Ah yes good point. Thanks for that. If all adults are done by May, that's huge.

Paging CWS - thoughts on how Ursula's threats (and admittedly they are just that) regarding blocking exports to the UK and other countries with high vaccinations rates will play into the picture going forward? I know even your knowledge on supply has its limits but would love any thoughts.

Nicola Sturgeon is still saying, just a few minutes ago, that priority groups will be done by mid April. While would she still be saying this if it looks like this will be beaten quite far ahead of schedule?

This is the current status in Scotland.

I guess this does not help though.

It's not really spoken about much, but perhaps there's a subtle distinction between infection-acquired herd immunity and mass vaccination-acquired herd immunity:

Because not everyone's at equal risk of contracting and then spreading Covid, I've seen people argue that herd immunity caused by infection can be achieved after ~43% of the population has been infected (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6505/846). Broadly it seems that the virus starts off infecting people with lots of social contact (as they're at high risk), leading to a very big spike in cases (as they' spread it), but once these individuals have become immune, many routes-of-transmission are closed off and cases drop faster than would be expected.

The difference with vaccination-driven immunity seems to be that you're doing everyone, from the person who gets Ocado and has minutes of social contact every week (when passing strangers on a daily walk), to the transport workers with 40 hours of human contact every week, and so you'll need a lot more than ~43% coverage to ensure protection.

There are variations on vaccine policy, for example, with Ebola they're using a ring-vaccination policy - so contacts and 2nd-degree contacts (i.e. contacts of contacts) are offered the vaccine. (I suppose they could improve Track and Trace performance if they trialled this...)

On international travel...

I'm just exasperated by this. Right now the biggest priority is Italy and maybe France in terms of sheer numbers of avoidable deaths. Jabs in arms today. At the moment, the EU has a stockpile of unused vaccines, which varies from country to country, but if the EU were really taking this issue seriously, the entire focus would be on getting every drop of vaccine into an arm immediately. it really isn't complicated. There are 1,000 Europeans going to die in the next 24 hours in Europe and this will continue until there is a single focus on vaccines, plus lockdowns in the worst places. So complaining that the UK AZ factories haven't sent many vaccines to the EU is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, when AZ is being blocked from use (admittedly not by the EU's EMA), and you have a stock of unused vaccines. Let's say the UK had a million vaccines lying around right now, what is the quickest way to get them all into an arm? Send them to Paris? Or send them to Birmingham?

It's often forgotten that the President of the Commission is a public health academic, by background.

I'm not too sure about France, but in Italy's case the "stockpile of unused vaccines" as of this morning was 1.557m doses, and the per-day jab average is between 150 and 180k, which the Civil Protection and army say they can't really increase as they don't have a lot of faith in deliveries going forward. They had a period in early Feb where they effectively ran out and there's very little faith in companies sticking to the timescales, or so tells me my sister-in-law who is a doctor (and a jabber, though I wouldn't want to call her Italy's C-W-S, her knowledge of miles and points is quite low). Right now they've used >80% of the stock they'd been given. The data doesn't quite say how many vaccines are in stock per type but, if we assume that they're using vaccines proportionally to how much they've been given of each kind, that 1.6m doses would be divided as follows: 1.1m Pfizer, 90k Moderna, 410k AZ (which is suspended until the EMA releases the verdict on Thursday).

Another thing to bear in mind is this: based on contracts, authorities expected the following number of doses by end of March (between brackets what they've actually got as of now): Pfizer 11.1m (5.9m); AstraZeneca 5.3m (2.2m); Moderna 1.3m (0.5m).

At the risk of going close to the wire here, that is slightly higher than the UK's stockpile, at least in terms of the delivery system.

I actually didn’t know that about her. So that’s my new fact for the day.

I fully agree with you (from my non-health chair). It’s politically motivated but their bungling of the entire vaccine process (starting from trying to hammer on price rather than placing orders) is utterly baffling for a group of countries that likes to think of itself as the pinnacle of the world.

What do you mean, in terms of delivery system? That number was for the entirety of vaccines shipped to the Italian equivalent of NHS.

The UK is doing just in time, Italy isn't, hence Italy has stockpiled, the UK not so much. There is more stock awaiting batch accreditation in factories in the UK and multiple places in Europe, but that can't be used until the batch is signed off. Because mainland Europe is still sticking to the 3 week timeframe, they have boxed themselves in, they are only using half their deliveries since jab2 is so close to hand. It's a bit of a mess, and the Commission's President will understand this more than most.

Didn't we just get 10m doses from India, and aren't all our vaccine plants expected to be online by April?

You can't do just in time if there's no trust in the forecasted supply. My SIL works in a hospital in the North-West, Piedmont region. They've started vaccinating in January and they haven't had a single delivery go as planned. Instead of, say, 10 doses they receive 4, or 3, or sometimes nothing at all. Layer it all with bureaucracy and you have a recipe for disaster: they plan conservatively and sometimes end up with surplus, which is of course not good. So far they've given it to healthcare workers, frontline workers and so forth but right now they've compiled "standby" lists although it's not without wrinkles...

The UK and Italy and everywhere else is the same boat, we have quite similar issues here in terms of planning and we end up ringing in taxi drivers and car showroom staff to use up the surpluses. We even stopped a passing bus on one evening, and no-one declined. There isn't enough supply. anywhere in Europe. What differs is emphasis and approach. Right now the UK has 24,839,906 examples of focusing on what matters - and you know what, I do not think that is good enough. Time is of the essence, we can spend all day making excuses and deflecting, or we can spend every minute trying to get the next injection into someone. So in a sense there is no point having a squabble about this, if that is what the President is trying to do, she would be better employed doing whatever it takes to get AZ vaccines out of refrigerated warehouses in Rungis and into Europe's citizens.