Vaccine - Coronavirus

Seems slow to me with the vaccine administration. I would have thought the army and GP’s would be working 7 days a week to get this process completed. Every day lost is an extra cost on the NHS.

Testing in schools? Would it not be more prudent to vaccinate all the school children immediately along with the 18-25 year age group who are spreading it? Schools/Unis can then get on without life without constant interruptions.

Don’t want to sound callous but should priority on vaccines not be on children/those spreading it as opposed to ninety year olds who could die anyway? Surely those who are very elderly or vulnerable should be staying at home anyway in the coming weeks/months which also includes myself.

Just seems very slow to me and can’t see this all being completed until September and there seems u turn after u turn from the government as usual!

Lost count of u turns it’s more of a beep beep beep this vehicle is reversing again and again and again

Vaccine - what could possibly go wrong? I have uploaded this article from todays Telegraph as it is behind a paywall
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When Boris Johnson cheerfully declared that things should be much better by Easter, hearts will have sunk all over the country. One of the few reliable features of the pandemic is the Prime Minister’s optimistic predictions being quickly disproven. He spoke of “normality” by November. Then Christmas. We were also promised no more lockdowns, or school closures. So now, when he says we could be less than three months away from the taming of Covid, it’s hard to banish the idea of something going rather drastically wrong.

His aides are, by now, familiar with his trend. He hates giving bad news. So after a particularly bleak press conference, he’ll seek to end on a high note with an unscripted promise of dazzling success (such as a “world-beating” test-and-trace system). “We need to break that habit of overpromising and underdelivering,” says one of his lieutenants in the Covid battles.

His striking optimism about the future may well be rooted in the misery of the present: surging Covid cases and ever-stricter restrictions. Right now, the vaccine isn’t just the best hope. It’s the only hope.

But there is, at least, a rational case for hope. The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine has finally been approved: effective, we’re told, even after the first of the recommended two doses. Britain certainly has been quicker off its feet than almost anyone else. The NHS has already given out almost a million doses of a fragile Pfizer vaccine that has to be imported and stored at -70C. Now we have reserved 100 million doses of an Oxford vaccine that is made here and can be kept in a fridge. The biggest operation in NHS history is about to begin.

The military have been embedded with the NHS for weeks: members of the 101 Logistics Brigade have desks in the top floor of the NHS headquarters under Brigadier Phil Prosser who chairs the 8am vaccine meeting. The jabs are just part of it: there are 12 million pieces of equipment (manuals, gloves) to get out to the GPs and hospital hubs who’ll start giving out the Oxford vaccine on Monday. The only restraint for now is supply, with AstraZeneca promising to make two million doses a week.

Then come the drawbacks. The Oxford vaccine needs to spend 20 days in sterilisation, so there’s a waiting game – which is why just 530,000 of the promised 4 million doses will be ready by Monday. Then, the safety tests: each batch needs to be checked by the regulator. The speed of rollout will be affected not just by social distancing, but the regulations: everyone is being observed for 15 minutes in case of nasty reactions. When the vaccines come, they’ll do so in splurges – there will be times when everyone is waiting for supplies.

Let’s go back to the Prime Minister’s deadline – or, as he prefers to call it, his “terminus ante quem” of Easter Sunday, April 4. To hit this timeframe, a lot of things would have to go right. Vaccinations would have to run close to 1.5 million a week by the end of this month, rising to 2.5 million – perhaps more – over the next two months. This is more than Astra can make, but Pfizer vaccines are due in February. Factor in the three weeks that the vaccine needs to take effect, and an Easter deadline is a stretch. But it’s doable.

This takes us to a conundrum every country faces: when to start relaxing lockdown? Do you shoot for herd immunity, protecting between 65 per cent and 85 per cent of the population? That would take all summer. Ministers are instead going for a compromise: to start dismantling restrictions when Covid is downgraded from a mass killer to a manageable risk. After having identified that 99 per cent of deaths come from the over-50s, the next question is how many in this group need to be protected. All of them? Or, perhaps, just four in five?

