As for vaccines the real game changer appears to be the Oxford version. It is at least 10x cheaper than Pfizer and Moderna and requires simple refrigeration for storage. It seems that the USA has not jumped on this version for some reason and your roll out has been lacking so far. There appears in the UK that they feel a single dose followed by a longer followup time is the way to go. They feel this will give increased coverage to more of the population. Just a single dose of Oxford afforded good protection in that no one in the trial group were hospitalised after just one dose.
The problem seems to be that the company that developed the Oxford version, AstraZeneca, had never developed a vaccine before and made a couple of miss steps in their testing. Somehow, some of the test subjects only received half dozes for their first of two vaccinations. And when one or two people developed unusual symptoms, which were almost certainly not related to the vaccine, a common occurrence when testing with thousands of subjects, the company did not report on this immediately, as they should have done. As a result, the FDA is delaying approval in the U. S. for months.
If it was up to me, I would take the AstraZeneca vaccine right now. I don’t care it’s only a reported 70% effective, as opposed to the 94 to 95 % effectiveness of the Pfizer and Modera vaccines. I think that the FDA is being too cautious which is not warranted under the current circumstances. The AstraZeneca inexperience with running vaccine trials, combined with bad decision making by the company executives, combined with the FDA’s extreme “all the i’s must be dotted and the t’s crossed” is going to cost thousands of lives in the United States. Along with the relaxed attitude common among many Americans about social gatherings, partly due to the poor leadership of Trump.
Also, the hospitals are so extremely slow in giving out the vaccines, it wouldn’t matter if the companies were delivering one hundred million doses a day, the rate of vaccination would still be 100,000 to 500,000 vaccinations a day, which is way too slow. Hopefully, we will see a big speed up this week and is sustained. Trump is clearly too preoccupied with other matters to really look into this and finding out what the Federal government can do to help the individual states get up to speed. We need to get more clinics up and running. And if we run low on vaccines for a week or two, we can’t shut down these extra clinics so when the next batch does come in, we are ready to vaccine at a high rate, and not have to spend a week or two getting up to speed again. With have to keep these clinics going, and continue to pay the trained personal full time, even if at times they have nothing to do. We can’t be pennywise, dollar foolish.
