This is a comedy sketch, right? Covid downgraded? So I can leave the house now then? And nobody told me?
Nope. I wanted to stay to reform it, can't do that now. The EU officials have ballsed this up primarily because they've got a whole lot of countries asking where their jabs are. Fighting over a vaccine the EU haven't even approved yet is stupid.
There's actually a grain of truth in this, it was removed from the top tier listing of High Consequence Infectious Diseases (which contains SARS, ebola etc.) 19th March 2020. This can either be viewed as it not being considered to be quite on the same tier of lethality as the others, or if you're a bit cynical, it was done so that front-line NHS staff couldn't sue the government for being exposed to an HCID without being provided the necessary PPE. Either way, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and this person has been led to believe that since the 'rona is no longer a HCID, that it doesn't exist, and even though it doesn't exist, can be cured with vitamins C & D.
The thought that kept popping up in my head was whether the chap was saying they had oxygen at home in a canister, or whether he meant oxygen in the air. Because I really wouldn't be surprised. Yep. x10.
If anyone deserves to catch themselves a dose of corona then its that guy. Not that I'd want to wish it on anybody.
While I wouldn't entirely discount the latter theory, this is how I understand it. SARS Classic is 15 percent lethality, Ebola is 50 percent(!) - making it a pretty high bar to pass for inclusion in the category. New SARS is nasty, no doubt about it, but it ain't SARS Classic nasty.
Just to add (as I remember worrying about this at the time) there was an apparent lack of oversight of the decision to reclassify. The 4 nations public health HCID group made the decision to classify it as an HCID in January 2020. The government removed it from classification in March 2020. Statements now on the internet when trying to google it are either fact checkers or conspiracy theories, or the government's own release saying how everyone agrees with them. But the issue for me at the time was that, given the drastic change in treatment protocols and staff protection, even though the decision might have been the right one, it still might not have been reached in the right way.
You have to consider that the most lethal diseases aren't likely to be such a pandemic risk. Dead people don't pass on diseases as much. Burial rituals in West Africa had a lot to do with Ebola hitting so bad.
It's always the way with coronaviruses. Some are more deadly but less transmissable, some are more transmissable but less deadly. Covid 19 tends more towards the latter in the grand scheme of things but it is deadly enough and transmissable enough to be more lethal overall than some of the more deadly coronaviruses. In that sense we are lucky. If it was one of the more deadly ones and as transmissable as it is, well, I dread to think the numbers beyond the horrific ones we have already. Those in the video should read a few books before storming a hospital.
We have always had stupid people but were often avoidable. Then the smart people built them an internet......
I'm getting a little worried about the EU-AZ vaccine spat. I assumed this was noisy scapegoating for the row in Europe over the pace of vaccination program. But as we see in other places, once you start shouting, the situation can spiral out of control. AZ have said they will make the vaccine contracts public, which may help create some clarity. It seems like unlikely that aZ's lawyer would have agreed to promise the EU that they could get priority over other countries if they were meant to have their own supply chain anyway. They could have double-promised, but I wouldn't bet on it. I worry that the EU, having assumed a new competence in Vaccine procurement, wanted to prove themselves by negotiating hard and getting a low price (though it seems a strange objective while the AZ vaccine is being sold on a not-for-profit basis for the time being) and got hamstrung by having to promise to buy large quantities of the French vaccines that haven't yet come to market. There is a frustration out there - the German health ministry has made it clear that they would have had bought up a lot more supply if they were left to sort out their own procurement. I hope they can take the political heat out of this but I'm not sure they can damp it down after storing it up. Announcing police raids on vaccine plants doesn't should great.
It's complicated. The EU has to play as a team. Being a team player means that the rich countries can't just hover up all the vaccine they can afford while the poorer countries are left at the back of the queue. So licencing and purchasing needs to happen as a team, with fair distribution, even if that means richer countries feel held back by poorer ones. Because nobody knew which vaccine was going to pay off, all countries spread their bets amongst various candidates. The UK got lucky; it rushed in and grabbed two vaccines that turned out to be winners, but either could have turned out to be like the French Sanofi one. As it is, AZ did run into some issues but managed to recover. I think that the EU's problem was more to procure a sufficiently large amount to serve all member states, at a price all member states could afford, while spreading the bet as to what vaccines would pay off. And then distributing it concurrently and fairly across all member states.
Well yes the EU-wide purchasing plan was a reaction to the everyone-for-themselves situation in March where Germany (briefly) banned the export of ventilators and PPE while Italy was in dire need. This was politically ugly and the policy was reversed but passing the task to the EU took the heat out of vaccine row for the time being. However I'm not sure where the emphasis on taking extra time on driving a hard bargain on cost and liability where a some vaccines were being provided on a not-for-profit basis and the funding was to be used to set up production in advance of approval. Further when you look at what contracts have been agreed (scroll down to the shots across the globe graphic), you see that the EU have contracted for equal volumes of AZ, Pfizer/BioNTech and Sanofi (300m each) as well as three others. No other country went so deep on Sanofi, though the UK has a contract for 60m Sanofi (vs 100m AZ, 40m P/BNT) and have contracts disclosed for seven different vaccines (including Novavax which is looking promising For whatever reason the UK Vaccine Taskforce seems to have been doing the right thing and doing if efficiently. If we are to see a flash of competence here this was a good time to see it. That said I was actually following the vaccine number in detail for a while as my mother lives in Ireland and hasn't had any news on a vaccine wheras her friends in London in the same age bracket have had one or two shots by now. It was very concerning for a while as Ireland wasn't releasing the data that frequently, but now they have and it's actually one of the best in the EU at getting the shots out.
Also keep in mind that health is not an EU competency. Its entire health budget is 0.5% that of the UK. It also regularly gets attacked for being a spendthrift organisation, so is under pressure to demonstrate it spends its money wisely. The EU is also always slow to react, but (hopefully) eventually learns from its mistakes. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the next years it develops a specific health emergency/pandemic response task force. Of course, then it will again be accused of overreach... The UK has done well on vaccine roll-out, but this is basically the NHS doing what it does well. Compare this to the government's private initiatives on Track & Trace and PPE procurement. What we've got here is essentially an in-vivo comparative study of the efficiency and effectiveness of private v.s public health services and it's pretty clear who won.
I would expect most nations to cset up or beef up. pandemic prepadness agencies. But I'm lost as to why you see the uk vaccine procurement a more public sector effort than other NHS procurement.
UK Track and Trace and PPE procurement are a private sector effort; vaccine procurement and distribution are a public sector effort.
PPE was purchased from private companies by a government agency. Vaccines are purchased from private companies by a government agency.
