EU vaccine role out.

[kiwi pom]

As above, Germany says lack of data means they're not recommending it for over 65s, so where if it shows lack of efficacy does this leave the UK?
Is the UK doing any follow up tests to see if a good level of immune response is achieved in the elderly?
Or is it just headline grabbing, we've jabbed 5 million once!
I really hope not , but it could just happen that Boris has grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory!

Nobody has sufficient data because the vaccine is so new, it has been shown to be safe and some what effective though, so is a huge improvement of doing nothing. Of course the UK are carrying out studies on exactly what's happening with the vaccine, do you really think they're just sticking it in arms and forgetting about it?
Germany can do whatever they want, but they're going to be even further behind if they keep waiting for perfection.
The UK is doing a great job, the further ahead they get the more other countries look incompetent.

 

[Jackson Ground]

Interview with AZ CEO ,with italian press
personally feel we should do the right thing wether we need to or not regard EU older population , When our own vulnerable have been done (happy to wait myself )

Pascal Soriot: "There are a lot of emotions on vaccines in EU. But it's complicated"

An exclusive interview with AstraZeneca's CEO on the accusations from Europe after the delay of Oxford vaccine supplies, some revealing details of the vacc…

www.repubblica.it

Thank you for posting - an interesting read!

 

[bobk]

Nobody has sufficient data because the vaccine is so new, it has been shown to be safe and some what effective though, so is a huge improvement of doing nothing. Of course the UK are carrying out studies on exactly what's happening with the vaccine, do you really think they're just sticking it in arms and forgetting about it?
Germany can do whatever they want, but they're going to be even further behind if they keep waiting for perfection.
The UK is doing a great job, the further ahead they get the more other countries look incompetent.

Has the Kiwi govt said anything about vaccination ?

 

[kiwi pom]

Has the Kiwi govt said anything about vaccination ?

They're miles behind, as usual. I think we're supposed to get some around the same time as Australia but my guess is we will be near the back of a long queue.

 

[le bon paysan]

Any body cribbing about the EU wanting vaccine should read this from last year. The EU paid 300 million to AZ and formed and paid into covax to make sure everyone rich and poor to get access to vaccine. AZ s plant in the UK was updated by EU funds .

The unequal scramble for coronavirus vaccines — by the numbers

Wealthy countries have already pre-ordered more than two billion doses.

www.nature.com

 

[Muck Spreader]

Yes, we've covered this.
But there is no trial data in efficacy for over 65s for the AZ .
The uk is the trial! Hence my question of the uk doing any follow up to see if an exceptable level of immune response has been triggered in the over 65s.
No point jabbing them if its not working!
Use the Pfizer jab that has data for over 65s and works in that age group.

Couple of things come to mind, the FDA in the US are having to rerun trials on the AstraZenica vaccine as they are unhappy with the explanations about the messed up results given to them by AstraZenica particularly claims about 90% efficacy related to the one and a half dose regime in just1400 participants. They are concerned that the overall efficacy of the two dose regime maybe below the 62% (compared to 95% for the mRNA ones) approved by the UK and could be a 1 in 10 chance of even being below 50%. They are likely to give their verdict towards the end of February.

 

[andybk]

Any body cribbing about the EU wanting vaccine should read this from last year. The EU paid 300 million to AZ and formed and paid into covax to make sure everyone rich and poor to get access to vaccine. AZ s plant in the UK was updated by EU funds .

The unequal scramble for coronavirus vaccines — by the numbers

Wealthy countries have already pre-ordered more than two billion doses.

www.nature.com

and the British funded the research into creating it before it was taken on commercially by AZ , and the deal was to make it non profit and to get to use it first , Europe partly pinned its colours to the french Sanofi research project , which failed , and why they are behind the game

 

[Ashtree]

Crikey... if the efficacy of AZ isn’t as initially thought, it’s going to blow a huge hole in European and American plans in particular.
Pfizer may be very effective, but it’s a logistical nightmare.

 

[le bon paysan]

and the British funded the research into creating it before it was taken on commercially by AZ , and the deal was to make it non profit and to get to use it first , Europe partly pinned its colours to the french Sanofi research project , which failed , and why they are behind the game

They also received covax funds.
Did you read the article?

