What? No discussion about G7 calls to give vaccinations away

[CuriousaboutSamphire]

I thought I'd come here and find a discussion underway already. Apologies if I have missed it.

G7 - Boris Johnson pledges to give vaccines to poorer countries. We have already paid for far more doses than we need. Australia, Canada, Japan, the UK, and US and the EU have already secured more than 3bn doses, that's 1.2bn doses of covid vaccine paid for by countries who won't need them.

Macron has suggest countries give away 5% of vaccines, Boris has already pledged far higher through covax! There is ongoing discussion about the timing of the vaccine giveaway!

Johnson wants a 100-day target for developing vaccines when new diseases strike. Given how this one was made, from new and old technology alike, that shouldn't be too hard, should it?

Sounds like we are moving on... global vaccination will be the new topic of outraged discussion.

Ooh! Always the hidden catch. Identifying it is why we allow pessimists to exist 😀

I knew I had a purpose 😉

I think we should vaccinate our first 6 groups and then give the rest of those countries who haven’t even managed to vaccinate the over 70s and CEV.

I think we should vaccinate our first 6 groups and then give the rest of those countries who haven’t even managed to vaccinate the over 70s and CEV.

Other countries won't necessarily follow the same order of priorities that we are. Some of them aren't approving the Oxford/AZ vaccine for use in over 65s.

Do you make giving the vaccines conditional on them vaccinating their elderly first, or do they get to decide how they use them?

Are you in the first 6 groups, OverTheRainbow88?

Of course we need to give whatever vaccines we can, but I think it’s accepted that at least the first 9 groups need to be vaccinated for the country to have any hope of returning a more normal life

It may be possible to carry on with the current UK programme AND to send doses out. It depends entirely on how quickly other vaccines get cleared for use.

It doesn't have to be either/or.

No I’m 32 with no health issues so I don’t think I’m due a vaccine any time soon and would happily not have one at all for it to be given to someone higher risk elsewhere.

I guess we would need to allow other countries to make their own decisions, but I would hope it would go to someone vulnerable

As I’m in group 7, I unfortunately cannot agree on a purely selfish level!

However there is also good evidence to back up my selfishness. The vast majority of patients occupying ITU beds and critical care beds are in the 50-65 age groups, we have no hope of returning our hospitals to any form of normal service level until the first 9 groups are vaccinated.

Working towards keeping the levels of community levels of transmission consistently below r1 and much lower ensures we don’t get a 4th wave next Autumn. As well as reducing chances of further dangerous mutations.

I agree that it doesn’t have to be either/or.

I think we should vaccinate all adults in the country and continue to test vaccinating children. Then we should give for free the spare doses away to the poorest nations.

Two reasons:

(1) We are set up and ready to vaccinate, just held up by doses. The quicker we vaccinate here, the quicker we’re all done and can pass them on.

(2)We have been harder hit than practically any country in the world. We need to vaccinate those living here because they are most at risk. For example, more people have died in the UK that in the Whole of Africa.

I also think that we should actually be helping set up vaccination manufacturing and research in poorer countries to enable independence and employment. The more scientists are working throughout the world, the better for the world.

We mustn’t also lose sight of the fact that we are just about one of the worst countries in the world for infection rates, and have seeded the world with the more infectious ‘Kent variant’ and possibly the ‘Bristol variant’.
On a global level we are failing, so we certainly need to get our own house in order. It also means we possibly have a stronger obligation to help elsewhere.
I’m not sure how small-islanders are going to feel about helping other countries though.

I think we can be rightly proud of our contribution to the world re. Vaccines. I believe we are the biggest single donor to covax not to mention all our work in the U.K. on the vaccines themselves, running many of the trials, British volunteers etc.
We are obviously not taking our share of the covax vaccines quite rightly (unlike Canada and New Zealand believe it or not who are on the list of countries to receive covax vaccines) and we certainly should donate extra doses where they are excess. I would like to see all U.K. adults vaccinated though, I think students in particular have massively missed out this year and that can’t be the case for next year.

@OverTheRainbow88

I think we should vaccinate our first 6 groups and then give the rest of those countries who haven’t even managed to vaccinate the over 70s and CEV.

That would be most of Europe then

It was like the shameful panic buying that most of us did at the start of the pandemic last year. My local food bank has done well from my paranoid greed as a result as well it should.

For once I agree with Boris Johnson. I think the way the government is handling the vaccination programme is the only thing they have done in a coherent, strategic and thought out way. Mike Ryan from the WHO had a very powerful talk about this in the week. I agree with him too, how we handle this vaccine inequity across the globe will be written and remembered.

@vera99

It was like the shameful panic buying that most of us did at the start of the pandemic last year. My local food bank has done well from my paranoid greed as a result as well it should.

It really was not!

As far as I can make out, from all the part stories, reports the media don't cover in detail, information from the podiums etc, UK, USA etc gave a lot of companies a lot of money to develop a vaccine. That money did not buy anything. It paid for research. They additionally bought a lot of doses from a number of companies, with no expectations that m/any of them would come up with a viable vaccine. They also agreed to fund Covax, with the sole aim of making vaccines available to coubtries that had not bought/could not afford to buy. Oddly some of the richest countries are signed up to be Covax recipients, but not the UK, who will probably be a net giver! CAnada, New Zealand and Singapore are amongst those signed up for Covax supply

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-55932997

The BBC has finally made a decent description of Covax.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-55795297

The UK Pandemic Plan, as it turns out, was based on throwing a lot of money at a lot of companies in the hopes of getting a vaccine. This was much derided when we first heard of it. Remember all those "OOh! Jobs for friends and family" headlines? Turns out that was, in some part, networking to find all the odd pathways, the small companies, the non vaccine companies that could help. As it turns out it was one of those that partnered with Oxford - AZ was not a vaccine manufacturer, it was formed from the breakdown of ICI, but it agreed with the not for profit ethos and retooled.

So, not panic buying.