Friday, January 29th, 2021
Work today has been completely derailed by a call at 6:00 this morning, which has led to a complete change of my plans. Instead of immersing myself in training decks and case studies, I found myself wrestling with our IT for hours. What should have been a quick update of a document turned into hours of frustrations with our systems and more hours with a very nice guy from IT support. At the end of the day I got to update the document I wanted online, and I could even download it as a pdf file. But not before losing all changes in the system twice and some copy paste activity between the system and a word document. What a waste of time to get there! At least the news triggering all of this was good news as the proposal I had been working on for year in different iterations seems to have been accepted. So, a good day despite the IT nuisance.
The news – apart from the political discussions – is all about vaccines, or rather the lack thereof. Novavax has just released its trial results showing a 90% efficacy to Corona. They tested it also in South Africa and efficacy with that strain was reduced to 50%. Good news: at least the vaccine is still effective. Bad news: efficacy is only 50% Novavax is now working on a revised vaccine or a booster for the South African strain. Likewise, Johnson & Johnson has just released its trial results showing 72% efficacy in the USA and 57% in South Africa for their one shot vaccine. This is the lowest efficacy of all vaccines developed to date.
Maybe, just maybe, it is not a bad thing to not be in front of the line for a shot. In fact, I am hoping that both Novavax and Johnson & Johnson will seek emergency use approval in the US soon and by the time this comes through will have vaccines amended to be fully effective for the South African variant also. Or is that too much to hope for? Is two months to little? Or maybe I should hope for AstraZenca- Oxford.
Meanwhile the EU is facing serious shortfalls. Firstly, Pfizer is upgrading the production capacity at its plant in Belgium and AstraZenca is having technical problems in its Dutch facility. As a result, both firms will deliver 60% less than contracted the doses contracted by the EU during the first quarter of 2021. There is a suspicion that AstraZeneca could honor deliveries if vaccines produced in the facilities in the UK would be partially shipped to the EU. Likewise, some of the vaccines produced in the Pfizer plant are shipped to the UK. The EU has now reacted, resulting in an uproar about the EU banning exports of vaccines manufactured there. This is not entirely accurate. Firstly, over 90 countries as well as Covax are exempted from the export restrictions. Secondly, while any company seeking to export requires an approval from the EU, this can only be denied if the producer has not fulfilled their contractual obligation to the EU.
Numbers continue to move in the right direction, with 162k new cases reported over the past twenty-four hours to bring US total to 26.3 million. Still, until all herd immunity has been achieved controlling the spread of mutants will be critical, also to ensure vaccines remain effective. To effectively do so the USA may need to step up its game on virus surveillance. “We know more about the U.K. variant than others not because it's necessarily worse, but because the British have one of the best virus surveillance programs in the world, said epidemiologist William Hanage, a professor at Harvard University. By contrast, the U.S. has one of the weakest genomic surveillance programs of any rich country, Hanage said. ‘As it is, people like me cobble together partnerships with places and try and beg them’ for samples, he said. Limited genomic surveillance of viruses is yet another side effect of a fragmented and underfunded public health system that has struggled to test, track contacts and get Covid-19 under control throughout the pandemic” in the USA.
Yes, the vaccination roll out in the USA is filled with hick-ups, as it is elsewhere in the world, still 22 million Americans have been vaccinated to date. It will be 30 million or roughly 10% of the population this time next week. In addition experts believe that over 100 million Americans did have COVID already and hence have some form of immunity.
So overall it is not going to badly as far as reaching herd immunity is concerned.