 

[le bon paysan]

Germany paid Pfizer 443 million in advance for vaccine development outside of their contributions to covax, this is why they are receiving vaccine in and outside of covax

Pfizer and Moderna vaccines can only be scaled up globally if many more suppliers can produce - World

English News and Press Release on World about Health and Epidemic; published on 08 Dec 2020 by MSF

reliefweb.int

 

[robs1]

Any body cribbing about the EU wanting vaccine should read this from last year. The EU paid 300 million to AZ and formed and paid into covax to make sure everyone rich and poor to get access to vaccine. AZ s plant in the UK was updated by EU funds .

The unequal scramble for coronavirus vaccines — by the numbers

Wealthy countries have already pre-ordered more than two billion doses.

www.nature.com

Figures I saw said the uk have paid more into cova than the whole of the Eu

 

[Still Farming]

Any body cribbing about the EU wanting vaccine should read this from last year. The EU paid 300 million to AZ and formed and paid into covax to make sure everyone rich and poor to get access to vaccine. AZ s plant in the UK was updated by EU funds .

The unequal scramble for coronavirus vaccines — by the numbers

Wealthy countries have already pre-ordered more than two billion doses.

www.nature.com

Farmers were paid by eu funds , will they have to worry also??? Think not.
Bye gone's are bye gone's now ,move on.

 

[Hindsight]

. Any body cribbing about the EU wanting vaccine should read this from last year. The EU paid 300 million to AZ and formed and paid into covax to make sure everyone rich and poor to get access to vaccineAZ s plant in the UK was updated by EU funds .

The unequal scramble for coronavirus vaccines — by the numbers

Wealthy countries have already pre-ordered more than two billion doses.

www.nature.com

Thats Ok and understood LBP. We will send to navvies down to Spain and across to Romania and get some of that good tarmac that I have seen with a EU flag adjacent to it. Straight forward really. good for goose good for gander Cheers.

 

[br jones]

Any body cribbing about the EU wanting vaccine should read this from last year. The EU paid 300 million to AZ and formed and paid into covax to make sure everyone rich and poor to get access to vaccine. AZ s plant in the UK was updated by EU funds .

The unequal scramble for coronavirus vaccines — by the numbers

Wealthy countries have already pre-ordered more than two billion doses.

www.nature.com

AstraZeneca’s vaccine to the EU market. It is a large demand.
Diplomatically, this country can invoke vital national interest and restrict exports of doses manufactured in the UK, just as the EU has announced it will do for doses made on its own territory. Whether this country should act in such a fashion is a question of statecraft.
But it would be a remarkably generous gesture at a time when the EU is being horrible on everything to do with the post-Brexit settlement, from customs clearance, to Ulster, or financial equivalence. It is reciprocating on almost nothing.
Personally, as a man in my early sixties, I might forgo my jab for a while so that the over eighties at greater risk in France, Italy, or Bulgaria can be saved, although why do they have a greater claim than Tanzanians? But the EU does not seem to be making a moral request for solidarity. It is issuing orders.
Advertisement

Ursula von der Leyen’s speech to the virtual Davos forum this week did not sound like a request for help from this country. It sounded like a threat. Companies must “honour their obligations”, she said in her teeth-clenching staccato style.
Health commissioner Stella Kyriakides says AstraZeneca is legally bound to divert doses from two UK factories. "In our contract it is not specified that any country or the UK has priority. This needs to be absolutely clear," she said.
You would hardly know that AstraZeneca is the saviour in this saga, not the villain. It is making no profit from the vaccine. It is selling at cost, like a charity, offering a humanitarian service to the world. But don’t expect gratitude from the Berlaymont.
Nor is there any hint of acknowledgement that Brussels got itself into its vaccine disaster by haggling over prices and trying to drive hard bargains on indemnity. It wasted three months before committing to AstraZeneca, as if it were the easiest thing in the world to mass-produce a viral vector vaccine. That is why the EU-based plants are not yet up to full efficiency.
Advertisement

The UK and the US invested seven times as much public money per capita to accelerate the vaccine breakthrough, acting with war-time energy while the Commission remained stuck in its bureaucratic box-ticking subculture, catering to the lowest common denominator of 27 states. If ever there was an example of why Brussels should not be let anywhere near policies of real national sensitivity, this was it.
EuroIntelligence said the EU conducted vaccine talks in the same spirit that it conducted Brexit talks. “It tried to lock in a perceived short-term price advantage at the expense of everything else,” it said. Speed is everything in a pandemic. The Commission could not see the wood for the trees.
I have no idea whether AstraZeneca’s Pascal Soriot is right in claiming that the company has no contractual duty to deliver tens of million doses to the EU by a fixed date, but rather only to make its “best effort”. Nor do I know whether vaccine supply-chain is set up for each specific country. The issue is larger.

