Vaccines

Thursday

Katja Hoyer

Berlin has been bounced into accepting Sputnik

Munich has had enough of the vaccine chaos in Berlin and Brussels. In a surprise announcement on Wednesday, Bavaria’s minister president Markus Söder stated that he would sign a preliminary purchase agreement for the Russian Sputnik vaccine. The leader of the Bavarian Free State explained that he would pre-order two and a half million doses of Sputnik V in the hope of receiving these by July. Söder, who is a potential candidate to replace Merkel, was keen to stress that this was dependent on regulatory approval by the European Medicines Agency. Under pressure to respond to Bavaria’s initiative, Germany’s health minister Jens Spahn has now told his EU counterparts that

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Are we at risk of another Covid wave?

Could we really see another peak in Covid-19 hospitalisations as bad as January once society reopens in June? That was the story widely reported this morning, based on the latest modelling from SPI-M, the government’s advisory committee on modelling for scientific emergencies. The study caught attention not least because back in January very few people had received a vaccine: now, 56 per cent of the adult population has been vaccinated. By July, on current forecasts, every adult in Britain will have been offered at least a first vaccine dose. How, if vaccines actually work — and there is a lot of evidence to suggest they do — could we end

Monday

Fraser Nelson

Johnson is in trouble over vaccine passports – and it’s showing

The biggest question facing Boris Johnson is the future of his so-called vaccine passports. A few months ago, the idea was dismissed by No. 10 as ‘discriminatory’. Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, said: ‘We are not a papers-carrying country.’ But now, without debate or democratic scrutiny, vaccine passports are quickly heading from unthinkable to unstoppable. Today, No. 10 released more details — hence the questions Johnson is facing. But bizarrely, the Prime Minister was unable to admit to any of it, and pretended to be confused by what he was being asked. This matters. If he cannot acknowledge his flagship scheme, leaving such an indefensible gulf between what his government has just published and what he has just said, he may already be

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Go with the flow: how helpful is mass testing?

Over half the adult population has been vaccinated, new infections and deaths have plummeted to their lowest level since last September — and the government chooses this point to launch a programme to test every adult for Covid twice a week. The Prime Minister is due to announce this afternoon that lateral flow testing kits will be distributed by the million, free of charge to anyone who wants them. We will all be encouraged to test ourselves — and be placed under an obligation to self-isolate if they are positive. Why? We have spent the past three months on a massive vaccination programme, using vaccines that have proved pretty well 100 per

Friday

Kate Andrews

Talking down vaccines is a short-sighted tactic

How strange to have spent a year in a world where to hug someone outside of your household is not allowed. For the past five days, six people in England have been able to meet up outdoors again, but only in a socially distanced way. Previously, the argument for crackdown on such instinctive human behaviour centred around hospitals being overrun. Today, the Covid data tells a very positive story, with infections, hospitalisations and deaths all down by 90 per cent or more since the most recent peak. Meanwhile, the right data is going up, with over half of the UK adult population having received at least their first dose of a Covid

Mary Dejevsky

Could the Sputnik vaccine end Russia’s rift with the West?

Accounts differ. But it would appear that during a wide-ranging conference call earlier this week, the leaders of France and Germany broached the possibility of – wait for it – buying some of Russia’s pandemic pride and joy: its Sputnik V vaccine. If a deal is struck this would be a huge boost to Russia at home and abroad, and by extension to President Putin, who has spent months trying to dispel widespread Western suspicions about the Russian vaccine, from its Soviet-era name to the breakneck speed of its development. Any deal would also represent quite a turnaround for France and Germany, whose leaders have spearheaded a Continental European reluctance

Thursday

Kate Andrews

Pfizer trial finds vaccine ‘100% effective’ against South African variant

Pfizer and BioNTech have released some extraordinary findings from a Phase 3 trial involving 46,307 participants, between seven days and six months after a second dose was administered. The vaccine was found to have a 91.3 per cent efficacy rate. These findings line up with the real world data coming out of Israel, which has used the Pfizer vaccine to inoculate its population, and reported several weeks ago that it proved 94 per cent effective in preventing symptomatic illness. But on top of the overall efficacy rate came even better news: Pfizer is reporting that the ‘vaccine was 100 per cent effective in preventing severe disease’ as defined by the

