@LeSving asked “Is everything in the UK purely political?Where do English speaking (only) people get information about non-English speaking countries?”
Headlines in the Daily Telegraph “Angela Merkel’s Government at War over AstraZeneca ‘disaster’ as EU Vaccine chaos deepens.”The Daily Telegraph was once a respected newspaper but the days of Phileas Fogg are long gone and today many of its contributors are conservative politicians including Boris Johnson.
Need I say more?
LeSving wrote:
Pretending this is a political issue is more of a conspiracy theory IMO. Besides, AZ is a Swedish company, not UK, so what exactly would the political issue be?
The political issue is that certain countries pussyfooted around instead of getting early speculative orders in, combined with production issues. The politicians who pussyfooted around now need someone to blame, and blaming a pharma company like AZ is easy.
If it’s not political, why are they ignoring the 10+ million results of actual hard real world data from the UK’s vaccination efforts showing that (a) the vaccine is safe and effective and (b) there has been a higher rate of blood clots (although, as I understand it, not really statistically significantly so) after the Pfizer vaccine, as if the laws of nature were somehow different in the UK? Why are they ignoring the advice of the EMA to continue using the vaccine? And the WHO who also advises continuing the rollout?
By the way I don’t think these political moves are “against the UK”, they are to discredit a company and its product (AZ) in order to deflect blame. There’s no longer a reasonable explanation for these continued efforts to spread FUD over the AZ vaccine in light of millions of points of actual real world data showing it is effective and safe.
It’s either politically motivated, or it’s just incompetence. At this point it can’t really be anything else.
If there were any doubt as to the effect of these decisions, just look at what’s happening to the shape of this curve…. the last three dots are 13, 14 and 15 March.
Thanks @Cobalt for an interesting analysis!
I did have one thought though.
This SVT phenomenon has been observed in vaccinated people, and is reported as rare, so we may call it a ‘plausible rare side-effect’ of vaccination.
But how many ‘plausible rare side-effects’ are there in addition to SVT? For example, if there are 30, we would expect one of the thirty to show this odd result by chance, even if the probability of any one doing so is only 3%.
I have no medical training and I have no idea how many ‘plausible rare side-effects’ there are, but surely there must be more than one?
The suggestion that these moves are to retain public confidence is unconvincing – do they really think their people are less sceptical than they were at the end of last year?!
Yes. And we can say that with a high degree of confidence as we track that weekly with public polling.
At some level, everything a govt does is governed by political considerations. It has to be.
These can be unexpected, too. For example something completely unrelated to the background job may be in the news at the time and will swing how the govt acts. Juxtaposition of “hot potatoes” and longer term factors is the most unexpected thing, and happens quite often. One example is the BLM stuff, which was triggered by an event in the US, and which made control of crowding (for virus spread reduction) impossible for a time. Now we have another red hot potato in the news which also makes any control of crowds impossible, for some time, because anything which looks like a suppression of public protest looks terrible (in the UK, with its uninterrupted and centuries’ old tradition of civil liberties, for sure).
Norway may be free of a subset of political considerations as a result of a lack of colonial past, but most of “old Europe” doesn’t have that luxury. However Norway may also have the luxury of a high level of social cohesion, facilitated by an exceptionally wealthy population. In most of Europe, there is much less cohesion which makes it easy for local politicians to exploit local issues for their own platform-building.
The Telegraph is a Conservative Govt supporting paper. If you want less of that position, the Times is better. Online, both are behind paywalls; the only papers which aren’t are the “left-wing” Guardian (which consequently is read by all civil libertarians on the mainland 
) and the “right wing” and dumbed-down Daily Mail. It has to be said though that if you want to find out the latest stuff regardless of whether it is PC or not, the DM gets the dirt before anybody else, and about 1000 years before the BBC would even think of carrying some topic…
It’s been noted that few if any “readable” papers in Germany, for example, are accessible online for free.
The entire load of “vaccine experts” here is totally baffled by what is going on in mainland Europe. The only disagreement between them is along the lines that some of them will not criticise their mainland colleagues openly, presumably because they don’t want to lose access to data, joint projects, etc. One “professor” made this clear in a very uncomfortable TV interview yesterday. But objectively they cannot support the action on the basis of any known data, and the UK should have much more data than anybody else.
Interesting data. The big lift in ‘definitely’ seems to correlate with vaccines actually becoming available just before the turn of the year. Probably too early to say whether the downturn beginning in the second week of March will continue, but I would be keen to see where that line goes over the next fortnight.
At least those who have removed themselves from the ‘definitely’ group in the last week seem to have joined ‘probably’ or ’don’t know’ rather than the other two groups!
Similar data for France would be incredibly interesting.
But we can agree to disagree, I think. I would tend towards a view that these moves are calculated not have an effect on the public perception of vaccination in general, but to have a negative effect on the public perception of the AZ vaccine in particular. The reason why the EU might want to do this, I will not re-iterate.
Public perception aside, the practical outcome is clear. The third wave is kicking off across Europe and this will make it worse…
Graham wrote:
But we can agree to disagree, I think. I would tend towards a view that these moves are calculated not have an effect on the public perception of vaccination in general, but to have a negative effect on the public perception of the AZ vaccine in particular. The reason why the EU might want to do this, I will not re-iterate.
Yes, but I am less certain why some countries would wish to discredit AZ (other than of course hurt feelings, oh dear, so sorry). I am not sure AZ is all that bothered as there are more than enough customers to take their alledgedly not for profit vaccine. Also, as i said earlier, the huge risk is that you end up eating humble pie (as appears to have happened), having burnt a lot of political capital in the process. Unfortunately it seems to me an approach that was unlikely to have paid out, whichever way it had gone, and, as it happens, it seems to have gone the less favourably way.
On lots of counts it does seem to me Europe is less stable than it has been in a long time. There seems to me political unrest in many of the countries and a feeling that a number of positions have been badly played. It is damaging to EU unity, which has become such a bastion of the organisation, and somewhat strange at a time Europe was so worried about the UK leaving and the need to present a united front, that they have managed the complete opposite. Maybe this is the problem.
Goal, own and home all come to mind.
gallois wrote:
The Daily Telegraph was once a respected newspaper but the days of Phileas Fogg are long gone and today many of its contributors are conservative politicians including Boris Johnson.
Need I say more?
It is nicknamed the ‘Torygraph’ for a reason…
DavidS wrote:
But how many ‘plausible rare side-effects’ are there in addition to SVT? For example, if there are 30, we would expect one of the thirty to show this odd result by chance, even if the probability of any one doing so is only 3%.I have no medical training and I have no idea how many ‘plausible rare side-effects’ there are, but surely there must be more than one?
There’s two challenges with SVT as a side effect:
1. It did obviously not show up in the clinical trials. So it is something new that has not been investigated. Therefore as of today we can’t really say how rare it is and even worse, we can not say if there is a pattern in the affected patients (e.g. some pre existing conditions or interactions with other medications) that would increase the risk for the affected group significantly beyond the “average risk”. What is quite interesting in the data is the fact the affected patients are exclusively younger ones so far – and far more female than male. Therefore it might actually be an undiscovered interaction with certain contraceptives…
2. the real formal reason for the suspension is, however, that this side effect is not mentioned in the patient information so far …
