Apparently there will be a second coming of Trump. The conspiracy bots are suggesting this will happen by 4th March.
The UK was reported as “the worst” in terms of COVID deaths today – while there are actually several countries in the 1400/1000000 death rate. You need to contrive the presentation a lot to find a way to make the UK worst (it seems to be “the UK is worst if you ignore countries that are worse”).
Major newspapers in Germany have reported that the Oxford vaccine has an efficacy of only 8% for the elderly – and Bild suggested the Oxford vaccine would not be approved for the elderly in Europe. The Guardian have linked this to an interview of AstraZeneca’s CEO, Pascal Soriot by la Repubblica
Now, why do people come up with this? I don’t know. Again, the emotions are raw. I would really like to call on people to really focus on the details and focus on the regulators. There is a lot of silly talk going on right now about all sorts of things. Some people making up stories, for what reason? I’m not sure. There may also be local political considerations sometimes? I can’t say.
we have strong data showing very strong antibody production against the virus in the elderly, similar to what we see in younger people
What about this new South African variant. Moderna have said their vaccine works on it. What does “works” mean? Apparently this variant tis six times harder to neutralise, but can still be neutralised.
There have been reports of excess vaccine being bought up by rich countries. Are they suggesting people will be vaccinated twice? And you cant hoard excess doses like toilet paper.
Most of this is fake news, some are underplayed and some are overplayed. Okay, I can understand that the Nostradamus style stuff like the return of Trump can be hard to prove or disprove. But some of these things are really easy to check and there is no reason for good quality media to get them so wrong.
I thought this would be a good introduction to my vaccine wars thoughts.
The EU is getting annoyed because the number of doses of the Oxford vaccine (that they have not approved) may be as low as 30 Million instead of the 80 Million they expected. So they are suggesting putting up barriers to export from the EU to stop “third countries” like the UK getting the Pfizer vaccine if they can’t get the Oxford vaccine.
I mean it sort of sounds right – we stop sending to them and they stop sending to us. But not if you read the back story. The missing doses of the Oxford vaccine were due to be produced in places like Germany and the Netherlands, and this is linked to limited production of an associated plant in Belgium. So this is purely an issue within the EU. Quite simply – without the Oxford vaccine the EU will be unable to vaccinate enough of their population. Are they looking for scapegoats?