Tuesday

William Nattrass

How the Sputnik vaccine brought down Slovakia’s Prime Minister

March was a dark month for Slovakia. Covid cases and deaths in the country were among the highest in Europe, while political tensions reached breaking point this week with the resignation of Prime Minister Igor Matovič, after the country controversially purchased Sputnik V vaccine doses. Following disputes within the ruling coalition over the decision to depart from the EU’s vaccine strategy, Matovič agreed to trade places with the Minister of Finance, making him the first European leader to fall victim to ‘vaccine diplomacy’ amid concerns about a shift eastward in Slovak foreign policy. Matovič’s fall is particularly painful given the wave of optimism which swept him to power in last year’s

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why is vaccinated Chile locking down again?

Get ahead with vaccination and you can open up your country sooner. It seems logical, but it is not quite how things are working in Britain, where in spite of this week’s relaxation our lockdown restrictions remain among the toughest in the world. This applies even less in Chile. On 29 March, 6.53 million of the country’s 19 million population had received a first dose of vaccine (either Pfizer or the Chinese Sinovac) and 3.37 million had received a second dose. In combined doses per million people, Chile is a little ahead of Britain. Yet large parts of the country have been placed back into a lockdown even more severe

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Gove hints at vaccine passport app

It wasn’t so long ago that ministers were lining up on broadcast to insists vaccine passports were out of the question when it came to the UK. While they could be used for travel abroad, the UK was — as Matt Hancock put it — not a ‘papers, please’ country. Instead, the UK appears to be turning into an ‘app, please’ nation. On Monday, Michael Gove met with MPs across the House for a private ‘listening exercise’ on immunity IDs. Although the purpose of the session was supposedly to gather MPs’ thoughts on the issue of vaccine passports, attendees were left with the distinct impression that they would be going ahead regardless of

Friday

Steerpike

Watch: Adonis grilled on UK vaccine scheme

As President of the European Movement during the current Brussels vaccine crisis, Andrew Adonis currently has his work cut out. With polls currently showing that Brits now have a more positive attitude towards the UK’s future outside the EU than negative by a margin of two to one, any bid to get the UK to rejoin the EU will suffer for as long as the trade bloc’s jab woes continue. Still, Adonis could make it easier for himself and get round to deleting some of his old tweets on the UK’s own vaccine efforts. Appearing last night on Spectator TV the peer was asked by Andrew Neil why he’d tweeted in November that the

Thursday

Dalibor Rohac

On vaccines, the EU is getting what it paid for

Remember when the EU was going to provide an antidote to the spectre of vaccine nationalism? While Italian authorities are raiding pharmaceutical plants for vaccines, the European Commission is pushing for measures to block vaccine exports to countries that do not ‘reciprocate’. Unfortunately, European authorities have it exactly backward. Instead of seeking to expand the existing supply, their ham-fisted policies risk having the opposite effect. The ongoing war on AstraZeneca is bound to make every pharmaceutical firm think twice before signing a contract with the EU. And with vaccine production chains spanning across numerous jurisdictions, including non-members of the EU, export restrictions increase legal uncertainty and can disrupt supplies further.

Steven Barrett

The EU’s vaccine grab breaches the rule of law

The EU is discussing confiscating and requisitioning private property. It is surprisingly brazen about this. The bloc is proposing both a ‘bespoke’ vaccine export ban and has identified 29 million doses in Anagni in Italy which it wants. The EU wishes to rectify its own error in vaccine procurement. That is a breach of the rule of law. The rule of law is very simple. It means that no one is above the law and there is one law for all. The EU asserts, regularly, that it has a legal case against AstraZeneca. I, and many other legal commentators, rubbished that assertion in January. But as I stated publicly eight

Tuesday

Katy Balls

Boris tries to avoid a vaccine war

After France’s Europe Minister became the latest politician to threaten a vaccine export ban on the UK, Boris Johnson used today’s press conference to try to diffuse the row ahead of Thursday’s summit of EU leaders. When asked in the Q&A session whether such an export ban could derail the UK roadmap for ending lockdown and if the UK would retaliate, the Prime Minister stressed the need for cooperation from all sides. No. 10 fear retaliatory measures in the event of a vaccine export ban could make the situation go from bad to worse Johnson said the UK would continue to work with European partners to deliver the vaccine rollout – suggesting

Monday

Katy Balls

Is the UK about to be forced into a vaccine war?

