When any case of the South African Covid19 strain turns up in the UK - and “dozens” have turned up according to government officials and scientists - a massive and aggressive old-fashioned system of contact tracing kicks into action (knocking on doors, taking statements...
about who has been in contact with the infected person, rapid testing of contacts). So far “at least one case” of the SA strain has been identified with no “obvious” link back to someone who imported it. In other words it is indicative of - as yet - limited...
community transmission. Obviously the good news is that the spread of the SA strain will be constrained by the lockdown. The more depressing news is that the arrival of the strain shows the risks of easing lockdown prematurely. The danger “will be greatest as we...
relax social distancing”, as one public health official put it to me. So it really matters that all those with the new strains (SA, Brazilian and anything else that may turn up) are found and put into strict quarantine before 8 March, that earliest of dates to relax lockdown

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More from @Peston

29 Jan
The EU is arguably playing a self-harming game in potentially restricting vaccine exports to the UK as a tit for tat for the inability of AstraZeneca to supply the 80m doses it ordered by the end of March. First of all this looks like unedifying EU sour grapes that the UK, out
of the EU, moved earlier to place vaccine contracts and will soon be self-sufficient in vaccines. Second it risks damaging the reputation of the EU as a place where multinationals can securely invest, because it is blowing up the supply chains of two big American companies...
with EU operations, Pfizer and Moderna. The UK, desperate for inward investment, will look relatively more attractive as a haven for foreign capital. Third, it risks converting the UK's many Brexit sceptics into reluctant Brexit converts, because it is conspicuous that...
Read 4 tweets
29 Jan
You can download the AstraZeneca vaccines contract with the EU here. The most interesting bit is the definition of "best reasonable efforts" to deliver the doses. ec.europa.eu/commission/pre…
"Best reasonable efforts" is defined as: "in the case of AstraZeneca, the activities and degree of effort that a company of similar size with a similarly-sized infrastructure and similar resources as AstraZeneca would undertake or use...
"in the development and manufacture of a
vaccine at the relevant stage of development or commercialization having regard to the urgent need for a vaccine to end a global pandemic which is resulting in
serious public health issues, restrictions on personal freedoms and...
Read 5 tweets
26 Jan
The important difference between AstraZeneca's relationship with the UK and with the EU, and the reason it has fallen behind schedule on 50m vaccine doses promised to the EU, is that the UK agreed the deal with AZ a full three months before the EU did - which gave...
AZ an extra three months to sort out manufacturing and supply problems relating to the UK contract (there were plenty of problems). Here is the important timeline. In May AZ reached agreement with Oxford and the UK government to make and supply the vaccine. In fact Oxford...
had already started work on the supply chain. The following month AZ reached a preliminary agreement with Germany, the Netherlands, France and Italy, a group known as the Inclusive Vaccine Alliance, based on the agreement with the UK. The announcement was 13 June. BUT the EU...
Read 9 tweets
22 Jan
The government's New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (or Nervtag) has concluded that the new Covid-19 strain may be a bit more lethal than the existing strain. I've spoken to the influential Nervtag member, Prof Neil Ferguson (@neil_ferguson)...
about this. He has given me this statement: "it is a realistic possibility that the new UK variant increases the risk of death, but there is considerable remaining uncertainty. Four groups - Imperial, LSHTM, PHE and Exeter - have looked at the relationship between people...
testing positive for the variant vs old strains and the risk of death. That suggests a 1.3-fold increased risk of death. So for 60 year-olds, 13 in 1000 might die compared with 10 in 1000 for old strains. The big caveat is that we only know which strain people were infected...
Read 7 tweets
8 Jan
This is an unashamed public information Tweet. It is prompted by a conversation I've had with an anxious doctor who is vaccinating against Covid-19 in east London. It is about why up to one-in-six Pfizer/BioNTech doses are being wasted in at least some vaccination...
centres. Here is why this shocking waste is occurring. The vaccine arrives at the centres in small vials. As you can see from the attached Public Health England/NHS document, the original protocol said each vial contains only five doses. But...
my doctor source tells me there is usually a sixth dose in each vial, and that she and her fellow vaccinators have been instructed to throw way the vial after five doses. In her centre all these sixth doses are being thrown away, and she assumes this practice is widespread. As...
Read 9 tweets
5 Jan
.@CMO_England gave a simple clear public health justification for extending the gap between the two necessary vaccine doses to three months: widening the gap will allow twice as many people to be vaccinated than would otherwise be the case; and even the first dose...
gives "significantly more" than.50% protection against the virus. Ergo, there is a net benefit from giving lesser vaccine protection to more people. But Whitty does accept that by widening the gap between doses the risk of what he calls "an escape mutant" would be increased...
(that is the virus would mutate and build up resistance to the existing vaccines - which would be something of a setback). However he sees that risk as worth taking because it is "sufficiently small" compared with the benefits of vaccinating more people more rapidly. And...
Read 5 tweets

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