Slightly disingenuous of The Times to suggest Merkel refused AZ. She is 66, and hence not eligible for it.
It would depend on what she actually said.
Anything negative about a vaccine spoken by the country’s leader is going to be a death sentence for that vaccine.
And for many thousands of people who could have benefitted from it, but somebody else will get the “political guillotine” for that, since Mrs Merkel is departing soon.
Peter wrote:
This is probably driven by tourism
Of course it is. It has nothing to do with medical stuff whatsoever, like the normal vaccine card actually is all about.
As a data point on how fast COVID spreads, an update on our Steam Packet worker.
The IOMSPC worker tested positive 12 days ago. In those 12 days, we now have 38 cases directly linked to this index case. (All were already self-isolating having been identified as contacts of this index case, and so far, there have been no new cases “in the wild” here.) A couple of the spreading events were cafes in which the index case had been a customer.
20,000 people here have now had at least their first vaccine dose. We’re vaccinating a little bit more slowly than the UK, the whole 18+ population is expected to be done by September.
The government expects to have a plan soon on relaxing border controls, I have to imagine border controls to the UK will be relaxed the first given the progress of vaccination there.
Graham wrote:
One thing you could definitely say is that if Norway hadn’t sat on its hands and waited to tag along with the EU’s disastrous procurement programme, it could easily have vaccinated it’s entire population twice over by now
I don’t see what that has to do with the current situation of AZ. What is done is done (or what is not done). There are lots of things that could have been done.
While looking up up the official French position on travel, the govt website says:
2.7million vaccinated.
6.9% of the population have so far been tested positive = 4.7million.
So almost twice as many have caught it as been vaccinated here. Just thought that was interesting…
Regards, SD..
LeSving wrote:
I don’t see what that has to do with the current situation of AZ. What is done is done (or what is not done). There are lots of things that could have been done.
You said ‘one could say it was a distraction’. I was simply pointing out that many things could be said – some more pertinent than others.
Graham wrote:
The business strategy of getting EMA approval first has almost vanished because they are so slow and difficult.
I don’t think this is the root cause. The trend towards “FDA first” approval is also strongly driven by German reimbursement scheme. You simply want/need to make sure that when the clock in Germany starts ticking you are lined up with the RWE for the additional value dossier. For many drugs an early market entry in Europe is actually value destruction…
When I started in clinical research (~2003) the US was the cheap place to fill a trial with patients, at least compared to Europe – we charged equivalent staff out in the US at perhaps 60% of European rates. Now the situation is completely reversed and US staff cost 50% more – all because of a shift in demand.
At least according to FDA, the “demand” for trial participants in the US has not increased in the last 5 years: page8
Malibuflyer wrote:
I don’t think this is the root cause. The trend towards “FDA first” approval is also strongly driven by German reimbursement scheme. You simply want/need to make sure that when the clock in Germany starts ticking you are lined up with the RWE for the additional value dossier. For many drugs an early market entry in Europe is actually value destruction…
I’m sure it’s multi-faceted. All I’m reporting is the outcome – that clients come to us saying “we want to do this in the US, Europe is too difficult and slow these days”.
Malibuflyer wrote:
At least according to FDA, the “demand” for trial participants in the US has not increased in the last 5 years: page8
I don’t know what that’s measuring and I’m not going to read the whole thing, but it fails a sniff test. The idea that only ~20k people in the US (and ~25k in RoW) are participating in a clinical trial at any one time is a ludicrous underestimate. An order of magnitude out.
What you mean, rather than “it doesn’t look good for the AZ vaccine”, is “it doesn’t look good for Germans”.
Insert for the acceptance of
The latter is the consequence. But it will give younger (than 65) people the chance to get vaccinated earlier.
