Thought of the Day - February 8 2022 - Reflections on the Vaccine Wars

It has been months since we did an installment concerning the global vaccine wars ( Thought of the Day - November 2 2021 - Meanwhile Back to the Vaccine Wars ). A fascinating article was passed on from the BBC (thanks Mark) that poses the question: Did Politics and National Interests get in the way of Ambitions for the AstraZeneca Vaccine?

Here are some excerpts from the article.

"There was too much nationalism," says Prof Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute in Oxford, where the vaccine was developed. "It was encouraging competition between vaccine types, between countries."

Before European regulators made their decision, Germany decided it [AstraZeneca] should not be given to those over 65. While in France, President Macron, called the vaccine "quasi-ineffective" in the elderly. Both Germany and France would reverse their decisions, but the reputation of the vaccine had been damaged. Some doctors in France had to throw away doses because nobody was turning up to get the jab.

At the same time, AZ was becoming embroiled in a major row about supplies. Because the UK had been guaranteed priority in a deal agreed before the rest of Europe, the company says it was unable to send vaccines from British plants to supplement the EU stock. Meanwhile, one million doses had already gone to the UK from an EU plant. At the height of the crisis, the European Commission threatened to halt vaccine exports to the UK unless Europe got its "fair share".

But what sealed the vaccine's poor reputation among many across Europe was the emergence in March of a link to rare blood clots. Germany, France, Ireland, Italy, Austria and Denmark were among many nations that suspended use of the vaccine.

But when it came to deciding on booster doses in the UK, the clots issue and the simplicity of the Pfizer or Moderna mRNA jabs not being age-restricted, sealed the AZ vaccine's fate. Since then, evidence has shown that mixing different types of vaccine may offer better protection.

Elsewhere in Europe many saw the AZ vaccine as either unsafe or inferior - it was nicknamed the "Aldi vaccine" in Belgium, after the supermarket, because it was seen as a budget option.

But it had been designed to be cheap. AZ agreed to license global production and distribution of the jab, to be sold not-for-profit, for about £3 a dose - a fifth of the price of the Pfizer's jab.

A key player in this deal was the Serum Institute in India, the world's largest manufacturer of vaccines. It agreed to produce more than one billion doses for low- and middle-income countries. But when the devastating Delta wave of COVID struck India in spring 2021, its government blocked vaccines leaving the country for more than six months, making a global shortage of vaccines even more acute.

More than a quarter of the 10 billion doses of COVID jabs administered globally have been AstraZeneca, a vaccine created by a small team at a British university and sold at cost. Other COVID vaccines, by contrast, have created nine billionaires.

In short, the answer to the question (Did Politics and National Interests get in the way of Ambitions for the AstraZeneca Vaccine?) is yes. Vaccine brand selection decisions were largely based on politics and national interests, rather than cost; remember at the time independent effectiveness and safety information was scant at best. The issue was that AstraZeneca woke up to this fact far too late ( Thought of the Day - March 16 2021 - Vaccine Wars ).

Anyway, it is great to see the BBC is starting to publish such stories. They are working to regain their credibility to being able to dig a little deeper in keeping the public informed on the world of global politics and maybe even the story of the pandemic.

My hope is sometime soon our national media will be able to provide a report on how we ended up exclusively providing mRNA vaccines here in Canada (AZ, J&J and Novavax have dropped off the radar ( Thought of the Day - December 30 2021 - What's Happening with the Novavax Vaccine? )), and why we still have one of the most restrictive "acceptable vaccine brand list" for visitors to our country.

Cheers

Cliff