Thread by @thomasforth

Remember all the worry that I and others had about the French actually doing what they told pollsters they would? To my great relief it was, as French people talking to pollsters usually is, not a problem at all. Care homes in France are almost as well vaccinated as in England.

https://twitter.com/thomasforth/status/1372862096900292613

I expect this to continue right down the age range and across all vaccine platforms. There's not much of a story to be had in that, but all the data is saying "you were wrong to worry, and you shouldn't worry now, it's going to be fine".

To further interrupt "the narrative" with the astonishingly boring data. (via covidtracker.fr of course). This is the impact of France suspending AstraZeneca vaccines for a few days in the week just past. So close to zilch as to be unworthy of comment. No problem. At all.

Point A: "SCANDAL OF UNINJECTED DOSES".
Point B: *crickets*.
As you can see, for the next three weeks AstraZeneca just can't manage to supply Europe. There are not huge numbers of vaccines sat in fridges. Vaccine hesitancy (largely an imagined problem) just won't matter.

I am confident that this excellent new data from the USA will further reassure the French public that the AZ vaccine is safe, which is good news. Though it won't really matter, since acceptance of the vaccine is already well above the level required.

I should say,... I did kind of believe that vaccine acceptance would be a problem in France. The polls looked really bad at the end of last year. Less than half of French saying they'd get vaccinated. But, as so often with French polls, the French were lying.

What is astonishing in all of this is that basically no-one in the UK cares about the data right. Zero of the takes from left, right, centre, calm, excitable, rational, it doesn't matter. The UK takes don't care about the data. We are in a war-like trance.

Which may turn out to be a not completely unreasonable state of mind. We'll find out on Thursday.