All of a sudden the stereotype roles of the last four years have reversed. Europe’s technocrats are now the populists, the vaccine imperialists. Borisian Britain is starting to feel like a haven of calm by comparison. For all its mistakes, the UK is now cleaving closer to science. It is behaving better.
Germany is in fever, hunting for somebody to blame for the inexcusable fact that it cannot obtain more than a trickle of its own BioNTech vaccine. If that blame ultimately lands squarely on Brussels, the European project is in trouble.
For now media wrath is turning on diversionary scapegoats. AstraZeneca is the easiest target. Hysteria is taking over. One can only guess which figures in ‘government circles’ (Kreisen der Bundesregierung) leaked a fabricated story to the Handelsblatt alleging that its vaccine is virtually useless against the elderly.
The claim has been shot down by German scientists. AstraZeneca has debunked it. Oxford University, unused to such political bloodsport, gently pointed out that five peer-reviewed papers show that efficacy is comparable across age groups. Not a single elderly volunteer died or became critically-ill after the jab.
No matter. The fake news lives on, amplified by Bild Zeitung, and still given credence by others, as if there were a genuine debate. This mendacious virus is now a staple of social media and lodged in the German mind. That is how to destroy confidence in a vaccination campaign. Kreisen der Bundesregierung indeed.
France’s rationalist president is like a rabbit caught in the headlights. The ‘variant anglais’ has surged to 10pc of all Covid cases in greater Paris even on the lagging official data. It is going parabolic. The scientific authorities are pressing for an immediate lockdown. Still he hesitates.
Emmanuel Macron is warily eyeing the travails of his friend and fellow-rationalist Mark Rutte. The Netherlands have been blind-sided by violent anti-curfew riots for three consecutive nights, “shameless thieves” in the words of Rotterdam’s mayor, or “the scum” to one minister.
Macron knows that civic acquiescence for his stop-go strategy is near breaking point. Consent for yet another lockdown has dropped to 40pc. A gilets jaunes two lies in store if this drags on deep into the Spring.

The EU’s vaccination debacle has delayed Europe’s social reopening and economic recovery by three months, with all the consequences that this will have for sovereign debt ratios, small firm solvency, and labour hysteresis.
It is one reason - though not the only one - why the International Monetary Fund thinks the region will be left behind as the US and China roar back this year. It is a Sino-American G2 world from now on. The pandemic has brought forward Europe’s definitive relegation from the top league.
The IMF and other global bodies lump the UK with the worst of Europe in their grim forecasts. The Fund thinks growth will be just 4.5pc this year after a 10pc contraction in 2020. The OECD says the UK will be the laggard of the developed world, far behind even France and Italy.
If that happens, I will eat my hat (another one). Britain’s vaccination success so far - and a steeper relative trajectory over coming weeks - imply a rebound roughly ten weeks sooner. So long as Rishi Sunak restrains the Treasury from fiscal tightening too soon, it may well be a V-shaped take-off.
The Office for National Statistics will publish a paper next week showing that the UK’s (best practice) method of measuring health and education in GDP figures exaggerated the fall in GDP last year. We cut ‘output’ when doctors see fewer patients, or schools have fewer classes. Other countries measure differently.
This flattered German GDP by roughly 2pc last year, or French and Italian GDP by around 1pc. The opposite effect will kick as life returns to normal. It is the UK recovery that will be flattered.
My bet: the UK will be the star of the big European economies this year and may clock up 6pc growth as pent-up investment flows, assuming the IMF is broadly right on world growth. The Brexit trade shock will be less than feared.
The UK’s flexible labour markets will make the switch to the post-Pandemic digital economy better than Germany, France, or Italy. Sterling will be the foreign exchange darling. The FTSE-250 will be the catch up story of 2021.
The global narrative on Brexit will become less relentlessly hostile. It will be the mirror image of Europe’s eroding credibility. Who knows, perhaps even the Scots will feel that they have judged our imperfect but interwoven union a little too harshly

 

[le bon paysan]

and the British funded the research into creating it before it was taken on commercially by AZ , and the deal was to make it non profit and to get to use it first , Europe partly pinned its colours to the french Sanofi research project , which failed , and why they are behind the game

Europe funded 11 different companies, in the desperate rush to find something that worked. It's only because of the vast amounts of money , thrown at the job, that we have these vaccines that work.

