Vaccine blast gives UK a rare victory in the fight against pandemic

Because the vaccine could only be in the refrigerator for three days once it reached the clinic, health workers knew they had to inject at 400 doses a day to use the stock. There were already a queue of people waiting for ‘jabs’, and doctors quickly diluted the vaccine, put the vials on trays and handed them out to a team of assistants.

This is the front line in what has become the most ambitious peacetime mass mobilization in modern British history. Britain has set up dozens of vaccination centers in sports stadiums, churches, mosques, even an open-air museum in the Midlands, which knows television views as the decade for the popular crime series “Peaky Blinders”.

With nearly 8 million people, or 11.7% of the population, already getting their first chance, Britain’s rate of vaccination is the fastest of any major nation in the world. Only Israel and the United Arab Emirates are moving faster.

The rapid implementation is a rare success for a country whose response to the coronavirus has otherwise been mixed – plagued by delays, reversals and mixed messages. All this has contributed to a death toll that has recently risen to more than 100,000 and confirms Britain’s status as the worst hit country in Europe.

Success has brought its own headache: doctors are now worried about the shortage of supplies, after a vaccine war broke out between Britain and the European Union. The EU on Friday imposed restrictions on the vaccines made in the block, after accusing a British vaccine manufacturer, AstraZeneca, of favoring its home market.

And Britain’s aggressive approach is not without risks: to quickly reach more people, he decided to give the second doses up to twelve weeks after the first, rather than the three or four weeks tested in clinical trials. , to give.

In the Bloomsbury Clinic, however, there was a distinct British atmosphere to go on with it. The mostly elderly patients waited patiently in the queue, rolled up their sleeves for their stab wounds, and then stepped out into a garden shed for 15 minutes to be watched for possible reactions.

“So many of my friends have had it,” said Emerenciana Mora, 72, a retired switchboard operator, about the vaccine as she watched as a medical assistant, Nasra Yusuf, prepared the needle. “Even the queen had it.”

The divergence between Britain and its European neighbors has led some to demand Brexit windfall earlier. Britain’s divorce from the European Union provided the political opportunity to authorize multiple vaccines before the bloc and to quickly shut down its own production of the AstraZeneca vaccine and the University of Oxford.

France, on the other hand, vaccinated only 1.8% of its population and Germany 2.6%, according to the numbers collected by Our World in Data. This reflects the shortage of supply that has swept across the continent, as well as the slow pace of European Union regulators approving vaccines.

But Britain’s success is also due to the basic decisions of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government.

Instead of outsourcing the campaign to private enterprises or rebuilding it, as with the costly, ineffective contact detection, the government placed the vaccination in the hands of the National Health Service, which continues to honor widely despite financial tensions is by the British public.

In addition to state hospitals, doctors are at the forefront of the program. It not only puts in place reliable local doctors, who are experienced with seasonal flu vaccinations, but it has also allowed these doctors to precisely target the people in the government’s highest priority groups.

This is a stark contrast to the more fragmented approach in the United States. While Americans had to rush to appointments on online portals and overwhelming phone lines, British hospitals and doctors set up the scheduling themselves so they could start with their oldest and most vulnerable patients.

And while U.S. states use complicated rules to determine who is eligible for vaccines – which has led to delays in implementation in some places – Britain has a clear system in place for those who, due to their age, are most at risk of getting vaccinated. virus to die, to prioritize. , together with the nursing homes and health workers who treat them.

“We work through these priority groups without any deviation,” said Dr. Daniel Beck, a general practitioner and head of a federation of physicians who were preparing vials in the clinic. “It benefits everyone, whether it’s someone who left home without training or whether he’s a gentleman.”

Among the 6,000 people vaccinated at Bloomsbury Clinic since mid-December was Joan Collins, 87, the British actress best known for her role in ‘Dynasty’. But Beck said his top priority is to reduce the hesitation of vaccines among racial and ethnic minorities, who according to polls are more distrustful than the white people of the health authorities in supporting the vaccine.

