Covid-19 finger-pointing

Various demands from EU members are not helpful. EU officials said today "that AstraZeneca's two UK plants making its coronavirus vaccine must share production with the EU under the contract the drugs firm signed with Brussels" according to RTE in Ireland. This unfortunately feeds into the paranoia of those voters in England and Wales we would hope to persuade to apply to rejoin the Union.

One can dismiss the claim that AstraZeneca is in the vaccine game solely to maximise its profits, when the company and its research partners in Oxford University have undertaken to deliver their product at cost to developing countries. Another point that the EU president and her health minister do not take into consideration is that, because the UK government committed early to purchase the Oxford vaccine, AstraZeneca was encouraged to start production in its British facilities even before the phase three trials had finished. Thus, any production difficulties could be spotted at an early stage. The EU's hesitation and bureaucracy told against a similar outcome in AstraZeneca's continental factories. 

Unfortunately, the tit-for-tat which some EU members seek, denying export of the BioNTech vaccine to the UK from the Pfizer fa ctory in Belgium, may gain wider support. By committing our stock of this vaccine to a first inoculation, presumably relying on the next Pfizer delivery to provide the necessary booster, the Westminster government has laid us open to a threat that the second shot will not be available even at the end of twelve weeks which their advisors believe is optimal. (It has to be said that few immunoogists outside the UK are prepared to agree that departing from the manufacturer's specified interval is going to be effective.)

WHO investigation

Their fortnight's quarantine over, the investigators from the World Health Organisation left their hotel by bus for Wuhan this morning. One hopes that they will be allowed to speak one-to-one on a professional level with the renowned researchers in the Wuhan Institute without having to go through political intermediaries. Their task has been made more difficult by the unverifiable accusation by the dying Trump regime that SARS/CoV2 was released accidentally from the institute. It is hardly credible that one of the leading research bodies in the field, which was far more aware of the dangers of zoonoses than administrations in the West and indeed consistenly issued warnings about them, would have such lax procedures as to jeopardise their fellow-citizens.

Having said that, I would not be surprised if it turned out that the Wuhan wet market was not the place where the virus first jumped from bat (or pangolin) to human. We have the evidence of infections in France and Italy before Dr Li spotted that a new killer disease was about in the wet market. It is possible that the tourists who brought the virus to Europe came from another province of China, maybe even another Asian country. Personal witness evidence may be inhibited by the Chinese authorities, but there should be enough samples preserved at the institute and in clinics to provide a genomic trail.