 

[Still Farming]

AstraZeneca’s vaccine to the EU market. It is a large demand.
Diplomatically, this country can invoke vital national interest and restrict exports of doses manufactured in the UK, just as the EU has announced it will do for doses made on its own territory. Whether this country should act in such a fashion is a question of statecraft.
But it would be a remarkably generous gesture at a time when the EU is being horrible on everything to do with the post-Brexit settlement, from customs clearance, to Ulster, or financial equivalence. It is reciprocating on almost nothing.
Personally, as a man in my early sixties, I might forgo my jab for a while so that the over eighties at greater risk in France, Italy, or Bulgaria can be saved, although why do they have a greater claim than Tanzanians? But the EU does not seem to be making a moral request for solidarity. It is issuing orders.
Advertisement

Ursula von der Leyen’s speech to the virtual Davos forum this week did not sound like a request for help from this country. It sounded like a threat. Companies must “honour their obligations”, she said in her teeth-clenching staccato style.
Health commissioner Stella Kyriakides says AstraZeneca is legally bound to divert doses from two UK factories. "In our contract it is not specified that any country or the UK has priority. This needs to be absolutely clear," she said.
You would hardly know that AstraZeneca is the saviour in this saga, not the villain. It is making no profit from the vaccine. It is selling at cost, like a charity, offering a humanitarian service to the world. But don’t expect gratitude from the Berlaymont.
Nor is there any hint of acknowledgement that Brussels got itself into its vaccine disaster by haggling over prices and trying to drive hard bargains on indemnity. It wasted three months before committing to AstraZeneca, as if it were the easiest thing in the world to mass-produce a viral vector vaccine. That is why the EU-based plants are not yet up to full efficiency.
Advertisement

The UK and the US invested seven times as much public money per capita to accelerate the vaccine breakthrough, acting with war-time energy while the Commission remained stuck in its bureaucratic box-ticking subculture, catering to the lowest common denominator of 27 states. If ever there was an example of why Brussels should not be let anywhere near policies of real national sensitivity, this was it.
EuroIntelligence said the EU conducted vaccine talks in the same spirit that it conducted Brexit talks. “It tried to lock in a perceived short-term price advantage at the expense of everything else,” it said. Speed is everything in a pandemic. The Commission could not see the wood for the trees.
I have no idea whether AstraZeneca’s Pascal Soriot is right in claiming that the company has no contractual duty to deliver tens of million doses to the EU by a fixed date, but rather only to make its “best effort”. Nor do I know whether vaccine supply-chain is set up for each specific country. The issue is larger.

All of a sudden the stereotype roles of the last four years have reversed. Europe’s technocrats are now the populists, the vaccine imperialists. Borisian Britain is starting to feel like a haven of calm by comparison. For all its mistakes, the UK is now cleaving closer to science. It is behaving better.
Germany is in fever, hunting for somebody to blame for the inexcusable fact that it cannot obtain more than a trickle of its own BioNTech vaccine. If that blame ultimately lands squarely on Brussels, the European project is in trouble.
For now media wrath is turning on diversionary scapegoats. AstraZeneca is the easiest target. Hysteria is taking over. One can only guess which figures in ‘government circles’ (Kreisen der Bundesregierung) leaked a fabricated story to the Handelsblatt alleging that its vaccine is virtually useless against the elderly.
The claim has been shot down by German scientists. AstraZeneca has debunked it. Oxford University, unused to such political bloodsport, gently pointed out that five peer-reviewed papers show that efficacy is comparable across age groups. Not a single elderly volunteer died or became critically-ill after the jab.
No matter. The fake news lives on, amplified by Bild Zeitung, and still given credence by others, as if there were a genuine debate. This mendacious virus is now a staple of social media and lodged in the German mind. That is how to destroy confidence in a vaccination campaign. Kreisen der Bundesregierung indeed.
France’s rationalist president is like a rabbit caught in the headlights. The ‘variant anglais’ has surged to 10pc of all Covid cases in greater Paris even on the lagging official data. It is going parabolic. The scientific authorities are pressing for an immediate lockdown. Still he hesitates.
Emmanuel Macron is warily eyeing the travails of his friend and fellow-rationalist Mark Rutte. The Netherlands have been blind-sided by violent anti-curfew riots for three consecutive nights, “shameless thieves” in the words of Rotterdam’s mayor, or “the scum” to one minister.
Macron knows that civic acquiescence for his stop-go strategy is near breaking point. Consent for yet another lockdown has dropped to 40pc. A gilets jaunes two lies in store if this drags on deep into the Spring.

