2 Articles; compare & contrast
Capt Wardrobe - April 2021
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Is vaccinating against Covid enough?
Robin McKie Observer science editor - Sun, 11 April 2021
A trio of countries stand out for the effectiveness of their Covid-19 vaccination programmes: Israel, Chile and the UK. All have managed to inoculate an impressively high percentage of their people but each has fared very differently in controlling the disease.
Israel has done so well it is resuming university lectures, concerts and other mass gatherings and has opened up its restaurants and bars. By contrast, Chile is experiencing soaring levels of Covid cases and faces new lockdown restrictions.
In Britain, deaths and hospital admissions have plummeted but it remains to be seen what will happen when lockdown restrictions are eased in England from Monday. (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each have their own timetables for easing.) Will the UK follow the grim example of Chile or the happier precedent of Israel?
Vaccinations
The nation will soon find out although it should be noted that Israel and Chile are not the only ones that provide helpful illustrations of how the fight against Covid-19 should be shaped in coming months. Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany and many others provide key lessons.
Nevertheless, it is Chile that supplies the sharpest warning for the UK. Its health workers have delivered first jabs to 37% of the population but daily cases are still rising sharply. Several reasons have been put forward for this unexpected jump: the spread of more virulent coronavirus strains from Brazil; increased numbers of Chileans travelling around the country; and reduced adherence to social distancing after the vaccination programme gave people a false sense of security.
The importance of this last point was stressed by Prof Lawrence Young, a virologist at Warwick Medical School. "I think that Chile shows the danger of being too reliant just on vaccines. Vaccines are fantastic but they're never going to be a solution on their own and what is happening in Chile provides us with a very clear warning."
Prof Stephen Griffin, of Leeds University School of Medicine, agreed. "You still need to get cases under control while you're vaccinating. If you don't, you will still be in trouble."
Chile therefore reveals the dangers of vaccine hubris. By contrast Israel demonstrates the need for constant planning and preparedness. Since its mighty vaccine rollout began, it has set up a number of initiatives to maintain its progress against Covid. These include a system of green passes that are given to people who have either had both vaccine doses or have recovered from the illness and are therefore deemed unlikely to be infectious. The plan is controversial and many have protested against its imposition.
"However, for universities, it has helped to get students back into lecture theatres where academics can teach students in person," said Linda Bauld, professor of public health at Edinburgh University. "These are the sorts of measures we need to be discussing now so we can be sure we are opening up safely over summer."
Two other Israeli measures were also highlighted by Bauld. Antibody tests - which will show if a person has Covid antibodies either from a vaccine or a previous infection - allow international travellers arriving in Israel to avoid quarantine. At the same time, health authorities are also considering giving vaccines to older children once they are approved by regulators. These initiatives show just how far ahead Israel is planning, added Bauld.
Other scientists point to the examples of Australia and New Zealand. The former has had just a handful of cases despite launching its vaccination programme only a few weeks ago - thanks to the rapid closure of its borders last year and its carefully managed hotel quarantine system that has reduced Covid's spread to minuscule levels. By contrast, Britain's lamentable test, trace and isolate system remains rickety and unproven - despite the fact it will be crucial to suppressing new outbreaks of Covid-19 once restrictions are lifted. "To put it simply, we have not learned just how important isolating infected people is still going to be," said Griffin.
Then there is the issue of vaccinating the world - for until this happens, Covid-19 will remain a menace and Britain will continue to be under threat. It therefore has a role to play in providing jabs around the globe.
Israeli musician Ivri Lider performs in front of an audience wearing protective face masks
Israeli musician Ivri Lider performs for an audience wearing face masks and who had shown a ‘green pass' to enter a stadium in Tel Aviv last month.
Scientists estimate that more than 11bn doses of vaccines will be required to provide double jabs for 70% of the world's population - a number that would, hopefully, achieve some form of global herd immunity. However, recent figures indicate that the richest nations - who make up a fifth of the world's population and include the UK - have already bought 6bn doses, while the remaining poorer nations - four-fifths of humanity - have secured only 2.6bn.
