Vaccine

Thursday

Ross Clark

Is India to blame for the UK’s vaccine delay?

The UK vaccination programme has been such a success to date that until yesterday evening it seemed a formality that the government would achieve its target of offering all adults at least a first dose of a Covid vaccine by July. Indeed, on Monday it looked as if this date might be brought forwards when it was announced that there would be a huge uplift in vaccine shots available, thanks to the arrival of a large consignment of AstraZeneca vaccine from India. Instead of 2 million doses a week, the vaccination programme would be able to deliver 4 million doses. On Wednesday evening, however, that hope was shattered. Firstly, Ursula

Wolfgang Münchau Wolfgang Münchau

Europe’s reckless caution over AstraZeneca

The first smear campaign against AstraZeneca, when Emmanuel Macron falsely claimed at the start of the year that the jab was ‘quasi–ineffective’ in over-65s, did serious damage to public confidence in the Oxford vaccine across Europe. The latest concerted action by the leaders of Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands may have destroyed it altogether. The decision temporarily to ban Astra-Zeneca originated in the German health ministry, which was spooked by reports of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, and was blindly followed by other European leaders. This is a scandal whose roots are political, not medical, and it will have terrible consequences. This was never really about blood clots, which

Wednesday

Constantin Eckner

Germany’s vaccine debacle goes from bad to worse

Germany’s decision to stop using the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine has been condemned internationally. It has also gone down badly with Germans. Once again, the country’s health minister Jens Spahn is under fire.  A year into the pandemic, Germans are fed up with what they see as a government which is too cautious to use its only weapon out of this crisis. Even before the suspension of the vaccine this week, the rollout was painfully slow. While Britain has issued 22million doses, Germany is lagging way behind: only 9.3million of its people have received their vaccinations. This latest hold-up will only further slow down the vaccine programme. And Germans fear that this

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Don’t blame the EU for the latest Covid vaccine clash

Far from subsiding, as it seemed to be doing last week, the European war over the AstraZeneca vaccine has intensified. Over the past few weeks, EU leaders have swung from accusing the company – and Britain – of hoarding the vaccine and failing to supply it to EU countries, to claiming that it is ineffective, back to accusing us of hoarding it again. But the decision by several European countries to suspend rollout of the vaccine over fears of blood clots is the most serious challenge yet. This time, however, the blame cannot be laid at the door of the EU – the European Medicines Agency continues to declare the

Monday

Dr Mark Toshner

Europe’s vaccine suspensions could come back to bite Britain

Germany is the latest country to suspend the Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine over concerns about possible side effects. The Netherlands and Ireland have taken similar steps. So too has Denmark, Norway, Bulgaria and Iceland, while Italy and Austria have halted the use of certain batches of the drug as a precautionary measure.  Britain has done many things wrong in its handling of the pandemic, but it has done one thing well: the rollout of the jab. It’s the one place where we have useful lessons to teach the world in Covid-19. Europe, in particular, does not appear to be listening. Vaccine programmes as ambitious as the one needed now require joined-up international co-ordination and action. These latest delays

Saturday

James Kirkup

My Covid-19 vaccine jab means I love NHS managers

I am 45. That means I’m old enough to have been writing about politics at a time when political attacks on ‘NHS managers’ were a routine part of political debate and media coverage, standing alongside ‘yobs’ and ‘asylum-seekers’ as the nation’s villains. It’s also old enough to get me a Covid-19 vaccine, injected into my arm on Saturday morning at a GP surgery in south London by a student doctor from a nearby teaching hospital. Watching the performance of the vaccine centre, doling out hundreds of vaccines each hour, I was reminded of all those promises from all those politicians about getting rid of fat cat NHS managers. The current

Thursday

Olenka Hamilton

Poles apart: why the Polish community doesn’t want the vaccine

There is a joke going around Poland at the moment which encapsulates the national character perfectly. A German is told he has to have the Covid vaccine. He is uncertain. ‘It’s an order,’ the doctor says, and so he agrees. A British man is told the same. He wavers. ‘Do it for Queen and country,’ the doctor says. He agrees. A French man is told ‘It’s the fashionable thing to do’, and he agrees, too. Finally, a Pole has his turn. The doctor says: ‘You’re Polish, you definitely won’t take the vaccine.’ The Pole replies: ‘Don’t tell me what I think. Give me that vaccine!’ Anyone who knows Poles (I’m

The Spectator

Which TV interviews have attracted bigger audiences than Harry and Meghan’s?

