www.medpagetoday.com
www.telegraph.co.uk
@voce I think you asked a question about this. HTH.
Here's Why Viral Vector Vaccines Don't Alter DNA
It's pretty simple -- they can't
www.reuters.com
www.forbes.com
www.reuters.com
It is the latest sign of the power of the Covid-19 vaccines: The number of new cases is declining, often sharply, in countries that have vaccinated a large share of residents. |
That’s the situation in Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Britain. Cases are also declining in the U.S., which is not as far along as those three countries but is well ahead of most. |
And on the other end of the spectrum is the European continent. |
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Across most of the European Union, vaccine rollout has been slow, and new cases are surging. Europe — the first place where the coronavirus caused widespread death — is facing the prospect of being one of the last places to emerge from its grip. My colleague Jason Horowitz writes from Rome: “Governments are putting exhausted populations under lockdown. Street protests are turning violent. A year after the virus began spreading in Europe, things feel unnervingly the same.” |
As Eyck Freymann and Elettra Ardissino write in Foreign Policy: “Spring in the European Union is going to be dismal.” Bild, a German newspaper, recently ran the headline “Liebe Briten, We Beneiden You!” — a mixture of German and English that means “Dear Brits, We Envy You!” Wolfgang Münchau of Eurointelligence has said that Europe’s vaccination program rivals the continent’s budget austerity of recent years as “the E.U.’s worst policy error during my lifetime.” |
Why has Europe done so poorly? There are three main reasons. |
While the U.S. and other countries rushed to sign agreements with vaccine makers, the E.U. first tried to make sure all 27 of its member countries agreed on how to approach the negotiations. Europe chose “to prioritize process over speed and to put solidarity between E.U. countries ahead of giving individual governments more room to maneuver,” Jillian Deutsch and Sarah Wheatonwrite for Politico Europe. |
The result was slower regulatory approval of the vaccines and delayed agreements to buy doses, forcing Europe to wait in line behind countries that moved faster. |
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Europe put a big emphasis on negotiating a low price for vaccine doses. Israeli officials, by contrast, were willing to pay a premium to receive doses quickly. Israel has paid around $25 per Pfizer dose, and the U.S. pays about $20 per dose. The E.U. pays from $15 to $19. |
The discounted price became another reason that Europe had to wait in line behind other countries. Even in purely economic terms, the trade-off will probably be a bad one: Each $1 saved per vaccine dose might ultimately add up to $1 billion — a rounding error in a trading bloc with a nearly $20 trillion annual economic output. A single additional lockdown, like the one Italy announced this week, could wipe out any savings. |
“The price difference is macroeconomically irrelevant,” Münchau writes. The E.U. “tried to lock in a perceived short-term price advantage at the expense of everything else.” |
“Europe is the world’s epicenter of vaccine skepticism,” Deutsch and Wheaton of Politico Europe write. That skepticism predated Covid, and now its consequences are becoming clear. |
In a survey published in the journal Nature Medicine, residents of 19 countries were asked if they would take a Covid vaccine that had been “proven safe and effective.” In China, 89 percent of people said yes. In the U.S., 75 percent did. The shares were lower across most of Europe: 68 percent in Germany, 65 percent in Sweden, 59 percent in France and 56 percent in Poland. |
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The skepticism helps explain Europe’s latest vaccination problem. About a dozen countries, including France and Germany, have suspended the use of one of the continent’s primary vaccines, from AstraZeneca, citing concerns about blood clots. |
But the evidence that the vaccine causes clots is thin. Europe’s main drug regulator still says the benefits outweigh the risks. And Ann Taylor, AstraZeneca’s chief medical officer, has pointed out that the rate of clotting among vaccinated Europeans is lower than “would be expected among the general population.” |
Dr. Muge Cevik, a virus expert at the University of St. Andrews, told me yesterday that it was always important to scrutinize vaccines. But, she added, “I would say the benefits of the A.Z. vaccine in preventing Covid, hospitalization and death outweigh the risks of side effects, especially in the middle of the pandemic.” |
