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Europe's Vaccine Disaster

spiegel.de

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Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#181

Post by foepys »

outside1234 wrote: post #109
maxerickson wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU pre-ordered more Pfizer than the US. Enough for 150 million people in EU, vs enough for 50 million in the US. The US has ordered more after it was approved.

The EU did not pay as much as the US — and signed the contracts much later. Pfizer is doing the rational actor thing and, given a shortage, prioritizing their highest paying clients. There might also be verbiage in the US contract to this effect. Also, Pfizer is an American company.

The US does currently not allow COVID-19 vaccine exports. Pfizer's plants are only manufacturing for the US while the EU plants are producing for the EU, Isreal, Canada, UK, etc.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#182

Post by vixen99 »

MrRiddle wrote: post #12
jacquesm wrote: post #5

It's not just a vaccine disaster, it is a COVID disaster. The response to COVID in most of the developed world was a completely fuck up. We are still learning lessons that should have been learned a year ago, and there are still people everywhere - here too - that believe the best way to tackle a crisis of this magnitude is to stick your head in the sand and to pretend it isn't happening. I've definitely lost the ill…

Meh, I’m not convinced it’s such a disaster it’s being portayed. Serbia is/was heavily hit by Covid, yet only 12% more people died in 2020 than 5 year average before that. Again, meh.

Romanian death rate per 1000 (8th highest in the world) has increased monotonically from 12.7 in 2015 by 0.1/1000 each year to 13.2 in 2020. In other words Covid has had zero effect (to one significant place) on the increase in rate of death per 1000. However to claim Covid has not been a disaster is disingenuous. On many fronts it's been a calamity though much of this has been self-inflicted.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#183

Post by foepys »

jostmey wrote: post #161
illuminati1911 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is at least partly developed (or funded) publicly. Lots of comments are complaining about how EU "paid less" for the vaccine than country XYZ, but actually EU funded AstraZeneca with hundreds of millions of euros to develop the vaccine in the first place. In any case unless AZ, EU etc. are able to come to reasonable agreement I think this might eventually lead to EU simply breaking the patent and then anyone can m…

Hundreds of millions of dollars? Not even a billion dollars was set aside for vaccines as trillions of dollars are being lost?

That's what many people are getting mad about.

Germany wanted to order from Biontech in July 2020 but the EU convinced them to let the EU order for a better "collective bargaining position". But this isn't the time to bargain. Just pay them a few billion Euros. Germany alone is estimated to be currently subsidizing its shut-down economy with around 4 billion Euros a week. Each week is more expensive than what the EU was willing to pay for advanced orders: 2.7 billion.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#184

Post by tzs »

Gravityloss wrote: post #80

There's lots of medical companies in most countries of EU. Why didn't they just license some working vaccine and start cranking it out? Why does the company X developed medicine only have to be made by company X? That's against the whole idea of patents, which is making information available and usable via licensing. Money shouldn't be the issue, the cost of the shots is negligible so there is not much profit to be m…

> Why didn't they just license some working vaccine and start cranking it out?

In the case of the mRNA vaccines, according to comments I saw on some prior COVID vaccine discussion, they depend on specialized precursors that not many companies can make.

mRNA vaccines are still quite new. Some human mRNA vaccines were developed before COVID, but they didn't do well in testing and none were approved. With no one needing to make mRNA vaccines in more than research and trial quantities, not many companies developed the capacity to make the prerequisites.

The issue then is not getting Pfizer to license their vaccine to some other company to make too. It's that Pfizer is already making as much of it as can be made right now due to precursor availability limits.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#185

Post by triceratops »

esja wrote: post #77
trianglem wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Trump administration spewed misinformation from day one that caused massive dissonance in dealing with the problem. Saying they did better when they had literally no plan and let 400,000 people die is incredible dissembling and most likely a political statement than a logical one. They literally dissuaded people from using masks.

“Literally no plan”? How did you arrive at that conclusion? Even the most cursory effort would tell you it’s not true.

What was the plan? Other than "let the states handle it". Which is the same as "no plan".