Good for the goose The government indicated that it will ban foie gras, out of animal welfare concerns. While it is often thought of as a French product, its origins have been traced back to Egypt in 2500 bc — thanks to a bas-relief at the Necropolis of Saqqara outside the ancient city of Memphis. The painting depicts workers holding geese around the necks and feeding them — although there is no great sign of force being used. Viewer discretion ITV reported an audience of 11 million for Harry and Meghan’s interview with Oprah Winfrey. In the US 17 million were said to have watched. What are the previously most-viewed

Seth J. Frantzman

Israel’s changing global fortunes

Israel has been working closely with other countries and international companies, developing and producing vaccines against Covid-19. At the same time, the Middle Eastern country is rapidly improving relations with its Gulf neighbours, the latest evidence being the appointment of a new UAE ambassador to Israel. A major shift has taken place in Israel — 20 years ago the country was under siege from terrorists, with bus bombings rocking Jerusalem and terror attacks in the heart of Tel Aviv. Just a few years ago Israel was fighting a major war in Gaza against Hamas, a war that is the subject of an inquiry by the International Criminal Court. For many years Israel

Wednesday

William Nattrass

Vaccines are testing Central Europe’s loyalties to the EU

In a fresh embarrassment for the EU in its vaccine rollout, breakaway member Hungary is now at the top of the bloc’s vaccine league table. The Czech Republic, Hungary’s Visegrád Four ally, languishes near the bottom of the list, having so far stuck with the EU’s centralised procurement programme. Meanwhile neighbouring Slovakia has now opted for the Hungarian approach, having taken delivery of its first shipment of Sputnik V vaccines last week. Problems are certainly piling up for Brussels – and in Central and Eastern Europe, a region with a long history of EU rebellion, the idea of ‘going it alone’ is heightening tensions between pro- and anti-EU factions. The

Tuesday

Jake Wallis Simons

Corruption affects everything in Palestine – even vaccines

Visit certain parts of the West Bank and you’ll encounter mansions owned by senior officials in the Palestinian Authority (PA). By any standards – let alone those to which ordinary citizens are accustomed – they are impressive, with arches, colonnades and tall windows. If you’d been watching them in recent weeks, you might have seen vaccines being quietly delivered to these residences in unmarked cars, having been skimmed off the supply intended for medical workers. Those, at least, were the allegations made by a number of Palestinian human rights and civil society groups. Last week, the Palestinian health ministry was forced to come clean. In a statement, the ministry admitted

Thursday

Matthew Lynn

The EU’s ugly vaccine nationalism

We have to rid the world of vaccine nationalism. No one is protected until we are all protected. And we need, above all, solidarity to fight a virus which by its nature does not respect borders or boundaries. Over much of the last year, European Union officials, led by the President of the Commission Ursula von der Leyen, have led the world in grandiose rhetoric about how we have to lead a global effort to fight Covid-19, contrasting its own noble internationalism with the grubby self-interest of the likes of Donald Trump or indeed Boris Johnson. But hold on. After much speculation, the EU has itself started firing the first

Dot Wordsworth

The word ‘like’ is in crisis

‘Blame Kingsley Amis,’ said my husband, with the carelessness of one defying a man out of earshot. The blame, such as it was, lay in the title of the novel Take a Girl Like You (1960). The ambiguity in the title, he maintained, was between like meaning ‘such as’ and like meaning ‘resembling’. There is something in what he says. Like has been in crisis for a generation on several fronts. The most hated is probably like as an oral filler, along with you know or sort of. A second annoying usage is stranger: like introducing a made-up quotation serving as an adjective. An example would be to replace ‘He

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The moral debate over Covid jabs for children