The EU’s vaccination debacle has delayed Europe’s social reopening and economic recovery by three months, with all the consequences that this will have for sovereign debt ratios, small firm solvency, and labour hysteresis.
It is one reason - though not the only one - why the International Monetary Fund thinks the region will be left behind as the US and China roar back this year. It is a Sino-American G2 world from now on. The pandemic has brought forward Europe’s definitive relegation from the top league.
The IMF and other global bodies lump the UK with the worst of Europe in their grim forecasts. The Fund thinks growth will be just 4.5pc this year after a 10pc contraction in 2020. The OECD says the UK will be the laggard of the developed world, far behind even France and Italy.
If that happens, I will eat my hat (another one). Britain’s vaccination success so far - and a steeper relative trajectory over coming weeks - imply a rebound roughly ten weeks sooner. So long as Rishi Sunak restrains the Treasury from fiscal tightening too soon, it may well be a V-shaped take-off.
The Office for National Statistics will publish a paper next week showing that the UK’s (best practice) method of measuring health and education in GDP figures exaggerated the fall in GDP last year. We cut ‘output’ when doctors see fewer patients, or schools have fewer classes. Other countries measure differently.
This flattered German GDP by roughly 2pc last year, or French and Italian GDP by around 1pc. The opposite effect will kick as life returns to normal. It is the UK recovery that will be flattered.
My bet: the UK will be the star of the big European economies this year and may clock up 6pc growth as pent-up investment flows, assuming the IMF is broadly right on world growth. The Brexit trade shock will be less than feared.
The UK’s flexible labour markets will make the switch to the post-Pandemic digital economy better than Germany, France, or Italy. Sterling will be the foreign exchange darling. The FTSE-250 will be the catch up story of 2021.
The global narrative on Brexit will become less relentlessly hostile. It will be the mirror image of Europe’s eroding credibility. Who knows, perhaps even the Scots will feel that they have judged our imperfect but interwoven union a little too harshly

Sour grapes looks like?

 

[Hindsight]

Europe funded 11 different companies, in the desperate rush to find something that worked. It's only because of the vast amounts of money , thrown at the job, that we have these vaccines that work.

Sorry LBP. I listened to this lady last April when she said matter of factly her team would deliver a workable vacicine by late autumn 2020 When Fauci and others were wittering about late 2021.

She was interviewed for Life Scientific mid September. Straightforward lass from normal background - no Eton here. But bright. She sounded like my Primary School deputy head three doors down the street. But she said a vaccine would be available by the late Autumn - she said that when interviewed in April. I believed her then. The UK government believed her. And her team delivered.

Following this thread the UK ordered loads of jabs months before EU - is that right, I have no idea and you seem well informed. May be Ursula should have listened to Radio 4 Life Scientific. If she had I think she might have put a call in an said book me a billion doses? All good fun. I can forgo my jab for a few months for an elderly German. Best wishes.

Or maybe for an elderly Rwhandan Mountain Gorilla. Theres loads of homo sapiens but few Mountain Gorillas.

The Life Scientific - Sarah Gilbert on developing a vaccine for Covid-19 - BBC Sounds

How did Sarah Gilbert get so far, so fast in developing a vaccine for Covid-19?

