Vaccine

To find out who your true friends and rivals really are, just gauge the reaction to news of your latest success story. It is revealing, for example, that many French officials have taken grave exception to the stunning speed and efficiency of our national vaccination programme. This became clear at the end of January, when President Emmanuel Macron defied medical opinion by unjustly claiming that the AstraZeneca jab was ‘quasi-ineffective’ for elderly people. His cynical tone, remarkable even by the frosty standards of the rest of the EU, was echoed by his Europe Minister, Clément Beaune, who stated that ‘the UK has taken a lot of risks in authorising Astra-Zeneca

Winning the war is one thing, winning the peace is quite another. Time and again through history, national governments have thrown everything into a wartime effort, only to forget that there will be a country – or countries – to rebuild once victory has been secured.  This is why the Prime Minister is so keen to talk about Building Back Better and the Green Skills Revolution that he promises will follow just as soon as the vaccine has worked its magic. We are, we are told, going to create a better Britain once we’ve seen the back of Coronavirus. And of course much of Johnson’s blue sky ambition is admirable,

As an epidemiologist and doctor who volunteered to return to the frontline in both waves, I have seen first hand the death and suffering from Covid. And, also, the knock-on effects on those affected by cancelled services. Deciding when to end lockdown is, of course, a difficult decision, but I now fear the costs of lockdown will soon start beginning to outweigh the benefits. There is no doubt that Covid-19 has the capability to rapidly overwhelm our healthcare system and cause unprecedented casualties. Indeed, what has transpired over the last year suggests that Neil Ferguson’s figure – that the virus was capable of taking 500,000 lives – looks fairly accurate.

With every passing day, more Covid immunity is being gained as hundreds of thousands receive the vaccine. Of course, vaccines take time to mature in the body and offer protection, but with roughly a quarter of the population having now received their first inoculation, our approach to dealing with the virus will inevitably need to shift. The big question is how vaccination has changed the equation for how quickly society can be reopened. Modelling from the PCCF project at Bristol University, on cautious assumptions, suggests that the pace of the vaccine rollout would allow significant reopening with herd immunity achieved in July. First, let’s say how much vaccine immunity has

Is the British approach of prioritising first doses of Covid vaccines and not promising a second dose until 12 weeks later compromising our ability to fight the disease? It is not a moot point, with several EU figures asserting that it is a risky route to take. As I wrote here a couple of weeks ago, as far as the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine is concerned, what evidence we have supports the practice of delaying a second dose until 12 weeks after the first one; the vaccine is more effective that way. However, a question mark has continued to hang over the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. There is limited data on the most effective

Last month, Imperial College’s React study claimed that new cases of Covid were static or even rising slightly. This contradicted the figures for confirmed new cases, obtained through the Test and Trace system, which had shown a sharp fall in new cases from the second week of January onwards. Given that React tests a randomised sample of the population to arrive at an estimate for prevalence of the disease — and is therefore not capable of being skewed by the number of tests being performed — some were more inclined to believe that this, and not the number of confirmed cases, showed the genuine picture. However, February’s React study, published