WHO urges Britain to pause covid jabs after treating the vulnerable

[Jay2020]

Link

www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/30/who-urges-britain-to-pause-covid-jabs-after-treating-vulnerable

I am beyond broken if this means we can't get to any kind of normality.

Agree with last two posts - re which countries are hardest hit and WHO losing status as it failed on border advice.

I'm a British citizen living in the EU. I have also worked for many years in supply chain management. I think the EU have fucked up big time and are casting around to lay the blame on the UK, which is bad behaviour on their part. Like it or not, if you give a company an order 3 clear months ahead of another (as the UK did), you can expect deliveries three months sooner. That's what lead time is about! If the UK hadn't placed that order then and approved the vaccine so fast, production wouldn't have probably started until round about now. Anything the UK decide to give to the EU will be charity. The Commission need to live by the decisions (or lack of) that they made back in June 2020. They didn't look into European production capacity either, given that two companies are reporting the same problem.... I know that means my vaccination gets pushed back, but if my ruling body fucked up, I don't expect the cavalry to arrive from the UK, any more than I expect it from the US or Russia.

Well, considering the UK has only just restricted entry to 24 countries and the WHO first suggested it 6 months ago (with caveats) i'm not sure criticism of the WHO is fair is it?

Good article about how the EU fell behind.

www.politico.eu/article/europe-coronavirus-vaccine-struggle-pfizer-biontech-astrazeneca/

Quite a few pp have said that it's in our interests to ensure the vaccination is rolled out at the same rate worldwide, in order to stop the virus mutating into new variants.

That argument holds no water. Mutations happen when the virus passes from one person to the other. Whether the patient dies has no bearing on it at all. Vaccinating vulnerable people first doesn't reduce the risk of the virus mutating.

The most effective way to limit new variants is to vaccinate the people most likely to transmit the virus, not those most likely to die from it. The incidence of the virus in that country is the biggest factor. It's no coincidence that the worrying new variants have come out of the UK, South Africa and Brasil - where there is a high incidence of the virus and it's spreading fast.

To limit the risk of virus mutation, a 22 year old shopkeeper in San Paolo, Jo'burg or London should be prioritised over an 82 year old in Ethiopia or Australia.

Of course, there's a separate humanitarian drive to limit deaths - but let's not conflate these goals.

And within a country, there are other factors as well as the risk of new variants: a duty of care to the whole population; the need for perceived fairness, so that people will accept political choices and continue to pay tax; keeping shared resources like the NHS afloat, maintaining the economy. In choosing vaccine priority groups, each government weighs all these up.

I don't feel we're anywhere near the point where it would be responsible for the UK to slow our vaccine roll out and give our vaccine supplies away. Not when the virus incidence is so high here. And that's both on a humanitarian basis (UK deaths per population still one of the highest in the world, and our NHS is barely coping) as well as being the best way we can reduce the risk of virus mutation worldwide (since we are currently one of the highest risk places for that to happen)

@Bluethrough

the WHO first suggested it 6 months ago

They should have suggested it 10 months ago, they are supposed to be the 'experts', remember?

6 months ago wasn’t much use

Sorry, another good article relevant to the conversation.

www.spiegel.de/international/world/a-stalled-global-vaccine-drive-the-west-s-greed-could-come-back-to-haunt-it-a-dc4b8653-d935-4938-928a-746b031bf0c9

@DamnUserName21

The Spiegel bunch are even more biased than the Guardian, disgusting

@MarshaBradyo

6 months ago wasn’t much use

Sorry but in the summer, uk cases were extremely low, we messed up an opportunity to slow the spread of CV into autumn/winter. it would have made a tremendous difference.

We had some quarantining in the spring of Chinese flights, meanwhile the vast majority of cases were coming in from europe.

A month ago, we had no SA variant in the UK, now we have dozens of cases.

There is little travel now, so any argument that Heathrow is a major transport hub is and always was ludicrous, so why wasn't it done?

@trulydelicious,

All news sites are biased, one way or another. It's up to the person to, IMO read as many news sites as possible and figure where the truths lies for themselves.

[quote DamnUserName21]Sorry, another good article relevant to the conversation.

www.spiegel.de/international/world/a-stalled-global-vaccine-drive-the-west-s-greed-could-come-back-to-haunt-it-a-dc4b8653-d935-4938-928a-746b031bf0c9[/quote]
Exactly!

