Covid 19 CRISIS

Dr_Grip said:
Point taken, a 12-week wait between doses is some time. I might get my first dose before leaving for Finland and the second when I return for Ringmeet...
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:nod: as two data points, my parents have their first AZ dose scheduled for early April, and their second doses would juuuust barely scrape in to the "end of June" window. Anyone getting their first AZ dose later than them (group 2, registered on day 1 of statewide group 2 availability) will drop out of that window.

12 weeks because of maximum efficacy with increased delay, for those who wonder why.
 
AstraZeneca seem to be really screwing the EU around. Only one of four AZ plants that was to supply EU is doing so. Probably the Belgium plant.

The Dutch AZ/Halix sub contract factory hasn’t been approved because AZ hasn’t submitted all the necessary data to the European Medicines Agency regulator.

Dutch media say Halix is supplying UK!

Some reports that site has a large stock of vaccine!








AstraZeneca Plc is preparing to file for U.S. emergency use authorization (EUA) for its COVID-19 vaccine later this month or early April
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www.reuters.com

Exclusive: AstraZeneca to seek U.S. authorization for COVID-19 vaccine this month or early next - sources

AstraZeneca Plc is preparing to file for U.S. emergency use authorization (EUA) for its COVID-19 vaccine later this month or early April after accumulating enough data to judge the inoculation's efficacy, sources with knowledge of the ongoing clinical trial told Reuters...
www.reuters.com www.reuters.com


NI to keep using AstraZeneca jab after Irish suspension​

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www.bbc.com

Covid-19: NI to keep using AstraZeneca jab after Irish suspension

The Republic of Ireland stops using the vaccine after reports of blood clotting in adults in Norway.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com
 
It is becoming clear by now that AZ, probably knowingly, took orders (and advance payments) for doses they knew they would not be able to deliver as promised.
Vaccine hoarding by the US, and the special UK contracts due to the Oxford development angle, means the EU is the party mostly getting shafted by this decision (if AZ would have been able to fulfill all commitments made, even with a huge US order, there would be no need to shaft the EU).

The good news is that even a full washout of AZ will only set the EU vaccination effort back a month or so, with the delay getting smaller as AZ delivers at least parts. Germany, for example, will have enough doses for 41.75 million people available until the end of Q2 from suppliers that are not AstraZeneca. Add 1.5 million AZ doses already delivered, and we end at a tad below 44 mio.
That's 64% of over-18s in Germany - and leaves us about 10 Mio vaccinated people/12% of over-18s short of full deliveries by AZ.

I sincerely hope the EU (and hopefully also third parties like Australia who do not get the shots they ordered), once they have enough vaccine from their four reliable suppliers (BioNTech, Moderna, J&J and hopefully also CureVac soon), will sue the shit out of AZ for breach of contract.
 
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Dr_Grip said:
I sincerely hope the EU (and hopefully also third parties like Australia who do not get the shots they ordered), once they have enough vaccine from their four reliable suppliers (BioNTech, Moderna, J&J and hopefully also CureVac soon), will sue the shit out of AZ for breach of contract.
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Also I think the EU helped fund early production....
 
jack_christie said:
Also I think the EU helped fund early production....
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Be that as it may, it doesn’t help us if the Commission is incapable of negotiating an airtight contract with AZ.

Let’s not forget who its president is: a former German minister of various departments who ran all of them poorly, got a head start into politics because her father was a prominent figure in Germany’s most powerful party and only got her current job because Merkel wanted her to be someone else’s problem.

She’s as competent as Boris Johnson, but lacks his shrewdness and sense of opportunity.
 
DanRoM said:
"Best effort"...
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Not sure that, or the willingness of @calvinhobbes and others to blame politicians for the blatant disregard of AZ for their contractual obligations will help them.

At this point, a best effort is not being made.

EDIT: Don't get me wrong, von der Leyen is not the most competent politician out there, but this one is not, or at least not primarily, on her.
 