In the face of this huge vaccine imbalance, India and South Africa have asked the World Trade Organization to suspend patent rights on various Covid-19 techniques, vaccines and drugs to help them produce their own treatments to cope with the pandemic. The proposal has now been backed by more than 100 nations.
"We cannot repeat the painful lessons from the early years of the Aids response when wealthier countries got back to health while millions of people in developing countries were left behind," Winnie Byanyima, executive director of Unaids, the United Nations HIV/Aids agency said in the journal Nature recently.
This point was backed last week by Dorothy Guerrero, head of policy at Global Justice Now, an NGO campaigning for equitable vaccine access. She accused rich countries of hoarding vaccines at the expense of low- and middle-income countries. "There is one rapid, sure-fire way to increase global vaccination - waive patents on Covid-19 vaccines and let countries produce their own jabs. Countries like the UK need to step up."
However, the European Union, the UK and many other western nations, together with major pharmaceutical companies, argue that waiving patent rights would not help. They say making vaccines involves the implementation of a series of careful, quality-controlled steps.
Negotiating the distribution of patent rights for these different processes would take far too long. It would be better to increase vaccine production to its highest level and then distribute jabs.
Scientists, though, are emphatic that the world will not be safe from Covid-19 until global immunisation has taken place. As the slogan states: no one is safe until everyone is safe. Achieving that goal could take years, however.
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Swine flu was as elusive as WMD. Simon Jenkins - Thu 14 Jan 2010
Remember the warnings of 65,000 dead? Health chiefs should admit they were wrong - yet again - about a global pandemic
Let me recap. Six months ago I reviewed the latest bit of terrorism to emerge from the government's Cobra bunker, courtesy of Alan Johnson, home secretary. Swine flu was allegedly ravaging the nation. The BBC was intoning nightly statistics on what "could" happen as "the deadly virus" took hold. The chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, bandied about any figure that came into his head, settling on "65,000 could die", peaking at 350 corpses a day.
Donaldson knew exactly what would happen. The media went berserk. The World Health Organisation declared a "six-level alert" so as to "prepare the world for an imminent attack". The happy-go-lucky virologist, John Oxford, said half the population could be infected, and that his lowest estimate was 6,000 dead.
The "Andromeda strain" was stalking the earth, and its first victims were clearly scientists. Drugs were frantically stockpiled and key workers identified as vital to be saved for humanity's future. Cobra alerted the army. Morgues were told to stand ready. The Green party blamed intensive pig farming. The Guardian listed "the top 10 plague books".
If anyone dared question this drivel, they were dismissed by Donaldson as "extremists". When people started reporting swine flu to be even milder than ordinary flu, he accused them of complacency and told them to "wait for next winter". He was already buying 32m masks and spending more than £1bn on Tamiflu and vaccines. Surgeries refused entry to those with flu symptoms, referring them to a government "hotline" where prescription drugs were ordered to be made available without examination or doctor's note. Who knows how many died of undiagnosed illness as a result? Lines were instantly jammed. It was pure, systematic government-induced panic - in which I accept that the media played its joyful part.
This week the authorities admitted that, far from a winter upturn in swine flu, there has been a slump. From 100,000 a week at the peak, there were just 12,000 last week. After the coldest winter for decades, when deaths might be expected to rise, the rate is below that of seasonal flu. In the UK, 360 people have died under its influence, most with prior "non-flu" conditions. Swine flu is not nice - I have had it - but bears no relation to the government hysteria.
I accept that anyone can make a mistake, and authority has some duty to err on the side of caution. As Alastair Campbell implied on Tuesday, Iraq might have had weapons of mass destruction, so Blair was right to go to war just in case. But it is reasonable to ask, as the Chilcot inquiry is doing, why precaution on such a colossal and potentially destructive scale was justified when those who questioned the need for it have since been proved right. Is anyone asking about flu?