These are the discussions now going on inside government. But even this depends on factors that ministers can only guess at. Will the vaccine stop people catching or passing on the virus – or just stop them getting really sick? Will we end up with Covid-19 cases still growing but hospital numbers falling – and deaths falling faster still? This is the working assumption, but it will take weeks to find out. Then there’s an obvious counter-argument: yes, deaths may fall. But what about long Covid, a condition where people have not recovered after three months? What about locking down longer, to protect them?

Then comes the growing international fight for the Oxford vaccine, which has started already. AstraZeneca is a firm with global ties and is already facing pressure from other countries who’d like a few million doses. In Whitehall, there’s an argument that it’s better for Britain not to say how many doses we have because we’re now in a global vaccine poker game and it’s best not to show our hand.

When any vaccine is given to tens of millions of people, there will be glitches. Some of them (like rare allergic reactions) wil be serious. Dosage mix-ups are inevitable: Oxford itself messed up on its own trials, giving hundreds of people half a dose by mistake. Earlier this week in Germany, four care home workers ended up in hospital after being given five times the recommended dose of the Pfizer vaccine. In Switzerland, someone died after being given a vaccine – but at the age of 91 years old, with multiple illnesses. After millions of vaccinations worldwide there have been just a handful of such stories, none fanning anti-vax flames.

For now, all eyes will be on the NHS, facing its normal winter load with a virus factor that has seen Covid-19 hospital cases in London treble over the past month alone. Given that the surge in London and Kent started when the last lockdown was very much in place, it’s far from clear what impact the Tier 4 restrictions will make. And if cases fall, the experience of last summer suggests that the restrictions will stay – for fear of what might happen if they are lifted.

Johnson has, so far, not been outbid in his deadline optimism. No one has gone earlier than Easter. Matt Hancock talks only about “Spring”. Sir Simon Stevens, the head of the NHS, pushes it to “late Spring” which, of course, lasts until June. Perhaps the key to a happy new year is to hope that, this time, the Prime Minister is right.

The facts are that the developers have said that it "might" be 70% effective on reducing severe symptoms, but you will still have to wear a mask and social distance and pass it on even if you have it.
People are living in the hope that it's a miracle cure and everything will be hunky dory when they have been vaccinated.
I think the vulnerable which is about fif**** million people will be given it to take the pressure off the intensive care units.
I have said before, a virus has to run it's course.

Something like 90% of all deaths with coronavirus positive within 28 days are in the age group 65+.

People at school can get the virus and pass it on but almost certainly very very few will die or need intensive care.

That is why the priority must be for the older age groups, after NHS staff. If not the older age range will block up the NHS beds with Covid and no one else will be able to receive treatment, no matter how urgent.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Yarmbaggie

Something like 90% of all deaths with coronavirus positive within 28 days are in the age group 65+.

People at school can get the virus and pass it on but almost certainly very very few will die or need intensive care.

That is why the priority must be for the older age groups, after NHS staff. If not the older age range will block up the NHS beds with Covid and no one else will be able to receive treatment, no matter how urgent.

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But that’s my point - vaccinate first those that are passing it on so stopping the spread! What’s the point of mass testing in schools when this time could be spent mass vaccinating? Children’s education can’t keep stop starting as can universities! Without being callous the other day a 98 year old was vaccinated - if I was that age I would either completely stay indoors or think - every month could be a bonus anyway so is the vaccine really worth it!

If a lot of the very elderly or vulnerable stayed indoors then this would be less of a burden on the NHS when someone gets the virus. I rarely go in shops or close to someone myself!

I have seen that Formaldehyde is a drug that can cause leukaemia and other cancer's in young children.
Is it one of the ingredients in the vaccine? What are the ingredients? I would suspect one of them would be a small dose of the Covid 19 strain because that is how the Flu jab works.
I certainly wouldn't vaccinate young children who don't get severe symptoms anyway. What a tragedy it would be if they were left with something more long term because people in my age bracket are frightened of dying.