Israel has the world’s attention, becoming the first country to achieve mass vaccination. What it does now may be followed worldwide. The first big development has been the use of immunity ID cards which give vaccinated Israelis access to gyms, indoor restaurants and — soon — holidays in Greece. Britain is preparing to follow suit, with Michael Gove considering UK vaccine certificates ahead of the great unlocking on 21 June. He’s widely expected to come out in favour of IDs in some form. But the other idea attracting interest in Whitehall is Israel’s plan to vaccinate children. Israel’s deputy health minister Yoav Kisch has said those aged 12 to 16

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: A Covid Budget, a Cotswold meteor and Angelina Jolie sells Churchill’s painting

Home First-dose coronavirus vaccinations totalled more than 20 million. A study suggested that in the over-eighties, a single dose of either the Pfizer or Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was more than 80 per cent effective at preventing hospitalisation. Hospital admissions of 8,452 in the week ending 27 February were 22 per cent down on the week before that. At dawn on 28 February, total UK deaths (within 28 days of testing positive for coronavirus) had stood at 122,705, including 2,340 in the past week, down by 32.3 per cent on the week before that. Six people with the Brazilian variant of coronavirus were detected in Britain, but one could not be traced.

Tuesday

Steerpike

The New York Times’ orgy of British despair

The New York Times seems to have developed a strange view of Britain in recent years – or at least since the Brexit vote in 2016. In the NYT’s world, the UK is a desolate place, where locals huddle round bin fires on the streets of London, gnawing on legs of mutton and cavorting in swamps during the summer, ever fearful of the despot Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. So Mr S was not exactly surprised to see that the paper’s latest missive from the Covid frontline in Britain, published today, veered on the negative side, detailing the ‘crushing onslaught of a pandemic’ in hospitals, in what can only be described

Monday

James Forsyth

Oxford’s remarkable vaccine success

It is worth taking a moment to stand back and applaud Sarah Gilbert and the Oxford vaccine team’s achievement. The data released this evening by Public Health England shows that a single dose of both the Oxford /AstraZeneca vaccine and the Pfizer vaccine cuts the risk of hospitalisation by 80 per cent in the over-80s, the most vulnerable group. It also suggests that the Oxford one, despite its messy trial data, is slightly more effective than the Pfizer vaccine in preventing symptomatic infection among the over-70s. The efficacy of the Oxford vaccine has completely changed the outlook for the UK. This country has enough doses of it ordered to cover

Steerpike Steerpike

EU leaders’ vaccine sniping backfires

The eyes of the world have been on Britain’s vaccination programme in recent months, as the UK government embarked on a dramatic push to get our population inoculated by prioritising first doses. During this time, the naysayers have been plentiful – with some UK commentators and plenty of politicians abroad keen to cast doubt over the strategy. What everyone agreed was that time would tell. But now it appears we have promising results, with a new pre-print of a study published by Public Health England today. The study shows that just one dose of both the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines has significantly reduced Covid-19 infections among those aged 70 and

Friday

Joanna Rossiter

What Angela Merkel can learn from the Queen about vaccine scepticism

You have to feel for Germany. After a fraught vaccine procurement process, not only is the government struggling to persuade its citizens to take the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, but Angela Merkel has now stated that she will not be given the jab on account of her age.  ‘I do not belong to the recommended age group for AstraZeneca,’ the German chancellor told Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. It could well be the final nail in the coffin for an EMA-approved, safe vaccine that has cost her country millions. Merkel’s view may be aligned with government policy – she is 66 and therefore, under the German rules which state that over 65s

Thursday

Ross Clark

Why do old people have fewer antibodies after the vaccine?

The UK policy of delaying second doses of the Pfizer vaccine has been criticised by some as risky, with Pfizer warning that there is no data on the effectiveness of its vaccine other than for the dosing regime used in phase 3 trials: two doses, 21 days apart. But evidence is steadily trickling through. Earlier in the week I wrote here about the Scottish population-wide study which found that a single dose of the Pfizer vaccine reduced hospital admissions by 85 per cent between 28 and 34 days after the jab. This morning comes Imperial College’s React-2 study, which paints a picture that is, on the face of it, rather less