COVID Vaccines To Reach Poorest Countries in 2023 -- Despite Recent Pledges (nature.com) 164
Most people in the poorest countries will need to wait another two years before they are vaccinated against COVID-19, researchers have told Nature. From a report: Around 11 billion doses are needed to fully vaccinate 70% of the world's population against COVID-19. As of 4 July, 3.2 billion doses had been administered. At the current vaccination rate, this will increase to around six billion doses by the end of the year, researchers from the International Monetary Fund, based in Washington DC, project. But so far, more than 80% of the doses have gone to people in high-income and upper-middle-income countries. Only 1% of people in low-income countries have been given at least one dose, according to the website Our World in Data.
Last month, the leaders of the G7 group of wealthy nations pledged extra doses for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) by the end of 2022, at a summit in Cornwall, UK. The centrepiece was a promise from US President Joe Biden to donate 500 million doses of the vaccine made by pharmaceutical company Pfizer of New York City and biotechnology company BioNTech in Mainz, Germany. This is in addition to 87.5 million previously pledged. The United Kingdom pledged 100 million, and France, Germany and Japan have pledged around 30 million each.
Last month, the leaders of the G7 group of wealthy nations pledged extra doses for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) by the end of 2022, at a summit in Cornwall, UK. The centrepiece was a promise from US President Joe Biden to donate 500 million doses of the vaccine made by pharmaceutical company Pfizer of New York City and biotechnology company BioNTech in Mainz, Germany. This is in addition to 87.5 million previously pledged. The United Kingdom pledged 100 million, and France, Germany and Japan have pledged around 30 million each.
Astraya (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
> Fuck all cunts getting the jab here in Australia.
> I visited my GP and asked if I could receive it...
You a wannabe cunt, mate? Put another IQ point on the barbie.
Re: Astraya (Score:5, Informative)
Fuck all cunts getting the jab here in Australia. I should translate for non-Australians. "Fuck all" means there is none or hardly any. I'm not saying to fuck everyone getting the jab. Hah
Re: Astraya (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Astraya (Score:5, Funny)
Saw a sign the other day that read "Do not ride bikes or scooters in the park. Children and the elderly may be injured."
Thought that was a bit daft, no riding your bike but beating up old people and kids is okay?!
Re: (Score:2)
Wait until you translate the rest of the sentence.
Fuck all - already covered
cunts - upstanding ladies or gentlemen, a term of endearment to fellow members of the human race.
jab - an injection commonly referring specifically to a commonly widely distributed injection for example vaccination.
Australia - Commonly referring to 5 of the 6 states and both of the territories of the country of Australia, because no one likes Tasmania and we are all hoping it drifts further away from the mainland.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Its nice to know that other nations use the word cunt as a generic term. In Scotland its barely even a swear (although maybe don't call your mother in law a cunt).
Stolen from Joe Heenan on twitter - A Scottish guide to the word cunt.
Good cunt = nice person
Daft cunt = silly person
Thick cunt = stupid person
Bunch of cunts = Tories
That cunt = Him/her
Total cunt = Nigel Farage
Kick his cunt in = Fight that man
Ooo ya cunt ye = that’s sore
Re:Astraya (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
What a arse-about, second rate, holes in the ground shithole my country has become.
What I'd give to be back in Australia, a country largely living a normal life throughout all of last year while much of the rest of the world was in lockdown.I can't believe I actually got jealous of my mother posting photos on Facebook drinking a wheat beer in the German Club in an Australian city while I was standing in fucking Germany staring at closed pubs.
Stop your bitcharse whining. It's un-Australian, and be thankful our craps his own pants in a McDonalds PM and a few moron Premiers gave you a life l
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
fair cop he came a cropper on the scuttlebut but turned it round anyway. seppos gonna be gallahs and think we all sound blotto like some bumblefuck bogan anyway.
"Divided by a common language" (Score:2)
That is the way anybody would read it in US English but I'm pretty sure it's not what the poster meant.
They don't need donations of doses. (Score:4, Interesting)
They need production facilities.
