Merkel is reported as a direct quote to have said;
“I am 66 years old and do not belong to the recommended group for AstraZeneca,”
Note the use of the word “recommended”. Not sure why this word was used, to me it suggests she could have received the vaccine, but was relying on the vaccine not being recommened, as opposed to her not being able to ignore the recommendation.
Is it recommened over 65’s do not receive the AZ vaccine, or is it not permitted to give the vaccine to over 65’s in Germany. Not exactly the same thing.
I fully understand that if “her experts” do not recommend it, she would be in some difficulty not following their recommendations, and from what I see, it is just that, a recommendation.
Danny Altmann who is much respected is on record as follows;
Prof Danny Altmann, an immunologist at Imperial College London, said he was confused by the German stance.
“When I look at the AZ phase 3 data for the over-70 group, I see a good response, similar to the other age-groups,” he said
This does seem rather extreme posturing, and I can only imagine as more data becomes available, their stance will look bizarre.
Graham wrote:
I was simply pointing out that many things could be said – some more pertinent than others.
I still don’t get your point vs AZ in all this. There are two ways Norway could go at this as a small country (5.5 mill people):
The first strategy would work just fine, but at that point in time when the contracts were made, it would be a very bad strategy if the goal is to get vaccines as early as possible, and it leaves you with no options in case the vaccine simply doesn’t work as expected. Israel got lucky, that’s all, or they have made a devilish pact with God, who knows? 
The only thing you do know with this strategy is that when the vaccine is ready for production/distribution, you will get them all in a short amount of time, and hope it does perform well. Israel is only 9 million people also, so production rate isn’t an issue. If they got them in December 2020 or July 2021, a wild bet though, because you simply don’t know when it is ready for production.
Strategy number 2 is better when getting some vaccine as early as possible because you can spread the bet on several vaccines. But, it’s not as good to get them as fast as possible, because more people will cause larger strain on production rate. Also if one vaccine should perform worse than expected, you have options.
Norway had already teamed up with others through COVAX and the Inclusive Vaccine Alliance (IVA), and heavily so, and still is. However, there were no hard contracts implicit in this, and a handful of brands were involved. EU was not part of the IVA, only 4 member countries were. Then what happened was that those EU countries turned to EU, the commission to make contracts. What Norway did at that point, who knows? It would be interesting to know what actually happened, since the people from Norway (as all others in IVA) had no powers to make contracts with the manufacturers. It was mostly R&D, production and distribution AFAIK. The end result was that Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Lichtenstein somehow was included with EU. Which essentially was the strategy Norway already had chosen, simply by entering IVA. The rest is history
If Norway had done as Israel, it would most probably have been with one of those brands: AZ, Moderna, CureVac, Johnson & Johnson or Sanofi. If it was any other than AZ or Moderna, we would have no vaccine by now. Somehow I don’t think that would have happened, rather 2 or 3 of those would be chosen.
All in all, I have a hard time seeing that teaming up with EU is a bad strategy. It takes it’s time, simply because millions and millions of vaccines have to be produced. But, to be together with fellow nations isn’t a bad choice, and if it takes 3 months or 8 months to vaccinate the entire population, so what. The alternative could be that none have been vaccinated by now.
The facts still remains though. AZ performs below expectations and Pfizer, and Moderna above. What actually happened during last summer when contracts were to be made is a mystery. Maybe the whole thing simply got chaotic, people panicked to get vaccines before others, it became a rat race? Don’t know. We don’t know if Israel’s strategy with Pfeizer was a fully planned one for instance. It could be that they had no choice at the time.
For me, my primary concern would be preventing people ending up in hospital. As a matter of public health I am not bothered about 10% more people falling ill with a mild case of the disease. Simply, get the hopsital numbers down, that is the public health crisis.
I bet most people would agree this is the priority and would not be all that concerned if one vaccine was slightly better at stopping any disease than the other, but this isnt what they are being told.
At the moment across the age range the latest data suggests AZ has the edge, not that there is a significant different between them. The AZ data is based on the over 80s, so logically it is difficult to construct an argument why the data wouldnt reflect the position for the over 65s.
The politicans are playing a dangerous game, and quite simply I think some of the posturing is not based on the science. What a mess.
(I appreciate that in public health terms a vaccine which is more effective at preventing infection also has benefits in terms of ulitmately curtailing the virus, but the difference is relatively small, and given we will probably have Mk 2 vaccines in the Autumn of secondary importance at the moment).
LeSving wrote:
I still don’t get your point vs AZ in all this. There are two ways Norway could go at this as a small country (5.5 mill people):Go all in for one particular vaccine, as Israel did.
Team up with others.
Go all-in for one particular vaccine is not what Israel did, and it’s not what the UK did either. Both countries placed firm, early orders with multiple companies – not just the ones they have ended up taking delivery from. Norway could easily have done the same, especially with its wealth.
LeSving wrote:
All in all, I have a hard time seeing that teaming up with EU is a bad strategy. It takes it’s time, simply because millions and millions of vaccines have to be produced. But, to be together with fellow nations isn’t a bad choice, and if it takes 3 months or 8 months to vaccinate the entire population, so what. The alternative could be that none have been vaccinated by now.