Is the UK about to be forced into a vaccine war? That’s the concern in Westminster after Brussels upped the ante over a potential vaccine export ban. Ursula von der Leyen suggested last week that the European Commission could block vaccine exports to countries with a high volume of jabs already. Now an EU official has said that the EU will rebuff any British government calls to ship Oxford AstraZeneca vaccines from a factory in the Netherlands.  The primary complaint among EU leaders is that AstraZeneca is yet to make good on its contractual obligations to them and deliver them the number of doses first promised. The Dutch plant can make between five and six million

Friday

James Forsyth

No one wins a vaccine trade war

Ursula von der Leyen’s threat to invoke emergency powers blocking EU vaccine exports and requisitioning factories was fairly extreme. Her justification was that 41 million doses have been exported from the EU to 33 countries in the last six weeks alone at a time when its own vaccination programmes are struggling. But, as I say in the Times today, this ignores two crucial points. First, it is not the EU making these vaccines but rather private companies. Second, the supply chains for vaccines are global and complex. ‘They can’t really be autarkic on this,’ says one cabinet minister. For example, the lipids used in the Pfizer vaccine tend to come from the

Francis Pike

Has Britain fallen victim to the Asian vaccine war?

The success story of Britain’s vaccine rollout has hit its first major obstacle: five million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine will be held up for a month. But how many of us knew it was India, not manufacturing plants in the UK or Europe, that was supplying a considerable amount of our vaccine needs? And does the delay show that Britain is now caught in the middle of an emerging vaccine war in Asia? The delayed jabs are being manufactured in the Indian city of Pune (pronounced Poona). Sometimes known as the ‘Oxford of the East’, the city – already famous for the manufacture of car parts – is about

Thursday

Katy Balls

Boris Johnson attempts to calm vaccine concerns

The message from Boris Johnson’s press conference this evening was one of reassurance. Following the decision by several EU member states to suspend use of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine over concerns about a potential link with blood clots, the Prime Minister said that the vaccine is safe and that ‘the benefits of the vaccine in preventing Covid far outweigh any risks’. Pointing to statements from both the UK and EU regulators on its safety, Johnson said the thing that ‘isn’t safe is catching Covid’. Johnson was also at pains to calm concerns over vaccine supply. The Prime Minister admitted that the UK was experiencing a supply issue — but said that

Wednesday

Steven Barrett

The EU’s jab snatching ruse is legally absurd

For some months now, increasingly disturbing statements on the law or legal threats have emanated from the EU. Some of these focus on AstraZeneca and if you were a drug company who had committed so early on and so successfully to helping develop and distribute a vaccine for the current pandemic (at cost price), you might reasonably feel hard done by. But that is not for me. What is for me is the latest, oddest statement, that the EU may seize AstraZeneca’s manufacturing plants and their produce and possibly their intellectual property rights (the recipe). Can they? The EU has form for making statements on the law which are wrong.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Is Matt Hancock trying to spin a vaccine supply crisis?

Matt Hancock was tremendously smiley when he led Wednesday’s coronavirus press briefing. In between beaming, he managed to tell us about the ‘fantastic news’ that the vaccination programme has now reached more than 25 million people having had their first dose. He was very keen to sing the praises of this programme — and indeed of his involvement in it — saying: ‘I’ve had the honour of playing my part, we’ve had the honour of playing our parts, it’s been a huge team effort and I’ve got absolutely no doubt it’s the best project I’ve ever been involved in.’ He also rather pointedly talked about ‘those of us who’ve been involved