When it became clear that Pfizer was working great and the AZ rollout was a trainwreck, Pfizer started work on a new facility in Europe and a couple months later dramatically increased out production capacity. This is needed all over the world For initial shots, for boosters, and then - down the road - for other mRNA treatments. It's not like Africa has a shortage of diseases that need vaccines.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, it won't be fast, but if we start now we have a better chance of having the capacity in place for the next pandemic. There will be one.
Need Money (Score:2)
It's not like Africa has a shortage of diseases that need vaccines.
No, but it has a shortage of money to pay for those vaccines to be developed and then produced. Commercial drug research is always going to focus on the diseases and problems afflicting those with the largest bank balances. Just look at how at least some of these companies extort money from rich countries - and even the well-behaved companies are only one takeover or new CEO from becoming just as bad. They can't do that to poor countries because they simply don't have the money to pay....and frankly soon n
Re:They don't need donations of doses. (Score:5, Insightful)
They need production facilities.
Building vaccine production facility in Somalia is entirely different challenge from building one in Europe. More so, people in Somalia are not stupid and would not trust vaccines produced there. Similar situation in Russia - they have very low uptake of vaccines because nobody trusts the process.
Re: (Score:2)
Build on ships. Sail to where needed.
Re: (Score:2)
You might implicitly trust something produced in the USA, Germany, UK, France, maybe a few more countries (Switzerland, Italy, Austria, ...).
You might implicitly trust something produced under Renault brand in Turkey.
However, many ships sail under "flags of convenience". Would you trust something produced in a Liberian, or Panaman ship?
Also, ships are not usually paragons of sanitation - see some sanitary crises on cruise ships, promoted by some as the "ultimate vacation".
Re: (Score:2)
Two words, hospital ships. Clean and under a sovereign flag.
Re: (Score:2)
Right. You're going to build a high-tech, cutting edge pharma production facility in places where farmers can't install irrigation systems because people steal the water pipes.
It's all well and good to talk about "leapfrogging", i..e, skipping generations of technology. However, there are limits: you can't skip past what the local populace is capable of supporting. Whatever the reasons (and that's a whole different discussion), certain parts of the world are simply incompatible with a high-tech society.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
We don't actually need new facilities. We need existing facilities capable of producing the Pfizer vaccine to be subcontracted to manufacture them.
That is what happened in Europe. No new facilities were built. Just a few existing bio facilities were additionally qualified by Pfizer and the regulator to produce the vaccine. And that isn't just Pfizer, they are doing that for all the vaccines.
E.g. Halix was recently qualified in the Netherlands to produce more AZ
The BioNTech facility in Marburg has always bee
Re: (Score:2)
Nobody had a spare mRNA vaccine production facility lying around. To be fair, full production is not done in Europe - the plasmids are shipped over from the US. But the mRNA production and subsequent lipid nanoparticle encapsulation are done in Europe.
Also, while
Re: (Score:2)
Grateful that some of the economies in Africa are improving.
I also have friends from Cape Town. They leave me the impression that the economy is fine, and it is of course full of natural beauty, but crime is a HUGE problem, even compared to otherwise comparable cities in the US.
I value my family's safety more than I do widescreen TVs or yearly vacations or a new car every 3 years. I suspect most folks do. The safety problem, in places where it is a problem (including right here where I already am), needs
Re: (Score:2)
Nobody had a spare mRNA vaccine production facility lying around.
Please stop using the word facility. No new facilities have been built. None. And that despite every increasing production capacities and ever more existing facilities producing the vaccine. This isn't about the ability to make the vaccine but being certified to produce specific components. Again You said "spare mRNA production facility", and I remind you the company which developed the fucking vaccine itself wasn't *allowed* to produce it and it had nothing to do with production limitations of its facilit
Re: (Score:2)
Okay, fine - what were the industrial scale mRNA bioreactors being used for beforehand? And the lipid nanoparticle encapsulation system, what was it being used for before it was repurposed? If you're going to argue that nothing new was built, then please describe what they were doing beforehand.