The bottom line: Over the summer, the U.S. was struggling more than any other country to contain Covid. Today, Europe appears to be in much worse shape. |
| Colombia has already paid a steep price in the pandemic with more than 61,000 deaths from Covid-19. Now the South American nation faces another cost: about $850 million to immunize its population. With an annual health budget of just $10 billion for about 50 million residents, Colombia is one of many countries struggling to afford immunizations. Health-care advocates have said that drugmakers hold the upper hand in negotiations with governments that have limited cash and aren’t eligible for free doses. Colombia has reported 2.3 million Covid cases, or about two out of every 100 worldwide. Tougher restrictions in major cities, fueled by rising infections at the start of the year, hampered recovery from its deepest economic contraction in history, and the government is planning tax increases and spending cuts. Countries like Colombia “are against the wall,” said Carolina Gomez, co-founder of an advocacy group at Universidad Nacional de Colombia that works to ensure access to medicines and health technology. “They have no choice but to submit to what the drugmakers say.” Covax, a program backed by the World Health Organization and other groups that aims to deploy shots equitably to every corner of the globe, is helping many poor countries access immunizations by providing doses funded by donors. But it can’t cover the costs for countries like Colombia or supply enough to protect most of a country’s population. 
A health worker carries a container of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines at a clinic in Bogota, Colombia. Photographer: Nathalia Angarita/Bloomberg So Colombia has done direct deals for doses needed to supplement its purchases via Covax. The country agreed to buy 10 million doses from partners Pfizer and BioNTech at $12 each, regulatory filings show. It’s paying about $295 million for 10 million Moderna doses, according to Finance Ministry documents pointed out by researchers from Universidad Javeriana in Bogota. That’s equivalent to almost $30 a dose, although it may include logistics expenses. The cost of 20 million doses through Covax comes to roughly $225 million. The figures take into account some transport costs. Officials declined to provide more details. High- and middle-income countries will pay more than low-income nations for Pfizer’s shot, but at a significant discount from “normal benchmarks” during the pandemic, the company said. Pfizer said it won’t profit off supplies to poorer countries. Moderna didn’t respond to requests for comment. South Africa, which budgeted as much as 19.3 billion rand ($1.3 billion) to vaccinate two-thirds of its population, confronted a similar dilemma. After a small study indicated AstraZeneca’s shot offered minimal protection against mild to moderate illness caused by a new variant, it had to change course. The government agreed to buy doses of both Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot vaccine as well as the Pfizer-BioNTech product at $10 each, according to its health department. It committed $5.25 a dose for AstraZeneca’s vaccine made by the Serum Institute of India. Moderna offered vaccines at between $30 and $42 per dose, but South Africa hasn’t announced any orders. Such payments are spread out across the globe. In another example, Malaysia has estimated its vaccine costs at about 3 billion ringgit ($730 million). The healthy ministry’s 2021 budget is less than $8 billion for its population of about 33 million. The expenses for these countries may not seem like a huge price to pay compared with the size of their economies and the overall cost of the pandemic, but they’re adding to the pain for those governments. “Up until now the landscape has been defined by availability,” said Safura Abdool Karim, a public health lawyer and researcher at the Wits School of Public Health in Johannesburg. “It will increasingly be defined by affordability.”—James Paton and Andrea Jaramillo |
www.medpagetoday.com
In IL it is being ran at the county level and their is no one to call in my county.
@Karl_K I agree with you. The experts say to take whatever vaccine is offered to you...My son and daughter-in-law agree with them and will take any vaccine that they are offered. I would have waited for Moderna or Pfizer...because I’m older. I just completed my shots last week. I received the Moderna vaccine. One week to go and I’m fully vaccinated. I read that the vaccines may only protect for three to four months. They don’t have the data yet. That would be so disappointing..
I knew this was gonna happen. It ain't gonna end with just two shots.
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