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[le bon paysan]

AstraZeneca’s vaccine to the EU market. It is a large demand.
Diplomatically, this country can invoke vital national interest and restrict exports of doses manufactured in the UK, just as the EU has announced it will do for doses made on its own territory. Whether this country should act in such a fashion is a question of statecraft.
But it would be a remarkably generous gesture at a time when the EU is being horrible on everything to do with the post-Brexit settlement, from customs clearance, to Ulster, or financial equivalence. It is reciprocating on almost nothing.
Personally, as a man in my early sixties, I might forgo my jab for a while so that the over eighties at greater risk in France, Italy, or Bulgaria can be saved, although why do they have a greater claim than Tanzanians? But the EU does not seem to be making a moral request for solidarity. It is issuing orders.
Advertisement

Ursula von der Leyen’s speech to the virtual Davos forum this week did not sound like a request for help from this country. It sounded like a threat. Companies must “honour their obligations”, she said in her teeth-clenching staccato style.
Health commissioner Stella Kyriakides says AstraZeneca is legally bound to divert doses from two UK factories. "In our contract it is not specified that any country or the UK has priority. This needs to be absolutely clear," she said.
You would hardly know that AstraZeneca is the saviour in this saga, not the villain. It is making no profit from the vaccine. It is selling at cost, like a charity, offering a humanitarian service to the world. But don’t expect gratitude from the Berlaymont.
Nor is there any hint of acknowledgement that Brussels got itself into its vaccine disaster by haggling over prices and trying to drive hard bargains on indemnity. It wasted three months before committing to AstraZeneca, as if it were the easiest thing in the world to mass-produce a viral vector vaccine. That is why the EU-based plants are not yet up to full efficiency.
Advertisement

The UK and the US invested seven times as much public money per capita to accelerate the vaccine breakthrough, acting with war-time energy while the Commission remained stuck in its bureaucratic box-ticking subculture, catering to the lowest common denominator of 27 states. If ever there was an example of why Brussels should not be let anywhere near policies of real national sensitivity, this was it.
EuroIntelligence said the EU conducted vaccine talks in the same spirit that it conducted Brexit talks. “It tried to lock in a perceived short-term price advantage at the expense of everything else,” it said. Speed is everything in a pandemic. The Commission could not see the wood for the trees.
I have no idea whether AstraZeneca’s Pascal Soriot is right in claiming that the company has no contractual duty to deliver tens of million doses to the EU by a fixed date, but rather only to make its “best effort”. Nor do I know whether vaccine supply-chain is set up for each specific country. The issue is larger.

All of a sudden the stereotype roles of the last four years have reversed. Europe’s technocrats are now the populists, the vaccine imperialists. Borisian Britain is starting to feel like a haven of calm by comparison. For all its mistakes, the UK is now cleaving closer to science. It is behaving better.
Germany is in fever, hunting for somebody to blame for the inexcusable fact that it cannot obtain more than a trickle of its own BioNTech vaccine. If that blame ultimately lands squarely on Brussels, the European project is in trouble.
For now media wrath is turning on diversionary scapegoats. AstraZeneca is the easiest target. Hysteria is taking over. One can only guess which figures in ‘government circles’ (Kreisen der Bundesregierung) leaked a fabricated story to the Handelsblatt alleging that its vaccine is virtually useless against the elderly.
The claim has been shot down by German scientists. AstraZeneca has debunked it. Oxford University, unused to such political bloodsport, gently pointed out that five peer-reviewed papers show that efficacy is comparable across age groups. Not a single elderly volunteer died or became critically-ill after the jab.
No matter. The fake news lives on, amplified by Bild Zeitung, and still given credence by others, as if there were a genuine debate. This mendacious virus is now a staple of social media and lodged in the German mind. That is how to destroy confidence in a vaccination campaign. Kreisen der Bundesregierung indeed.
France’s rationalist president is like a rabbit caught in the headlights. The ‘variant anglais’ has surged to 10pc of all Covid cases in greater Paris even on the lagging official data. It is going parabolic. The scientific authorities are pressing for an immediate lockdown. Still he hesitates.
Emmanuel Macron is warily eyeing the travails of his friend and fellow-rationalist Mark Rutte. The Netherlands have been blind-sided by violent anti-curfew riots for three consecutive nights, “shameless thieves” in the words of Rotterdam’s mayor, or “the scum” to one minister.
Macron knows that civic acquiescence for his stop-go strategy is near breaking point. Consent for yet another lockdown has dropped to 40pc. A gilets jaunes two lies in store if this drags on deep into the Spring.