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Dr_Grip said:
At this point, a best effort is not being made.
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My point is that it’s unforgivable to use a term as vague as that when you’re buying life-saving vaccines that are in extremely high demand and made by a (largely) British company.

We knew what their promises are worth, we knew that the British government is keen to embarrass the EU, we knew that BoJo & company were desperate for a “win” after all their dismal failures. And yet, our representatives (headed by the aforementioned CDU reject) chose to settle for the “best efforts” clause.

Add that to the apparent failure to implement, test and optimise the German distribution system during the summer (Did they ever bother with test runs?), the drawn-out decision processes, the absence of proper coordination at the national level and the litany of bone-headed decisions and there’s every reason for people to be furious.

I’ve been keeping quiet about this because I don’t want my negativity to cause more anxiety, but I’m angry. My dad (84 years old, so he’s highest priority) keeps getting e-mails telling him that he’s waitlisted for a vaccination, but the state he lives in is opening registrations for group two. I am worried for his life and he and so many others are being exposed to unnecessary risks.

And to top it all off, we have people wearing completely inadequate, yet approved, surgical masks in public because some CDU/CSU :censored:s couldn’t resist a kickback from the vendors. Tell me again that I shouldn’t be blaming them?
 
So, first things first:
  • The german government's failure to mount any kind of covid response/second wave preparation since May 2020 is a catastrophy. It will lead to us spending the first half of 2021 in lockdown instead of having the relatively relaxed summer of 2020.
  • Our government literally has blood on it's hands - tens of thousands of people died needlessly in the name of the christmas shopping season
  • The current approach flies in the face of everything we have learned worldwide during the first wave (closing offices and schools is key do drive down figures, the lower you get covid numbers, the longer they stay down, there's a strong correlation between low covid deaths and low impact on the economy - as well as the most impotant one: If you open up too early, you'll have to close down again in no time).
    The fact that we are already on an exponential growth path again is not powered by the British mutation - it is powered first and foremost by the fact that we re-opened at a higher covid rate than we had at any point during the first wave.
  • Most press conferences by the German government since last May are textbook cases of horribly bad political communication.
All of this makes me incredibly angry as well, as does the armada of talking heads in newspapers and TV who still demand more re-openings.

That being said:
  • Unlike what the German press (in what looks like their effort to get the AfD into power) is trying to suggest, the vaccination campaign mostly works. We are at half the pace of the US' campaign by now, and the bottleneck is not distribution, but supply. This answers most of your points above.
  • As @narf and me pointed out based on data above, even without AZ supplies, we are on good track to be done with first shots by July. Which is about the same timeframe as the US and UK.
  • You are angry because instead of looking at the acutal progress of vaccination plans, you are listening to Sascha Lobo trying to become relevant for the first time in years by shouting IMPFDEBAKEL.

  • Regarding your dad - support him by annoying people. No system is perfect, and as long as demand outlasts supply people will be forgotten on waiting lists. In fact, the public outcry to make the system less perfect, but to optimize for speed instead, will make cases like your dad more likely. So call the relevant authorities in his Landkreis and make sure he gets an appointment. My dad (82, in Lower Saxony) was waitlisted until he started annoying the local Gesundheitsamt. Now he already received his second shot last week.
About the AZ contract - the "best effort" clause was clearly linked to the EMA approval of the vaccine, and is part of the British and US contracts as well. Again, not defending Ursula von der Leyen, just saying that the blame lies firmly with AstraZeneca in this case. We should not allow them to get away with super shady business practices just because we think our politicians are incompetent (which many of them are, van der Leyen first and foremost).
 
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calvinhobbes said:
Add that to the apparent failure to implement, test and optimise the German distribution system during the summer (Did they ever bother with test runs?), the drawn-out decision processes, the absence of proper coordination at the national level and the litany of bone-headed decisions and there’s every reason for people to be furious.
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Distribution is keeping up with supply, so far. When new batches of doses come in, our supply tends to be down to about 1.5 weeks of buffer at the then-current pace, give or take. A bit of buffer is necessary, so depending on how big that "bit of buffer" ist, we could at best be one week faster - or none at all if our current buffer happens to be ideal.

