If the UK government came late to the Moderna party, and has bought less of its vaccine than is ideal, the fault is not that of Kate Bingham and her Vaccine Taskforce. It is down to the mandate set her by the PM. He told her at the outset to purchase potential vaccines that...
could be available for use as early as possible, and preferably before the end of the year. And Bingham was clear in July that Moderna - although a world class biotech company - does not have an established distribution network in Europe. So she knew that even if its...
research delivered a good vaccine, it would not be available for use here till the end of March or beginning of April at the earliest. And so it has turned out. That said, it looks an excellent vaccine, and the 5m doses she has secured is only enough to protect 2.5m people (or...
rather 90% of them on current efficacy figures). It is possible that if she had negotiated more aggressively earlier, she could have secured more. But so long as most of her six other vaccine bets pay off, and scientists seem to think there is a reasonable chance of that,...
having less of the Moderna one won't matter so much. One of the six, the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, is on a par with Moderna's for efficacy - though is less stable and therefore may be more expensive and riskier to transport from manufacturing plant to arm. And Bingham has...
secured enough of Pfizer's for 20m people, something like 10% of the available global supply. Her biggest bet is the AZN/Oxford vaccine. She's ordered 100m doses of it, enough for 50m people. The efficacy data for AZN/Oxford is a few weeks away. But the scientific community...
seems to think its efficacy will be less than that of Moderna's and Pfizer's (maybe 70% or so efficacy - though this is all gossip). But it may excite "a greater cellular response". As I understand it, this could mean it delivers longer lasting protection, for those...
whom it succeeds in protecting, than the Moderna and Pfizer ones. All of which points to a big looming challenge for the government's Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, if a majority of the 355m doses of vaccine ordered by the government turn out to be effective...
in varying degrees. Which is how to decide which of us get which vaccines (there will be none for under 18s, because as yet there are no Phase Three trials involving young people). The politics of allocating vaccines that confer different kinds of protection will be...
challenging. That said, thank goodness we are now moving to the politics of choosing how we organise a return to something like normal life, rather than the politics of simply staying alive.
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