Ross Clark

We have become used to Mondays bringing good news on the vaccine front. But the publication of interim results from the Astra Zeneca/Oxford University vaccine – AZD1222 – will certainly please the UK government. Not merely because this is the home-grown option and we have already ordered 100m shots, but because, shot for shot, it is considerably cheaper to buy and administer than the other vaccine candidates. The vaccine itself is less than a fifth of the price of the Pfizer vaccine. Moreover, it does not need storing and transporting at minus 70 Celsius – it can be kept at ordinary fridge temperatures (2 to 8 Celsius), greatly facilitating any roll-out.

Now that we seem to have two Covid-19 vaccines that work, do we really need Operation Moonshot, the government’s programme to test 10 million people a day by early next year? It’s a poignant question, not least because of the extraordinary sums which appear to have been committed to it: briefing documents leaked to the BMJ in September suggested that it could cost £100 billion, which is close to the annual NHS budget in England. What would be the point of testing the entire population of Britain once a week if the virus was being controlled by a vaccine? The cost aside, there is growing medical opinion against the idea.

Another week, another set of preliminary results from a Covid-19 vaccine trial. This time it is the Moderna vaccine candidate, mRNA-1273. And, to judge by the figures put out by the company this morning, it has outdone the Pfizer vaccine in its efficacy. Out of the 30,000 people involved in the phase three trial (half of whom were given the vaccine and half of whom were given a placebo), 95 went on to contract Covid-19. Of those who became infected, 90 were in the control group and only five had been given the vaccine. Eleven participants had a severe case of Covid, all of whom were in the control group. The findings have allowed Moderna to claim, provisionally, that the vaccine is 94.5 per cent effective.

So is this the big turning point? Markets certainly seem to think so. No sooner had news broken that the vaccine being developed by Pfizer and German firm BioNTech is 90 per cent effective, the FTSE surged by 5 per cent. Given that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has suggested that any vaccine that proves to be more than 50 per cent effective could be licensed, this suggests the vaccine will go on to be approved around the world. Any vaccine that proves partly effective will be welcomed with open arms by a world which largely remains in lockdown or semi-lockdown. But does the reality live up the surge of relief which has gone around the world this morning?

The weekly ONS infection survey suggests that the rise in prevalence of Covid-19 in England has levelled off. Not only that, it suggests that the rate of new infections has actually fallen. In the week to 31 October, the ONS estimates that 618,700 people had Covid-19 — about 1 in 90 of the population. That was up from 568,100 the week before — a 9 per cent increase. However, it amounts to a stark slowdown on previous weeks. At that rate, it would take eight weeks for the number of people with Covid-19 to double — a long way from the doubling rate of eight to ten days which was observed in September.

If it wasn’t miserable enough being told that I have to spend the next month at home, now I have ‘Pete’ from Octopus Energy emailing me and asking if I would mind terribly turning off a few appliances between 4.30pm and 6.30pm. If fact, he says, if I can halve my energy usage during those hours he’ll give me a half price deal on the rest.  Apparently it’s because the National Grid has issued an ‘electricity margin notice’ for those hours – basically a plea for Britain’s remaining coal and gas power stations to turn up the power and squeeze a little more energy out of their plants.

The government’s £12 billion test and trace system has been described by its scientific advisory committee Sage as making a ‘marginal’ difference to the transmission of Covid-19. This is not least because test results are taking a long time to arrive — of tests conducted at testing centres in the week to 21 October, only 47 per cent of results were returned the next day. For home test kits, just 32 per cent of results came back within 48 hours. In the same week, test and trace only managed to make contact with 60 per cent of contacts reported to it.  But there is another factor that is central to understanding test and trace's effectiveness which remains obscure: just how likely are we to catch Covid-19 from a close contact anyway?

The graph presented by chief scientific officer Sir Patrick Vallance during Saturday’s press briefing suggested that, in the absence of a new lockdown, deaths from Covid-19 could reach 4,000 a day by Christmas. To put this scenario in context, deaths in the first wave back in April peaked at just over 1,000 a day. Back in spring, a pre-publication copy of Neil Ferguson’s paper — the Imperial College modelling of Covid-19 deaths which sent Britain into the first lockdown — was released, so we could all see the assumptions and reasoning behind it. Saturday’s graph did not even reveal the source of the 4,000 deaths a day claim — although it has subsequently been revealed to be a Cambridge/Public Health England (PHE) estimate.

In Britain this week we have had scientists at Imperial College warning that levels of antibodies in the population are dropping away fast, with only 4.4 per cent of the population showing them in September – far short of the 60 to 70 per cent government scientists believe is required for the epidemic to die away thanks to herd immunity. But it is a different story in South Africa, where two of the country’s leading virologists believe that parts of the country have achieved herd immunity. Speaking to Sky news, Marvin Hsiao of the University of Cape Town, said he couldn’t explain why infections in South Africa – which was one of the worst-affected countries in the world in the middle of the year – suddenly plummeted at the end of July.

Imperial College’s latest React study — an attempt to measure the spread of Covid by testing the general population — suggesting that the number of people in Britain carrying antibodies for the SARS-CoV-2 virus has dropped sharply over the past three months. This led a few headline-writers to run somewhat ahead of the facts. 'Covid immunity only lasts a few months,' claimed one. The reality is a lot more complex — indeed, one of the possible interpretations of the Imperial study is that more people have some level of immunity than has previously been believed. The React study tested 365,000 adults between late June and September, using a self-administered finger prick test to detect for the presence of antibodies.