16 percent of the world’s population has secured 60 percent of the available vaccines. Instead of relying solely on Covax, the European Union, Britain and Canada have ordered large quantities directly from manufacturers, thus blocking the market for now

@DamnUserName21

The world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure

Why does this guy think he can lecture now about morals? Who is he, the Pope? He should stick to health/science advice, oh wait....

Blue can you link change of advice 6 months ago?

The first I saw that the WHO had changed its stance was when over 40 countries closed to U.K. due to new variant.

They were very fast then to advise border closure,

A distinct change to advice when China let a new virus loose. Where were the 40 plus countries then taking strong action?

I think the Spiegel article seems to be missing the point that it is the richer countries that are in dire need of the vaccines rather than a lot of the poorer countries.
The highest death rates are not in places like Cambodia but in the UK and America.

@trulydelicious
Haha. I don't know who he is personally but it's his journalistic viewpoint with some (provable???) facts thrown in. It's up to the reader how they perceive it.
I do feel the writer has a point. The rich developed nations are buying up a scarce commodity which will leave the LDCs with much less.

Although they were probably changing advice to reflect global shift. They are no longer ahead of the situation. And lack position from first month. When people did listen to them first.

@Bythemillpond

I think the Spiegel article seems to be missing the point that it is the richer countries that are in dire need of the vaccines rather than a lot of the poorer countries. The highest death rates are not in places like Cambodia but in the UK and America.

There's a counter argument!

16 percent of the world’s population has secured 60 percent of the available vaccines. Instead of relying solely on Covax, the European Union, Britain and Canada have ordered large quantities directly from manufacturers, thus blocking the market for now

That isn't an accurate reflection of what's actually needed globally, which is to create as much vaccine as possible as fast as possible and jab it into arms as fast as possible. The problem is that this implies WAITING and over-organisation at the expense of progress. The world needs to set up vaccine manufacturing facilities to create more vaccine, everywhere, quickly. Lots of the vaccine creation has been newly established by those countries, so it's a net addition to world supply (a good thing!). Any country that is either actively producing vaccines or providing funding for other countries to produce vaccines is helping the global effort. Countries that are not involved in production nor funding, and aren't very poor - those are the countries that should be called out to start contributing.
The UK has high cases and high deaths, we are exactly where there is a risk of new variants arising and should vaccinate our population accordingly.

@Bythemillpond

I think the Spiegel article seems to be missing the point that it is the richer countries that are in dire need of the vaccines rather than a lot of the poorer countries. The highest death rates are not in places like Cambodia but in the UK and America.

Difficult to say, developing countries don't always have the means to count deaths with any accuracy. SE Asia seems to have done well in regard to CV, Africa, S.America far less so.

Vaccinating vulnerable people first doesn't reduce the risk of the virus mutating
It does. For the virus to mutate it has to be in a person for a long time. If someone either dies or recovers quickly, the virus doesn’t have time to mutate. But if someone is ill for a long time, not dying but not getting better either, because their body is strong enough to survive but not strong enough to fight it off - that’s when the virus mutates.

api.nationalgeographic.com/distribution/public/amp/science/2020/12/why-new-coronavirus-variants-suddenly-arose-in-uk-and-south-africa

@MRex

The world needs to set up vaccine manufacturing facilities to create more vaccine, everywhere, quickly

^This

The Spiegel article hints that Russia and China will start supplying inferior vaccines in an attempt to create influence over poorer countries. India is doing well with vaccine production. China is a global powerhouse. If anything China should be helping out in vaccine production! Why the suspicion towards China and Russia in a global health crisis when it could be good to have them involved fully.

@Lostinacloud

The Uk have donated 548 million pounds to Covax as well as helping raise 1 billion dollars towards the fund to provide vaccinations to poorer countries. If you look at the list of countries who have pledged donations, the uk’s contributions dwarfs everybody else’s, including the 500 million euros donated by the EU. At the same time as that, they have been at the forefront of researching and ordering vaccines for our own citizens so that we are now world leading in our vaccination program and production facilities. These are achievements to be celebrated and to act as inspiration to other wealthier nations. We should not be told to pause our own program and made to look like selfish bad guys when this couldn’t be further from the truth. I am sick of the UK being painted as villains and it’s time our government became very “unbritish” and started letting the world know the real situation.

Great post

MRex

Agree, vaccine production is paramount as is vaccinating the worlds most vulnerable whilst we wait.
Given AZ doesn't expect to make money from its drug, couldn't it give the patent rights to any drug suitable company?
don't know the exact term but similar to non generic drugs we also use at a fraction of the cost of the originals.