The Marburg facility was a Novartis facility used for producing a rabies and a tick-borne encephalitis vaccine. Both are extremely old-school tech: inactivated pathogen grown in fertilized chicken eggs. The plant's
Re: (Score:2)
Pfizer's new facility in Marburg wasn't created from scratch. It was an existing Novartis facility that was repurposed to produce the new vaccine.
Also, Marburg has been a center of biomedical research and production for a while, so qualified personnel was there.
It still took months. But creating the same from scratch elsewhere would have taken much longer.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm sure companies like the Serum Institute could do final mixing / bottling / distribution at the very least. As far as I'm aware there's no Indian companies with experience mass producing and extracting specific DNA plasmids and then using them to breed (and then isolate) mRNA, at industrial scales, though. And while I'm sure the lipid encapsulation process could be implemented by any competent Indian biotech firm, I'm sure Pfizer doesn't want to share the precise details of their process.
The Serum Insti
Re: (Score:2)
Novavax is a good vaccine, BTW, at least judging from the Phase 3 results. After accounting for the fact that its Phase 3 trials were run while there were variants of concern circulating and Pfizer's weren't, Novavax's efficacy is probably up there with Pfizer's, or at least close. Lower side effects, cheaper to produce, and easier to store. More primitive technology, but hey, if it works...
Re: (Score:2)
Also, transportation of Pfizer/Biontech is easier in cooler countries with excellent road infrastructure.
Meanwhile, amid exulting press releases of "Pfizer is as good against variants" we have news from Israel suggesting an increase in number of cases, many twice vaccinated with Pfizer.
Re: (Score:2)
The new Israel data is disturbing on so many levels. And the anecdotal chatter seems to support it. Barring any data on how well being vaccinated protects against Long COVID if you're symptomatic - but with anecdotes of people who it's happened to - this is really uncomfortable.
Meanwhile, most countries seem determined to just let COVID rip without actually finishing vaccinating all of their willing populations and giving them enough time to develop immunity. When did the goal stop being achieving herd im
Nope. Less than 1/4 were vaccinated. AT ALL. (Score:2)
we have news from Israel suggesting an increase in number of cases, many twice vaccinated with Pfizer.
No. We don't have that news. Read beyond clickbait titles and you would know that.
Slashdot clickbait title:
Report from Israel: About Half of Adults Infected With Covid-19 Delta Variant Were Fully Inoculated [slashdot.org]
Actual article linked in the summary:
Delta Outbreaks Prompt Limits in Australia, Israel, as India Warns of New Mutation [msn.com]
Actual quote from the article:
Children under 16, most of whom haven't been vaccinated, accounted for about half of those infected, he said.
90% of the cases were the Delta variant. Half of those are unvaccinated kids. Half of the rest were vaccinated adults. You do the math.
Similarly, in UK, land
Re: (Score:2)
I'm confused as to how you think you're contradicting the GP. Are you saying that there haven't been an increase in the number of cases? Or that many of the people who were infected had been twice vaccinated with Pfizer?
Re: (Score:2)
"Vaccines work. Period."
Well, what does Pfizer say? (reading between the words):
"Only 10% of people vaccinated with Pfizer got infected by COVID-19"
What does AstraZeneca say? (reading between the words):
"Even if you are partially protected from infection (the 70% or so protection against disease), once vaccinated you are much less likely to develop a severe COVID-19 sickness".
As for "and deaths are at less than 0.4%"... most of the developed countries maintained that 1% death out of infected people without
Re: They don't need donations of doses. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not even the good old USA was able to reliably produce vaccines in the Emergent Biosolutions' Baltimore factory.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Cipla is distributing, not manufacturing, Moderna.
What mRNA vaccine is Biological E making? Corbevax is a protein subunit vaccine.
Producing DNA plasmids is only the first step (of three primary steps***) to manufacture a mRNA vaccine, and Zydus Cadila's efficacy has been rather poor (I haven't dug into why, though - to be fair, they were testing against Delta). Their administration system is pretty neat, though. But yes, I did forget about them when discussing local manufacturing, and that's a fair point.
