Coronavirus Thread: Worldwide Pandemic

BK The Great

BK The Great

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jj23 said:
Is that the truth though? Or perception?

One could argue we were fukked once governments decided that intellectual property was more important that people's lives.

Everything else is just a by product.
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I really don't know. Seems like they are pushing this narrative a lot in the media. Sometimes you can't trust the news either cause that can be controlled, which is what we are seeing now.
 
thatrapsfan

thatrapsfan

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Do we have proof that there is a single variant that evades vaccine protection at a significant level?

This is the current trajectory in the UK, which probably had the earliest Delta case spike in the West, and lifted all restrictions in mid-July:

COVID cases fall in the Netherlands and UK while Romania pushes jabs


Same thing is happening in the Netherlands as well. To me, this is very encouraging and also reiterates that mass vaccination changes the relationship between case trajectory and overall deaths. The unvaccinated are at acute risk, because of the increased transmissibility of the variant, but the major question for public policy is whether this changes anything for vaccinated. So far it doesnt seem like it does.
 
nyknick

nyknick

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thatrapsfan said:
Australia's second most populous state, Victoria, to enter sixth lockdown - France 24

Only 15 percent fully vaccinated despite being a very wealthy country. They bought into their own hype about how they eliminated COVID. Very clear example of why the only real policy answer is vaccination.
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Australia was, in fact, more than four months behind its allies in securing Pfizer.

The United States, United Kingdom, Japan and Canada had all struck agreements with Pfizer in July and August 2020, and the company was expecting to produce 1.3bn doses to satisfy global demand.

Not only was Australia late to the party, its order was minuscule. At two doses a person, the Pfizer order was enough to vaccinate one-fifth of Australia’s population, not accounting for wastage.
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“In the case of Australia, enough vaccine to inoculate its entire population over the age of 18 should have been done at once. Assuming that is about 20m Australians, this would have cost about US$780m … How much has Australia spent on Covid-19 relief packages?”

Instead Australia planned to make AstraZeneca and the University of Queensland vaccine the workhorses of its rollout. Both brought the valuable option of domestic production at CSL’s Melbourne facility.

Time casts those decisions in a poor light. The UQ vaccine failed to get out of the starting gate, scuppered due to its tendency to generate false HIV positives. AstraZeneca has had its own well-publicised problems, greatly inhibiting its use among younger Australians and sending the government scurrying for more Pfizer.
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The former health department secretary Stephen Duckett believes the early procurement decisions have been one of the major, compounding failures of the rollout.

“If you think about it in terms of what business people call ‘portfolio theory’, you have to have a mixture of investments so you can mitigate your risk if one strategy doesn’t work,” he says. “One of the failures was this failure to diversify back in July.

“So when AstraZeneca fell over, when UQ fell over, they were stuffed.”

Australia remains almost the worst performing OECD nation on Covid-19 vaccinations, behind countries such as Costa Rica and Latvia.
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The first sign of Pfizer’s eagerness to do a deal with Australia came in the middle of last year. A letter from Pfizer, dated 30 June, invited Australian government officials for discussions about its mRNA vaccine – at that stage still in development.

A meeting was scheduled within a fortnight. It was the first of a series of 11 formal meetings and ad hoc phone calls between Pfizer and Australian officials.

The first, on 10 July, has been the subject of intense controversy. In the room were Pfizer’s Australian executives and a group of government lawyers and senior health officials, including Lisa Schofield, the first assistant secretary in the government’s Covid taskforce.

“Pfizer said: ‘This is a vaccine that we are developing,’ ” Schofield told a Senate inquiry. “We said that we were interested in talking to them about potentially purchasing that vaccine, but that was it. No numbers or details were put on the table at that discussion on 10 July.”

But a different account has emerged in the reporting of Norman Swan, the host of the ABC’s Coronacast podcast. Citing unnamed sources, he reported that one Australian official was belligerent, tried to haggle over the price, and demanded access to intellectual property. The conversations continued but no deal was struck, in his account.

Then acting Victorian premier James Merlino has also spoken of a huge offer made by Pfizer to the Australian government at the time of the first meeting.

“Our nation had a ‘sliding doors’ moment last July,” he said. “Last July, there was an offer of Pfizer to the commonwealth government that would be enough for our country, and they didn’t take it up.”
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jj23

jj23

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mastermind said:
profits over humans :blessed:
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And this is where I get pissed off.

Outside of the UK these variants have been coming from countries like Brazil, south Africa etc. Places with low vaccination rates. Makes no sense hoarding vaccines then encourage variant s that will make your vaccine obsolete.

I don't understand it.
 
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