Not a bad strategy to end up the furthest behind in the developed world when it comes to vaccination? What’s ‘being together’ got to do with it? If you drown, doing it with your friends doesn’t improve the experience a great deal. 3 months vs 8 months, are you kidding? You know how much semi-closed economies are costing us all? Maybe it doesn’t matter so much to Norway given how rich it is, but for the rest of us I can tell you this IS a race out of lockdown. Not to mention the 50-60-70yr olds who’ll die because they can’t get a vaccination for many months yet.
Let’s roll back to July last year. Some reasonably smart cookies foresaw the EU procurement issues and have turned out to be reasonably accurate what they forecast might happen.
LeSving wrote:
The facts still remains though. AZ performs below expectations and Pfizer, and Moderna above.
For the last time:
(a) that is simply not true, based on all the data available
(b) the media-friendly efficacy figures are not at all comparable across the different products because of fundamentally different trial designs
(c) in the context of a herd immunity goal, exact efficacy doesn’t matter so long as it’s sufficient to keep R well below 1 and ensure that most individual infections become ‘dead ends’ that aren’t passed on to anyone else
If you want to have a serious debate on the matter, you might consider reading fewer opinion pieces in the media and instead engage in a bit more wider reading about pharmaceutical development, clinical trial design, vaccines and epidemiology.
Fuji_Abound wrote:
For me, my primary concern would be preventing people ending up in hospital. As a matter of public health I am not bothered about 10% more people falling ill with a mild case of the disease. Simply, get the hopsital numbers down, that is the public health crisis.
Perfectly put. Many are failing to wrap their heads around the fact that when hospitals aren’t overloaded and annual deaths are similar to flu then from a public health perspective that’ll be the end of the matter. Trying to eliminate it completely is like trying to eliminate deaths of the roads.
LeSving wrote:
Israel got lucky, that’s all, or they have made a devilish pact with God, who knows?
No, they just used their brains. Prob90 bought enough doses of various vaccines (or had some early intel, which wouldn’t surprise me at all) and figured out that any, ANY, amount spent on vaccines is trivial compared to the economic damage Covid does to a country. Alas, the dumb EUrocrats don’t have the brains for that.
172driver wrote:
No, they just used their brains. Prob90 bought enough doses of various vaccines (or had some early intel, which wouldn’t surprise me at all) and figured out that any, ANY, amount spent on vaccines is trivial compared to the economic damage Covid does to a country. Alas, the dumb EUrocrats don’t have the brains for that.
They paid in advance and they traded earlier and sufficient delivery for higher price. No brainer 
Emir wrote:
They paid in advance and they traded earlier and sufficient delivery for higher price. No brainer
Actually, bright brainer. And traded data. Much, much more than what the dumbass EU politicians led by a bunch of morons like Merkel, Van der Leyen and Macron could even dream of.
Graham wrote:
Not a bad strategy to end up the furthest behind in the developed world when it comes to vaccination?
Accurate description and you may well add that if they go on as they are now, they might end up behind some 3rd world countries as well.
Graham wrote:
For the last time:(a) that is simply not true, based on all the data available
(b) the media-friendly efficacy figures are not at all comparable across the different products because of fundamentally different trial designs
Thanks for that and your other explanations. It amazes me how extremely misguided the whole discussion about AZ has become. To paraphrase your analogy with the sinking ship, quite some people refuse the life boat they are offered because someone told them it would not float and choose to drown instead.
It is totally unacceptable to see that most of the EU and Switzerland have totally run out of vaccines at this stage but instead of actively opening the doors for others, they stubbornly insist that people have to die because they won’t have other vaccines.
If nothing else, they should leave the people to decide if they want to be vaccined by the shunned AZ vaccine instead of selling the stuff on to Africa or whereever.
And its not only AZ which is shunned and withheld from the public, the Russian Sputnik is equally being denied market access, despite rather good results….
If this goes on like this, and I have all belief it will, the EU and Switzerland will become the center of the next outbreaks because they blunder along so incompetently that by the time the vaccine may reach the majority of people maybe in 2022 the virus will have modified to an extent that the vaccines won’t work anymore and need to be modified, whence the whole game starts afresh.
Fuji_Abound wrote:
For me, my primary concern would be preventing people ending up in hospital. As a matter of public health I am not bothered about 10% more people falling ill with a mild case of the disease. Simply, get the hopsital numbers down, that is the public health crisis.
Yes, ultimately that is what all the pandemic response is about, or rather, should be about.
If a vaccine only prevents hospitalisation due to Covid but not it’s spread (which, from current data, none do, they all do both) then that’s perfectly sufficient to end the pandemic as a major threat to society.
Because if you just reduce it to a highly infectious cold that lasts for a few days where people have to stay home, well that’s something our society can deal with without lockdowns or other measures…
Admittedly, that ignores the issue of Long Covid.
MedEwok wrote:
Yes, ultimately that is what all the pandemic response is about, or rather, should be about.
Yep.
Unfortunately I am forming the impression some Governments have forgotten this.