*
Re: They don't need donations of doses. (Score:5, Informative)
Adenovirus based vaccines are easier to make and cheaper, but much lower efficacy. India and other countries are making that variety now.
Re: They don't need donations of doses. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is that for a lot of people just because they don't die or don't get hospitalized doesn't mean they want to risk getting COVID.
There is long COVID, affecting a million people in the UK at the moment. It's pretty horrible and affects your ability to work. For kids even if they recover eventually it could really harm the education, especially around exam time, and we know that kids who are badly affected at school often never make a full recovery in terms of lifetime earnings or opportunities.
Then
Re: (Score:2)
I sympathize. I had Kawasaki disease as a child, which is normally extremely rare, seems to be genetic***, and basically means that my body vastly overreacted to an (unknown) virus that in most people appears to be harmless, and started attacking my circulatory system. You normally get it as a child, develop
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for the sympathy. While it's great that vaccines were developed quickly, at least in the UK we have placed too much faith in them getting us out of this and not done enough testing on people with underlying conditions before rushing to get everyone vaccinated.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: They don't need donations of doses. (Score:5, Interesting)
There are a lot of bottlenecks to the new mRNA vaccines. With virtually unlimited funding, it took a year and half to get to the current level of production in the most advanced countries on the planet. Do you think less advanced nations could make the same equipment, skilled technicians, matured processes, etc in the same amount of time? Even if handed every blueprint, process manual and formula?
Mind, with every available manufacturer or technician already gainfully employed, you need to dismantle the current production ramping capability, distribute it and then try to parallelize the process in countries with zero experience with this type of vaccine. That'd easily double the amount of time to vaccinate the planet. Probably longer.
Re: (Score:2)
Bill Gates should stop wasting his money on nuclear power projects that are going nowhere and instead work on developing vaccine production facilities. It might take a while but this won't be the last pandemic, or the last time that developing countries need medicines that are in short supply.
mRNA looks like a good technology to target as there will probably be a lot of other applications of it soon.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There are a lot of bottlenecks to the new mRNA vaccines.
Actually there's one bottleneck. One specific active substance, and it's apparently a doozey. This hilariously led to the company who developed the vaccine BioNTech in Germany to be unable to produce the vaccine without help from the USA. It is only in April of this year that BioNTech's own facility was certified to produce the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in its entirety without Pfizer's manufacturing help.
Re: They don't need donations of doses. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They don't need to. Viable and easier to manufacture alternatives are available, and without expensive patent baggage.
Re: (Score:3)
No they couldn't.
The RNA vaccines are an entirely different process. India *will* start manufacturing RNA vaccine sometime in the future, but up until this point, and probably for a while yet, the current manufacturers are taking up the entire capacity.
Your conspiracy theories are silly.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And whats your plan for the next pandemic? Because Pfizer-BioNTech wouldn't be bothering again, thats for sure. And neither will anyone else.
Re: (Score:2)
Why not?
Guaranteed purchases of everything you can manufacture plus a liability shield? Other businesses could only fantasize about getting a deal like that.
Re: (Score:2)
The original posts approach was “deny Pfizer-BioNTech their profits” and as a result India being able to manufacture the vaccine, which means invalidating patents and trade secrets etc, so its basically a shit deal for Pfiser-BioNTech, not a good one.
I think your intention is very different to the one BytePusher puts forward - thry are basically gutting any reason for a for-profit entity to conduct any research or development in future.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Presuming you mean Hindu. Muslims make up most of the remaining 20% (14% according to this map [mondediplo.com]. And according to this, [statista.com] Muslims have the biggest average family sizes of any religion, higher than Hindus (who rank second).
So you will hear a similar lament in many places, that the Muslim population tends to outbreed others, and therefore becomes more and more prevalent over the generations until it becomes a majority, even in places where it wasn't.
I personally don't feel that way. I think that babies an
Re:They don't need donations of doses. (Score:5, Informative)
This is due not only to general anti-vax, but also the belief that COVID poses no danger to kids, so parents are not going to get adolescents vaccinated before school starts, and will only be motivated when the 10,000 kids who have died in the US already becomes 100,000. I am sure we will see in the comments justification for not vaccinated kids.