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#186

Post by qwantim1 »

jackTheMan wrote: post #84
mrtksn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese and the Russian vaccines were not even considered. Now those are used in mass vaccinations, soon EU would be behind all countries but those who barely have any government at all. People don't even want to talk about that, as if those alternatives don't exists. Non-EU countries in Europe are getting them. Serbia(6.1) and Turkey(2.3) are already close to EU average(2.6) or better on the vaccination process.

I wonder if the Chinese vaccine with 50% efficiency could be used for herd immunity at all. Im not a virologyst, but the false safety of most people vaccinated with it in a country might could trigger even more death? The Chinese vaccine is not even tested above 59 years old. If the young is vaccinated and start to party etc the new more infectious variants could still spread and can reach even more elderly.

> virologyst

Is this an actual spelling in some dialect of English?

It looks interesting. In medicine, when I see “gy” I’m thinking gynolocologist.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#187

Post by flembat »

robotmay wrote: post #10

From what I've gathered (unfortunately mostly on Reddit, before this article), Ursula von der Leyen wasn't exactly fondly thought of in Germany before this and somehow keeps managing to fail upwards. Is that accurate? The utterly bonkers u-turn today was a bit of a shocker. For those that haven't seen the news, the European Commission managed to say they were effectively going to establish border controls between the…

I am in the UK and while in the EU I thought we were part of the world's reasonable ethical block, but now from outside it is apparent how badly the EU bullies and intimidates other countries.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#188

Post by TheMechanist »

mrec wrote: post #177
Throwawayaerlei wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Russian Gam-COVID-Vac/Sputnik V vaccine looks very good, but for the US or to much of the West, there's a price to be paid for being in an effective state of war with another country. Although Gamaleya is now working with AZ/Oxford to see if substituting one of their doses for one of Oxford's will produce much better results, which I never would have expected. This is based on the theory that the immune system re…

> the theory that the immune system response to Oxford's virus vector is mostly negating the benefit of the second dose taken 21 days after the first Do you know if there are more trials underway to verify this? I'm guessing it ties in to AZ's encouragement for delaying the second dose i.e. wait until the immune response has died down. I think UK medical consensus is currently recommending 12 weeks rather than the or…

Non-sequitur, but true: this is a political hatchet job from delivered by a center-left newspaper to a center-right politician. The key to this crisis and article can be found in the middle of the article: "...von der Leyen's press department has been energetic in its defense of the Commissions actions. After all, the EU has secured rights to 2.3 billion doses of vaccine, they have pointed out, with 760 million of them from BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna.

But what use is that when the availability of the vaccine will remain so limited for the foreseeable future? When the producers are unable to deliver what they have agreed to – or can only deliver much later?"

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#189

Post by nradov »

macintux wrote: post #160
katbyte wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope this is something that changes post pandemic.

I just hope there is a post-pandemic era. Too many unknowns still about the mutations and whether they’ll out-maneuver the vaccines.

We are in the post-pandemic era of HCoV-OC43 despite not having a vaccine. It is very similar to SARS-CoV-2 and there is circumstantial evidence that it caused the pandemic of 1889. The only reason it kills few people today is that most of us are infected as youths and build up immunity.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#190

Post by ahartmetz »

TheMechanist wrote: post #188
mrec wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the theory that the immune system response to Oxford's virus vector is mostly negating the benefit of the second dose taken 21 days after the first Do you know if there are more trials underway to verify this? I'm guessing it ties in to AZ's encouragement for delaying the second dose i.e. wait until the immune response has died down. I think UK medical consensus is currently recommending 12 weeks rather than the or…

Non-sequitur, but true: this is a political hatchet job from delivered by a center-left newspaper to a center-right politician. The key to this crisis and article can be found in the middle of the article: "...von der Leyen's press department has been energetic in its defense of the Commissions actions. After all, the EU has secured rights to 2.3 billion doses of vaccine, they have pointed out, with 760 million of th…

Von der Leyen deserves all the hatchet jobs she can get... She is the child of a political dynasty and hasn't done anything well for citizens in her life.
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