❌The UK has sidelined its "homegrown" Covid vaccine.
🇬🇧Last week, it was confirmed that Britain’s programme offering third jabs to the most vulnerable will use Pfizer and Moderna jabs instead
💉As the company looks back today, it will know that somehow its project has soured, turning what should have been a reputational triumph into something at times approaching a disaster...
📸Daniel Pockett/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
➡️November 2020 turned out to be the month the world was waiting for.
#Pfizer revealed its vaccine was 90 per cent effective at preventing infection. Exactly a week later, #Moderna said its vaccine was 94.5 per cent effective…
📉Then came AstraZeneca’s turn. By comparison, the results were a bit of a disappointment – only 70 per cent effective
While Pfizer and Moderna had clear studies, AstraZeneca’s trial managed to introduce doubt about efficacy in three variables:
❌Age
❌Dose strength
❌Time between doses
➡️Almost as soon as the vaccine was first authorised, it became clear that AstraZeneca would not be able to deliver as many doses as it hoped
The EU found itself receiving less than a quarter of the 120m doses it expected in the first quarter
🇫🇷It was Emmanuel #Macron who, on January 29, dismissed the #AstraZeneca vaccine as "quasi-ineffective" for over-65s
Soon an issue emerged that made supply wrangles fade into insignificance.
🔴The first reports came from Austria in early March. A 49 year-old woman had died. Another, 35, was in hospital. Both had suffered severe blood clots after receiving the AstraZeneca jab
📊A poll in March found that just 23 per cent of people in France considered the AstraZeneca jab safe
As summer ends, the fate of the AstraZeneca jab might seem sealed…
However, a couple of bright reasons for hope shine out
➡️Low-income countries are awaiting their first jabs and AstraZeneca, unlike its rivals, is cheap and easy to transport.
The second hopeful glow for the company is strategic. It has been a rollercoaster ride, but investors are already looking at the positives
📸: AstraZeneca
🔎Read more on why the AstraZeneca jab has reasons for hope as we move into autumn here 👇
🔴The British Retail Consortium, which represents the major chains, said it expected to see food shortages by the end of the week
Pork suppliers have warned of "farmageddon" within 10 days.
🐷Pig farmers have threatened to slaughter animals on their land for render because of a growing backlog at abattoirs and processing plants due to the CO2 shortage
📉In a landmark study, scientists from the University of Manchester and the University of Western Australia found that they could reduce the number of children being diagnosed with autism at the age of three, from 20.5% per cent to 6.7%
🔴The intervention involved videoing at-risk babies as they interacted with a parent, before a therapist showed how the child was trying to communicate, so that the parent could respond
🔴Denis Sergeev, a senior military intelligence officer who used the alias Sergey Fedotov, is accused of being part of the team who deployed a deadly nerve agent in an attempt to murder the Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia
🚨 Sergeev allegedly carried out the attack alongside his fellow GRU operatives, Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin, who were charged by the Crown Prosecution Service under their aliases Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov in September 2018
❌Shoppers face a shortage of meat and even ready-made pizzas long before #Christmas if the carbon dioxide crisis continues, supermarket bosses have warned.
➡️Pork suppliers warned of "farmageddon" within 10 days.