I'm very pro-vax, but bullshitting people will do nothing to gain trust. 10,000 kids certainly have not died from COVID. CDC says 326 in the 17 and under cohort. Even the 18-29 group is nowhere close. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/... [cdc.gov]
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
He seems to be only bullshitting by getting the details wrong. 10000 kids have died from COVID *globally* according to UNICEF.
Mind you the focus on death may be misplaced. It should be common knowledge by now that the negative effects of even a minor COVID infection can have lasting consequences. Loss of smell and taste, chronic fatigue, etc. I have seen no data that says children have been unaffected by these.
I have anecdotes to the contrary, but that's just anecdotes (teacher wife says 2 students are now
Re: (Score:2)
Overall = 1.4% chance of dying (above rates weighted by number of cases per ag
Re: (Score:2)
the belief that COVID poses no danger to kids, so parents are not going to get adolescents vaccinated before school starts, and will only be motivated when the 10,000 kids who have died in the US already becomes 100,000.
This is true in some places. However, in the California Bay Area, 48% [sfchronicle.com] of kids 12-17 had already gotten their first dose within the first three weeks of availability. In Marin County, that figure was 70%. My guess is that local teenage vaccination rates will very closely mirror local adult rates. From what I see in my area, most parents are eager to get their kids vaccinated primarily because that means a big step toward normal life, regardless of what they might think about the actual efficacy of the va
"at the current rate" (Score:4, Interesting)
Linear extrapolation is certainly the easiest thing to do. Meanwhile in the real world, vaccine production is still increasing every day, vaccine distribution too. In the first few months the US sucked up the lion's share of the supply, then that started going to Canada and Europe. Once they're having trouble giving it away it will flood the next tier of countries and so on. It doesn't matter how many doses the politicos announce, everyone making COVID vaccines are going to continue churning them out as fast as possible until they can't sell them anymore because the big costs are already sunk.
It sucks to be poor and/or unprepared. Usually it means you go without. This time it means you wait a bit.
Re: (Score:2)
At the current rate my math says that there will be enough doses by the end of 2022 based on the article. Unless there is a word missing from the article. The article says 11 billion doses are needed. There will be 6 billion doses this year which includes the ramp up phase. The average production rate this year is quite a bit less than the current production rate. So, producing another 6 billion doses next year is pretty much guaranteed which makes 12 billion doses by the end of 2022 which is >11 billion
Re: (Score:2)
That sounds about right. "end of 2022" is "2023" if you're a bit pessimistic or want to round up for your headline. So if you make pessimistic assumptions about the rate of vaccination, it is conceivable that somebody somewhere will not have access to a vaccine until the calendar says 2023.
It makes a better story than "holy shit, we're vaccinating people fast, and even starting to actually share!"
Great job! (Score:2)
Will be interesting to see whether the current vaccinations will be effective at all after the virus had _that_ much time to get more infections and potentially more deadly. We either get this thing under control globally, or we do not get it under control.
The pandemic started in rich countries (Score:2)
so it's only to be expected that the initial majority of cases to be treated were there, Part of the plan was for India to mass produce AZ vaccine for export, but the much faster spread of the Delta variant means they've chosen to keep it for themselves. Now do they count as an evil richer country, or a poor country with a vast population suffering?
Topsy Turvy. (Score:2)
Start by distributing anti-vaxxers' doses (Score:2)
A big part of problem in US is that vaccine is given for free and everyone is begging people to get the shots. This devalues the shots and gives rise to instinctive perception of ulterior motive. When someone keeps nagging you to buy a timeshare, wouldn't you suspect that the "deal" is too good to be true?
Instead, give eligible adults a couple of months to either get the shots or donate their vaccine internationally. The later group can still get a certificate to go back to office / not wear masks because i
Re: (Score:2)
I would even charge $50 for the shots, but with an honor system option to pay less, potentially $0, in case of financial hardship. So that recipients know that the vaccine has a value and billions are still waiting for their chance to get it.
