If I offer you a bullet-proof vest that stops 50% of all bullets, are you better off not wearing it?
The key thing right now is whether it prevents hospitalisations. Most of the vaccines prevent between 99 and 100% of hospital admissions and that’s the main thing.
Whether people still get ill and lie in bed for a week, on average, is a different thing. Some lie in bed, quite sick, for a month, staying at home, but that’s not so common, because they would probably benefit from oxygen.
The new strains is why the UK has blocked most inbound airline travel. They need time for vaccines to catch up with these new strains.
The entire reason for the lockdowns etc is to flatten the hospitalisations curve, so the hospitals can continue to function. It’s come at a huge economic cost, because the facilities are sized for the normal level of demand. The “flu” kills ~50k/year just in the UK and the reason it doesn’t make the news is (a) the curve is much flatter and (b) it would be old news.
every vaccine producer was essentially a monopolist. Germany would have been much faster would they have negotiated it nationally, like Israel, the US or the UK
The problem is that nobody, not even Brussels, has its own in-house State owned vaccine research and production facility. Well, maybe Russia?
So they are all relying on the pharma business to do this. And no pharma company would have signed a contract for delivering a nonexistent vaccine, to a deadline, and with penalty clauses 
It could only ever be on a “you can have it, €x, if we manage to develop it, and orders will be fulfilled on a first come first served basis”. Nothing else makes sense – unless you want your company to commit suicide.
The mistake Brussels made was to waste ~ 3 months haggling internally (the alleged reasons have already been well aired). By the time it made a move to throw some money / committment at the pharma business, others got in before them.
Virus which infected 1.2% of the population and killed 0.03% of the people
Astonishing this stuff is still getting published, but yeah it is all over fb and tw. I occassionally come across cv19 threads on fb and they are 99%+ anti-vaxx and fully along the above line, so lots of people do really believe it, and they dominate these areas of social media.
Like I said before, they really ought to camp out outside a big hospital and count the ambulances going in and count the bodies coming out. The numbers are in the public domain.
But we don’t know yet what the raid on their Belgian premises turned up.
Indeed, but I would be amazed if AZ breached their contract, because (a) these companies are pretty good at contractual stuff and (b) the breach alleged by Brussels would be pretty obvious and I don’t think they would have risked it. Like faking the moon landings, too many would have known about it. The pharma business doesn’t have a super clean image anyway, so it would have been leaked fast – especially by workers from the very country which is not getting the vaccine!
Graham wrote:
If you refuse brand X, you won’t get offered brand Y.
Sais who? This is the normal way of getting vaccines, you go to whatever facility will offer the vaccine you want. Not that anyone actually bother about which brand they get, I have never given it a single thought. But in this case people actually might do that, and it may be very important also. Say you want to go to South Africa where this mutation has taken over, you may not even be allowed to enter with Novavax. This mutation is like the British mutation, it spreads faster than the original, but it’s also more different DNA vise. It’s all around Europe mainland already.
Cobalt wrote:
It’s not intended to mislead, bit it is flawed. 1/3rd of the score are effectively directly corelated with the countries size (absolute number of infected and deaths), and 1/3rd is highly unreliable because it depends on who you test (ill, symptomatic, or everyone). While I generally like looking at numbers, playing with them and seeing what they tell us, this is Kindergarten level of statistical analysis not worth the paper it is not written on.
How do you know? you are simply guessing wildly, making accusations because you don’t like the “score”. You don’t know how they have calculated things. Absolute country population is used as a correlation parameter from what I can see. It’s about the only correlation they get with deaths per capita, positive tests per capita etc.
It wouldn’t surprise me if that is what the AstraZenaca debacle is all about either. British government putting pressure on AZ so that the UK won’t fall down on the “score card” of vaccinations.
Off_Field wrote:
the EU claims look silly.
I am not a lawyer, and I am sure there will be cogent legal arguments on both sides.
There is, however, a dangerous difference between the EU as a client who thinks there is breach of contract, and what they do.
If I think that a supplier did not deliver the bread I ordered under the terms of a contract, I would have to use whatever conflict resolution mechanism I agreed and perhaps take them to court to get them either to perform or to received damages (and getting specific performance on such a contract is rare, you tend to get damages).
I certainly cannot blockade their bread factory and take the bread they are delivering to other customers for myself, or raid their offices to establish how much bread they are baking and who they are delivering it to. Well, I could, but I would end up in jail. Forget the rhetoric – it is the actions that worry me.
41 pages – wow!
Forget the rhetoric – it is the actions that worry me.
Indeed. But the actions would need to be implemented by the country where the factory is located.
Fuji_Abound wrote:
In fact what message do you think it is attempting to convey?
This what they say themselves on the front page:
What impact have geography, political systems, population size, and economic development had on COVID-19 outcomes around the world?
That’s what they obviously tried to find out. The only correlation that can be seen countries with smaller population size tends to cope better than countries with larger population size. But only marginally so.
That’s basically it. But, you and Cobalt etc know so much better. How? What data have you been analyzing that has made you to come to your more correct conclusion? You are simply talking nonsense, wild guesses with no substance. It’s pure Antivaxer logic to use a term you understand (but not me)
The new Johnston & Johnson vaccine is showing up as 85% effective against severe symptoms. Single shot, but 85% is much worse than the others which all approach 100%.
This shows one has to buy up everything in the pipeline and hope some come out good.
They have tested much more than that. What they say is 66% effective against moderately to severe illness and 85% effective against most common symptoms. Tests in the US shows 72% and in South Africa only 57 %
LeSving wrote:
What’s misleading about it?
What is misleading is the title “Covid performance index” – it indicates that the numbers assigned to each country are a reflection of the performance of this country in its Covid response.
For the many reasons already discussed here it is not! So it’s just a number which indeed is clearly defined but has nothing to do with the title.
How would you feel if we had a “Pilot performance index” here, where I outscore you by a large amount because body weight is used as one of the key criteria?
LeSving wrote:
The only correlation that can be seen countries with smaller population size tends to cope better than countries with larger population size
Great example! They absolutely don’t cope better with anything than anything! That get a better score in a scoring system where 1/3 of the score is calculated from size of the country (smaller gives higher score)!
It’s exactly that what is misleading: You by yourself are mislead by the idea that the number assigned to each country have anything to do with how they cope with Covid. They do not! It is just a number assigned to country names – not more!
I think it’s safe to say by now that the vaccines, at least the ones currently available, are for sure no wonder cure against this pandemic. And really, why should they be when influenza vaccines are only 40-50% effective after years of development. IMO a number of 40-50% effectiveness will be the ballpark of corona vaccines in general also.