Swine flu is not the first time we have suffered this nonsense. I have a stack of predictions by senior scientists on BSE/CJD in 1995. It would "lead to 136,000 deaths" - a spurious exactitude used to convey plausibility - and "could infect up to 10 million Britons". This led to an obscene £5bn campaign of cattle destruction and compensation. When the prediction proved wildly wrong, the government excused itself with a classic Rumsfeld-ism: "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence."
This was followed by Sars 2003, a "panic gripping the world". The World Health Organisation declared that "One in four Britons could die". The medical doom-monger, Dr Patrick Dixon, said that Sars had "a 25% chance of killing tens of millions", whatever that meant. The madcap Tory health spokesman, Liam Fox, demanded the arrest and quarantining of all recent travellers from Asia, including 30,000 Asian students.
In the event, some 800 people died with Sars worldwide, against 21,000 who died in Britain in the seasonal flu epidemic of 1999/2000.
Undaunted, within a year the same alarmists were at work on avian flu. With now habitual hyperbole, Donaldson predicted 50,000 deaths, with "an upper limit", graciously conceded, of 750,000. When one dead swan slumped on a beach in Scotland, BBC reporters went crazy as inspectors stumbled through the seaweed, clad in anti-nuclear armour. Within a year the horror had passed. The global mortality was put at 262, with not one death in Britain. Another fiasco was brushed under the carpet.
The Blair government, and now Brown's, have proved adept at using scare politics to divert attention from other troubles. During foot-and-mouth Blair was quick to don a yellow jumpsuit for photographers and intone as if he alone stood between an illness (that is in fact harmless to humans) and armageddon. This time the swine flu coincided with two other "mystery diseases", MRSA and C-difficile, which killed 10,000 Britons in 2007 alone. But those deaths lay squarely at the doors of unclean NHS hospitals. Hence there were no scary stories or predictions about them from Donaldson.
Donaldson and his eager virologists will doubtless stick loyally to their predictions since it is "too early to be complacent". His allies at the BBC did their bit on Wednesday with a Horizon programme that turned a serious study of virology into grotesque scaremongering, with solemn music and voices crying, "there's no escape", "this could take a devilish turn", and "we don't even know how many viruses there are!" Children writhed in agony from smallpox.
Mad scientist syndrome is rampant. Had these scares been disseminated by a private firm, a local authority or a newspaper (as was anti-MMR), they would be damned from on high with demands that heads roll. As it is, the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies sails gaily on, still graced by the presence of Sir Roy Anderson, who happens also to draw a six-figure salary as a non-executive director of GlaxoSmithKline, which made hundreds of millions from the government's panic. Anderson, and GSK, vigorously deny any conflict of interest.
The Council of Europe's head of health, Wolfgang Wodarg, is one of the few who have dared blow the whistle on the links between "Big Pharma" and national and supranational agencies. He this week persuaded the council to stage a debate on the "enormous gains" made by GSK and others from the swine flu pandemic. He seeks details of relations between the companies and the WHO, given that stockpile contracts kick in the moment that organisation uses the word "pandemic". It did so for the first time last year, with reckless alacrity.
I am not aware of the WHO or the General Medical Council or any of the medical colleges investigating these matters, or any check on conflicts of interest of government doctors who work for drugs companies. I am not aware of any Whitehall or Commons committee, any National Audit Office or competition inquiry into the supply of these drugs. All I know is that a huge amount of health money, time and effort was last year diverted from possibly critical therapies into what looked from the start to be yet more terror virology.
This is why people are ever more sceptical of scientists. Why should they believe what "experts" say when they can be so wrong and with such impunity? Weapons of mass destruction, lethal viruses, nuclear radiation, global warming … why should we believe a word of it? And it is a short step from don't believe to don't care.
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