Which has been harmed most?

If it was that easy why couldn’t everyone just “buy the vaccines”?

Amongst other reasons, the success was due to investing/partnering early in AZ, spotting other potential candidates as early as possible and investing in those (for example, we invested in Biontech before the EU / German government), building domestic manufacturing capabilities, sharing the risk of failure with manufacturers, acquiring more than was required and securing solid contractual commitments.

 

Which part of what I have said is incorrect?

Oh, and I’ve never read the Daily Mail, or the Express, Sun, Mirror or any of the other sensationalist tabloids. I consume my news through the BBC.

 

It was shipped out to Jesse Norman’s wife, Kate Bingham (another government minister). Of course there was calls of cronyism at the time, but evidently she was perfectly qualified for the job is set to receive a damehood.

 

You mean hedging bets? Also known as the "throw as much sh it at the wall as possible and see what sticks" method.

Yeah, a lot of thought went into that procurement process.

 

We went early with buying vaccines and paying in excess what other countries/blocs did before they'd been approved for emergency use (yes, the line about being at cost was parroted, but prices released by the EU and US show this to be untrue and we're paying more for our vaccines which bumped us up the queue). The reality is we were hugely lucky. We could just as easily be sat here with x million vials of vaccine that have no purpose because it didn't work or had huge side effects.

I read this morning that Uganda has run out of vaccine and Africa pretty much en bloc won't meet a 10% vaccination target by September.

I don't take much pride that we're sat on huge amounts of surplus (yet not speeding up our own delivery when you look at daily figures) while there are parts of the world unable to meet their needs.

That to me, doesn't feel particularly like an outward looking global Britain.

 

No denying she did a good job, but a single swallow.....

 

If you think that’s the approach that was taken, there’s no point continuing a discussion. Suggest you read up on it from unbiased sources. Largely based on early trial data, vaccine type and potential speed to delivery. We didn’t invest in LSE, for example.

 

This is completely untrue. We’re not sat on huge amounts of surplus. Look at the quantities of vaccines delivered but not yet administered yet (Scotland and Wales publish there’s any it can also be extrapolated to England). It’s very small and enough only to ensure second doses can be delivered within 8/12 weeks if there is a future problem with supply.

We have large orders still outstanding, which will be donated to other countries when they arrive. However, there’s little we can do to speed those up.

Crazy how much vaccine misinformation there is in just one thread.

 

I was only teasing

 

Of course we have large orders still outstanding, a huge surplus to our actual needs for 50-60 odd million people (depending on if they vaccinate younger children), because we ordered such obscene amounts of every vaccine we could before it was approved for use.

Surely you see the speculative nature in that and the essence of "we're alright jack".

I wouldn't buy that we'll be donating vaccine until it happens either. The commitment was an extremely vague one.

 

Partly. NHS didn't agree the contracts nor set the parameters which has been the underlying success. From the NHS side, not sure who is looking after their data but I get at least one text message inviting me for another jab down at priory campus every week even though I have had 2 at my local doctors.

 

It’s worth remembering that when we were ordering all these vaccines we didn’t know which, if any of them would be any good. It was case of covering as many bases as possible

 

Precisely my point. We threw money at it, over the odds, to hope we had a silver bullet in at least one of the vaccines.

We were lucky it panned out the way it has, or we could be sat on millions, maybe even billions of vaccines we couldn't use, something else the public taxpayer would have to foot the bill for.

 

I would also suggest that the government procured the number of vaccines they did because they'd fcked everything else up and this was their last chance at 'saving us all'.

If they'd have done what was necessary earlier on in this pandemic, then the need for the vaccine numbers wouldn't have been as desperate.

But it is a fact that the vaccine programme has been successful.

 

Children initially were not the focus. It is sensible to gather data especially now this indian variant is becoming widespread. What if it has mutated and younger people now do end up being hospitalised? We haven't had the data because of low numbers to understand that, now things are ramping up however, the scientific community should be able to understand this better.

Better safe than sorry.

 

The comparator is going to be with other countries, but given we secured vaccines in excess of other countries, and approved them earlier, you look at the level of 2nd vaccines administered in London and it's very low. I mentioned it yesterday that 2nd doses in my borough are just 29%. That's pretty poor.

 

Fish doesn't any more - he left in the late 80s...

 

The UK’s investment in potential vaccine candidates was largely for building manufacturing capabilities rather than vaccine research and development. Without that investment, manufacturing would have been slower and fewer vaccines in total would have been delivered globally. We’ve not jumped the queue - our investment has helped increase the number of vaccines these companies are capable of delivering. As part of that we secured priority access and the investment meant we paid more when calculated on a per dose basis as we didn’t just buy them “off the shelf”. I don’t see how that’s a “we’re alright Jack” attitude when other countries will benefit from the surplus vaccines, increased manufacturing capabilities, and many could have invested a bit more on a per dose basis too to help build more manufacturing capability early on.

Sadly more rich countries didn’t take the risk early on, pay a little bit more and help build that manufacturing capability. It’s one of the reasons global supply is currently very limited. It needed national governments to share in that risk, rather than leave it all to the pharmaceutical companies with their limited resources. You might say we got lucky that so many paid off, but the cost of the vaccines (ie the risk that was taken) was always dwarfed by the potential benefit. A point that was made by Vallance very early on.

Regrading acquiring vaccines before they were approved. Is that a criticism, as it would seem very odd to do anything but?

 

And you don’t say you have informed them of the text. I’d hope you have otherwise you become part of the problem.
It’s a huge task they have and those problems are bound to arise through someone’s failure at admin level.

 

I don't concur with that at all. Costs of vaccines that were coming from the continent were far more expensive than the price EU countries and America were paying. I think even Israel in isolation were paying less on the figures that I saw months back. That doesn't stack up against the argument of including cost of bulking up development.

I'm pretty sure everyone would be criticising, and rightly so, should the vaccines been a catastrophic failure. We're in an ok position with vaccines now, though it could still be better for us, and moreso for others, but large aspects of that are luck.

The vaccines isn't the worst handled thing by this government, but then it would be unbelievably difficult to do that given how disastrous everything else has been.