Vaccines

When Donald Trump returned to the White House after a brief spell in hospital with Covid-19 last October he made a video attributing his rapid recovery to a drug he called ‘Regeneron’. ‘They call it a therapeutic drug, but to me it wasn’t therapeutic – it made me better,’ he said. ‘I call that a cure.’ Naturally, given that Trump had on a previous occasion appeared to advocate injecting humans with disinfectant, there was an element of scepticism on the part of many viewers. However, the drug he was talking about went on the receive emergency use authorisation in November from the US Food and Drug Administration. We now have

Over the last two months our fight against Covid-19 appears to have changed dramatically. The emergence of novel variants in the UK, South Africa and Brazil has generated plenty of headlines and concern. We shouldn’t panic. But one thing is clear: if we don’t act now, we could come to regret it. In the UK, for obvious reason we have been most focused on the B.1.1.7 variant. The evidence seems pretty clear that it is more transmissible and potentially more severe. Part of the reason we have such extensive data on virus mutations in the UK is the quite astonishing efforts that have gone into sequencing the viral genomes. With

The government has failed to meet so many Covid-related targets so far that many will be extremely sceptical of the Prime Minister’s pledge on Monday evening to get the over-70s, front-line care workers and vulnerable people of all ages vaccinated by the middle of February. That is around 13 million first doses which will have to be delivered over the next six weeks – compared with just over a million which have been administered since the Pfizer vaccination programme began four weeks ago. We now have the AstraZeneca vaccine as well as the Pfizer one, but can the NHS really increase the rate of vaccination tenfold, as would be necessary to