Supply is an issue.
 
Dr_Grip said:
  • The current approach flies in the face of everything we have learned worldwide during the first wave (closing offices and schools is key do drive down figures, the lower you get covid numbers, the longer they stay down, there's a strong correlation between low covid deaths and low impact on the economy - as well as the most impotant one: If you open up too early, you'll have to close down again in no time).
    The fact that we are already on an exponential growth path again is not powered by the British mutation - it is powered first and foremost by the fact that we re-opened at a higher covid rate than we had at any point during the first wave.
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The B117 exponential growth is ongoing since mid-January or so, way before we started opening. It's probably not yet visible in the numbers how much the current wave of openings contributes to the current build-up of wave three.
1615816812567.png

(RKI)
 
narf said:
The B117 exponential growth is ongoing since mid-January or so, way before we started opening. It's probably not yet visible in the numbers how much the current wave of openings contributes to the current build-up of wave three.
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We see in Ireland, in the UK, in Israel that a real lockdown works against B117 as well. Our problem is not B117, our problem is people going to the office.
Also, if you can see an uptick in cases even before re-opening, then re-opening is... wait... yeah. Totally stupid and will lead to more death and back into lockdown, which was what I was getting at.

eizbaer said:
www.tagesschau.de

Corona-Impfstoff

Corona-Impfstoff
www.tagesschau.de www.tagesschau.de
damn it, people... come on :|
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Yeah, even if every single of these thrombose cases would be linked to AZ it'd be 1/10th of the thrombosis rate of the current generation of female oral contraceptives. This will be found negigible, but lead to absolutely no one wanting AZ any more. Way to self-destruct a vaccination campaign, dear EU governments.

EDIT: Speculation: This is political! If the EU withdraws authorization, the contract with AZ is void. So this pressures AZ into upping their delivery commitments.

EDIT2: See here for what losing ALL AZ supply from now on would mean for vaccination in Germany and most EU countries (apart from those six cheapskates who opted out of the collective EU deal and only ordered AZ). Luckily Moderna, J&J and BioNTech are the pillars of the vaccination effort, with CureVac hopefully coming in for extra supplies.
 
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Dr_Grip said:
EDIT: Speculation: This is political! If the EU withdraws authorization, the contract with AZ is void. So this pressures AZ into upping their delivery commitments.
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I think this might well be the case. The AZ vaccine possibly has some problems, but now they are being blown up for political reasons and to renegotiate the deal.
 
And since there is no good one-stop shop for Germany's overall vaccination plan, take this one from Finland:
b7a26e6b-4a2c-0877-0587-5460eacaed48

Looks good for Ringmeet.
 
STAT said:
Side effect scares are common with vaccines, but they also very often do not pan out. The reason is that so many people receive vaccines that some will experience what seems like a side effect by chance when, really, it is not related to the vaccine at all.

“Vaccines protect against one thing: the infection or the infection plus disease,” said Susan Ellenberg, a biostatistician at the University of Pennsylvania who once tracked vaccine side effects at the FDA. “They don’t protect you against everything else that might possibly happen to you.”


That means that right after the vaccine is given to people, some will come down with cancer, or have heart attacks, or suffer falls. “There’s no reason to think that somehow there’s a magical period of time like, you know, four days or a week or two weeks after you get vaccinated, when none of those other horrible things are going to happen to you,” Ellenberg said.[/STAT]
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And in "how to score a PR win", BioNTech pledges 10 million extra Q2 doses to the EU. That's about 5% of their total delivery and a tad over 10% of what AstraZeneca should deliver, but it gives a warm fuzzy feeling of "Pfizer/BioNTech, a name you can trust."
 
I've been away for a while, but heard about this thread on the grapevice. It's been a pleasure reading the past dozen or so pages.

After spending too much time listening to the fear mongering populist crap on public news, and having too many of my daily contacts turn to paranoid conspiracy theorists, it's been a damn pleasure seeing some quality discourse on the topic.
 
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