27M is excellent. Very good news. Hopefully other countries are doing similarly well.
Hopefully UVDL will finally see sense and kick the totally misguided legal action against AZ into the long grass, as they say…
With most of the stuff coming presumably from Pfizer, and royalties to Biontech, it’s come at a substantial cost
This BMJ article is from January but has interesting snippets on cost. Pfizer definitely is more expensive than AZ.
This surprised me though:
Quote
The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is much cheaper, although neither the UK nor the US can match the EU’s $2.15 deal: they are expecting to pay about $3 and $4, respectively, per dose.
This more recent summary from The Week has the UK paying £15 for Pfizer vs the EU’s $14.70 (NB different currencies :-), which is what you would expect as they backed its development.
But as somebody posted earlier in the thread, for rich countries it’s all peanuts. How hard you negotiate on price depends on how easily your hospitals are overwhelmed.
The EU backed Pfizer’s development? I don’t believe so. Pfizer have taken no public money on either side of the pond, as far as I’m aware.
The EU may have given money to BioNTech at some stage, but that is the R, not the D, and is relatively insignificant in terms of overall cost of getting to market.
The EU’s lower prices across the board are illustrative of the EC’s ‘customer’ mentality in all of this. They pushed every company very hard on price, perhaps not appreciating that in the context of the cost of this pandemic it hardly mattered.
The prices are really interesting
That’s a really interesting article e.g.
Israel, which is on course to vaccinate all its citizens before any other country—having denied responsibility for vaccinating the Palestinians of the Occupied Territories—this month acknowledged paying $23.50 per dose on average to Pfizer and Moderna to obtain early shipments. Even at this high price, vaccinating the entire population of Israel costs the economy only as much as two days of lockdown. Uniquely, Israel agreed to give Pfizer anonymised health data from all of its citizens as part of the deal.
Graham wrote:
The EU backed Pfizer’s development? I don’t believe so. Pfizer have taken no public money on either side of the pond, as far as I’m aware.
I just quoted the BMJ article.
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The EU financially supported the development of the BioNTech and Pfizer vaccine
I have no idea if that’s correct.
Here is AZ’s public riposte to its EU critics (whose motivation in seeking to deprive a neighbouring country of a vaccine which European leaders say is unsafe and quasi-ineffective remains a matter for quiet reflection). 
@Jacko that’s old news most of Europe are now getting on with their own vaccination programmes whether or not they have supplies from AZ. The feeling here is that we get what we get and that is mostly Pfizer but there has been a growing anti AZ feeling, which started mostly because people had booked into Pharmacies for the AZ turned up only to find that the vaccines hadn’t arrived. Some people had this happen on more than one occasion. The mistrust that followed, led to rumours that people really felt unwell for a few days after the AZ whereas Pfizer vaccinees did not and then there was the blood clotting saga. So many French people have turned against AZ despite French politicians taking the AZ vaccine and ensuring everyone that it was no less safe than any of the other vaccines.
In our local area (Mid Sussex) the number of infected people is now estimated at around 50ppm (0.005%). Obviously everybody reading EuroGA knows what this is but for the illiterate this is somewhere south of negligible
It’s somewhat amusing that the UK has practically conquered the issue internally (achieved roughly 50/50 with AZ and PF) while still being extremely tight on foreign travel by its own inhabitants (still have the threat of the £5000 fine, unless you travel to see an estate agent 
) while we have 5k-10k people coming in from India (with UK passports) every day, supposedly going into supervised hotel quarantine, but that system is poorly run and the stuff escapes from it, not least because unless you impose absolute solitary confinement (which would need 24/7 security on every corridor) there will be some mixing of new and old residents. This was found in AU and NZ, sometimes comically, with security guards getting “friendly” with female residents. This says you can come out of the hotel in some circumstances, but mixing inside is sure to happen much more. There is very little in the press about this but the numbers in the hotels must be huge (50k-100k, obviously) so I guess hotel owners must be rubbing their hands, getting ~£1500 for 10 days, in a hotel which was not generating any money otherwise.
The track and trace system must be working like crazy…
For some reason the UK has always badly mismanaged the airport arrival angle.
On the plus side, it seems both vaccines do work against this new variant, to some extent. There is not yet a substantially vaccine resistant strain.
… unless it is to be used only for travel and only to places where a passport is required.
If you travel abroad than you have to have either ID card with photo or passport.
More terrified people clamoring for others to produce vaccine passports before they will leave the house… photo taken today. The gleeful willingness of government weasels to find another entree into (some of) our lives is none the less predictable.
It’s complete nonsense. The solution was to successfully provide vaccines to those who want them and let people live their lives. No fear, no power grab, no 80 year geriatric national health officers and presidents preaching nonsense to conquer the masses. End of story, nothing else required, full stop.