The EU’s vaccination debacle has delayed Europe’s social reopening and economic recovery by three months, with all the consequences that this will have for sovereign debt ratios, small firm solvency, and labour hysteresis.
It is one reason - though not the only one - why the International Monetary Fund thinks the region will be left behind as the US and China roar back this year. It is a Sino-American G2 world from now on. The pandemic has brought forward Europe’s definitive relegation from the top league.
The IMF and other global bodies lump the UK with the worst of Europe in their grim forecasts. The Fund thinks growth will be just 4.5pc this year after a 10pc contraction in 2020. The OECD says the UK will be the laggard of the developed world, far behind even France and Italy.
If that happens, I will eat my hat (another one). Britain’s vaccination success so far - and a steeper relative trajectory over coming weeks - imply a rebound roughly ten weeks sooner. So long as Rishi Sunak restrains the Treasury from fiscal tightening too soon, it may well be a V-shaped take-off.
The Office for National Statistics will publish a paper next week showing that the UK’s (best practice) method of measuring health and education in GDP figures exaggerated the fall in GDP last year. We cut ‘output’ when doctors see fewer patients, or schools have fewer classes. Other countries measure differently.
This flattered German GDP by roughly 2pc last year, or French and Italian GDP by around 1pc. The opposite effect will kick as life returns to normal. It is the UK recovery that will be flattered.
My bet: the UK will be the star of the big European economies this year and may clock up 6pc growth as pent-up investment flows, assuming the IMF is broadly right on world growth. The Brexit trade shock will be less than feared.
The UK’s flexible labour markets will make the switch to the post-Pandemic digital economy better than Germany, France, or Italy. Sterling will be the foreign exchange darling. The FTSE-250 will be the catch up story of 2021.
The global narrative on Brexit will become less relentlessly hostile. It will be the mirror image of Europe’s eroding credibility. Who knows, perhaps even the Scots will feel that they have judged our imperfect but interwoven union a little too harshly

Firstly , EU money helped upgrade the AZ facility in the UK. UvdL saying companies must fulfil their contracts is completely fair.
Should they completely fulfil one contract and not supply another or scale back pro rata on a number of contracts?

Brexit has nothing to do with this. But typical that you wanted third country status and now want special treatment. I posted a link that showed Frost didn't ask for many of the things you now want. You obviously didn't read it or chose to believe the liar Johnson. We shouldn't convolute the two subjects and am quite happy to continue arguing , over in a Brexit thread rather than spoil this one. It's up to you.

As for the AZ being unsuitable for over 65s, two points.
1, the original reporting of 8% efficacy in the over 65s was mistaken/ malicious by someone who read the report but confused / didn't understand what he was reading.

2, the German report says there is no trial data to show efficacy in over 65s. This is why they are not licensing Pfizer in over 65s and using the AZ in younger people. Until and unless they can be shown data.

The Israelis had Pfizer vaccine on a deal they would provide all data from all age groups, this they've done. It works in all age groups very well. It's a git to handle.

I asked if follow up testing in the UK on the efficacy in over 65s was being done and got howled at that of course it is!
So why won't AZ/ Boris release it?
Today the United States FDA has come out and said there is no data on over 65s from AZ and none is forthcoming!

I said could Boris snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by delaying the second jab? That's been turned into I must have the UK!
I think it's a legitimate question.
The UK vaccination campaign has got off to a flying start, it would have been just as impressive if people were getting their second jabs within 4 weeks.
Stanley had 2 in a month though. Illiterate peasants can wait.

As for your UK will rule the world paragraphs... Good luck.

 

[le bon paysan]

Thats Ok and understood LBP. We will send to navvies down to Spain and across to Romania and get some of that good tarmac that I have seen with a EU flag adjacent to it. Straight forward really. good for goose good for gander Cheers.

Does that mean the UK gives half of Cornwall back?
Cheers.
ps .we don't want it

 

[Hindsight]

Does that mean the UK gives half of Cornwall back?
Cheers.
ps .we don't want it

Yep, your welcome to half Cornwall and the South Yorkshire Objective 1 EU funded development areas. But we will come get all our tarmac from Southern Europe and mend he bloody potholes in Lincolnshire. Cheers,