked down for quite so long and the death toll probably wouldn’t have been so high. I

Matt Ridley

Why mRNA vaccines could revolutionise medicine

Almost 60 years ago, in February 1961, two teams of scientists stumbled on a discovery at the same time. Sydney Brenner in Cambridge and Jim Watson at Harvard independently spotted that genes send short-lived RNA copies of themselves to little machines called ribosomes where they are translated into proteins. ‘Sydney got most of the credit, but I don’t mind,’ Watson sighed last week when I asked him about it. They had solved a puzzle that had held up genetics for almost a decade. The short-lived copies came to be called messenger RNAs — mRNAs – and suddenly they now promise a spectacular revolution in medicine. The first Covid-19 vaccine given

Wednesday

Joanna Rossiter

Europe’s slow vaccine approval is testing Germany’s patience

The Bundestag can’t be an easy place to be a politician right now. At the start of the pandemic, Germany seemed to be steering a steadier course than other countries, who looked on in awe at the speed with which it launched its testing regime. But as Britain, Canada and the USA begin vaccinations, Germany has been left tapping its feet. It is still waiting for the European Medicines Agency to approve the Pfizer vaccine, which it is set to do on 21 December – a state of affairs that is rapidly turning into a national and international embarrassment. The German public have grown increasingly irritated at the delays. ‘It’s just beyond belief,’ the Bild

Thursday

The Spectator

Why we can be confident in the safety of Covid vaccines

At the beginning of the Covid crisis, some expressed the hope that a pandemic might at least bring a divided country back together. Instead, public discourse descended to new levels of bitterness as a fresh schism replaced that caused by Brexit. On one side were those who thought tens of thousands would die because government action was too slow and half-hearted, and on the other, those who thought lockdown to be an over-reaction that inflicted grave damage on our economy and society. Both sides ought now to be able to agree that this week marks a significant turning point in the pandemic. The first shot of an approved Covid vaccine