Abdul Mathlib, 85, a retired caterer who just got his shot, said he was worried even years later about the vaccine causing side effects. But Mathlib said it was worth the risk, adding, “You have to take it, right?”

While some observers point to Britain’s greater risk tolerance than the European Union, they attribute the vaccination success more to the country’s strong scientific base, as well as to ‘good old-fashioned preparation’, says David Goodhart, an author whose latest book , “The Road to Somwhere” explored the Brexit era Britain.

In any case, this was not typical of Britain’s broader response.

Few foreign leaders, like Johnson, have grappled with the pandemic. He abandoned the detection of large-scale contact and resisted imposing a shutdown, and then ended up in a guard unit himself after contracting the virus.

But during those chaotic early days, his ministers switched to investing in vaccines and obtained early contracts with manufacturers. They also recruited Kate Bingham, a British venture capitalist, to lead a task force of the government’s vaccine.

In March, the government provided initial funding – £ 2.6 million, or $ 3.5 million – to the Oxford research team. By May, when the vaccine was still in clinical trials, Britain had reached an agreement with AstraZeneca to buy tens of millions of doses, three months before the European Union negotiated its purchases.

As concerns about vaccination against vaccines had already flared up, British officials were determined to make any homemade vaccine accessible to Britons quickly and easily. They chatted with the Oxford team while negotiating with Merck and other drug companies looking for a partner to manufacture and distribute the vaccine.

Oxford has finally reached an agreement with AstraZeneca, headquartered in Cambridge.

“They have made it clear to me and others that they want to know about the agreement, and that they are concerned about vaccine nationalism,” said John Bell, an Oxford professor and member of the government’s vaccination task force, last year. health officials.

Two factories in England now manufacture the vaccine, and a firm in Wales is preparing it for distribution. The UK government has said most of the shipments of AstraZeneca vaccines come from the supply chain.

AstraZeneca said its early agreement with Britain helped it iron out the inevitable manufacturing hiccups before it began distributing the vaccine. Production problems in a Belgian plant led the company to announce that it would reduce deliveries to Europe by 60%, causing the cross-channel dispute.

“With the UK, we had three months extra time to resolve all the errors we experienced,” Pascal Soriot, CEO of AstraZeneca, told an Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, this week.

EU drug regulators on Friday approved the AstraZeneca vaccine for all adults, complying with the precedent set by the UK regulator last month.

Britain, meanwhile, could get a vaccine again soon.

Novavax, a biotechnology company in Gaithersburg, Maryland, reported Friday that the vaccine is 89.3% effective in a large-scale trial in Britain. The government has obtained 60 million doses that will be made at a plant in the north east of England. If approved by UK regulators, the vaccine will be delivered in the second half of 2021.

In all, the British government has spent at least £ 11.7 billion, or $ 16 billion, on developing, manufacturing, buying and administering vaccines.

“Vaccination is the only thing we have managed,” said Christina Pagel, a professor of operational research at University College London.

This does not mean that the deployment was without tension. With hospital overruns and a more contagious variant sweeping the country, Britain has been waiting to give more people the partial protection of a single dose, rather than giving fewer people the full protection of two doses quickly.

Doctors whose shot increases have slowed down are angry at the approach and accuse the government of making subjects of a new, risky experiment worried that vaccines will be less effective. Immunologists have expressed concern that a country full of people with only partial immunity could reproduce vaccine-resistant mutations, while Pfizer said the strategy was not supported by data collected in clinical trials.

But the idea of ​​prioritizing the first shots has gained some traction, as countries struggling with the rising virus and shortage of vaccine are looking for ways to partially protect their populations.

For the married doctors at Bloomsbury Clinic, the biggest challenge is getting just a steady amount of doses.

“Our biggest problem is that we do not know week after week what deliveries we get,” said Dr. Clinical director Ammara Hughes said as she anxiously examined her iPhone for news of the next installment. “The logistics are difficult.”

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