And you'd immediately be branded a racist because such a charge would "disproportionately affect communities of brown and Black people." Not saying I agree with it, but that is absolutely what would be said, with much hand-waving, shrieking, and cardboard signs.
And y
Yep... (Score:2)
...the countries that can afford to vaccinate their populations have prioritized their own people before those of countries that can't afford it. No big surprise there.
What I would find surprising is if these poor countries have similar or better vaccination rates than wealthy nations or if they ever actually say thank you for the continued handouts we always seem to be on the hook for.
Re: (Score:3)
The concept of being pro-abortion is to do with the fact that a woman (who may have gotten preganant without her consent) has to nourish a featus for 9 months possibly at a mental or health risk to herself, and that cells at early development shouldn't be considered full sentient life. There's many more arguments with great nueance than I can convey here. The argument rarely is "death is cool, let's have more of that". Have a look at the Venn Diagrams of pro-choice and anti-death penalty for example.
Also yo
Edit (Score:2)
(edit : There's many more arguments with *greater* nueance than I can convey here) - Slashdot, how's that edit button coming along?
Re: (Score:2)
> Ahh then, so you are in favor of killing off the mentally unstable, such as the homeless or undeveloped native people.
None of that even remotely flows from what I said, not even if taken to extremes.
> More humane to the richer countries to just let the poor nations fare on their own and reduce population
You know foreign aid isn't something done out of pure alturism. Having stable countries to trade with is much better for rich nations than having war torn countries with fleeing refugees, or countrie
Re: (Score:2)
Covid doesn't affect Africa and other poor regions that much.
These countries have a younger population, who is less susceptible to the most serious form of the disease. And they have so many other problems that covid is way down the list, the population is young for a reason...
Re: (Score:2)
They said the same kind of thing about India. Look how that turned out.
Re: (Score:2)
They said the same kind of thing about India. Look how that turned out.
Africa has around 10% of the population aged 50 or over. India has around 18% while USA has around 38%. In other words: India is much further in the demographic transition than Africa is and has a much older population although it is still far from USA. So, given the age dependence of the Covid-19 symptoms and the prevalence of other issues causing early deaths in Africa it is no surprise that India feels the impact of Covid-19 more than Africa (gross generalization of course since there are huge difference
Re: (Score:2)
Btw I am not claiming that the Delta variant will not hit Africa hard as it seems to affect younger people more (at least that is what I have heard), just pointing out that the difference between India and Africa (as a whole) is about as large as the difference between USA and India in terms of age distribution.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, abortion is a choice, whether you die of Covid isn't exactly one.
Also, Covid isn't as much a killer as it is a lingering sword of Damocles. Allowing it to brew in the African continent only serves as an incubator for better, resistant strains that then go and kill us as well, so if you want to reduce the African population, you might want to try some more true and trued method as the endemic diseases there, or if you want to speed up the process and make a dime while doing so, send more weapons.
Re: (Score:2)
Your point being?
Re: (Score:2)
COVID would be a poor choice if you wanted a virus to kill a lot of people. Despite all the hype, COVID wasn't the highest killer in any country. Even in India it is the #7 cause of death. People are insane. If you want to kill people, change their diet to a Western diet so they die of heart disease and diabetes. And give them tobacco. That will kill them much faster than COVID.
Long term it might kill more of them. But it certainly won't do it faster than COVID could.
Re: (Score:3)
Bullshit. Without modern medical care, death-rates for COVID are in the 5...10% range. (Fortunately only estimates exist...) And the rate of long-term or permanent disabilities is far higher. Also, you seem to be entirely unaware that as long as this thing runs, it creates more infectious and potentially more deadly variants regularly.
Re: (Score:2)
However, poor countries tend to have lower life expectancy, and higher birth rates. With no or only very few old people around, Covid-19 is far less deadly.
Re: (Score:2)
Ebola spreads pretty readily, except when it scares the shit out of everybody enough and they get the hell away from it. Also, one of leading causes of infection was ritual washing of the body after death.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
like it assumes that the vaccines are mandatory or actually wanted by every single person in the world. this is the beginning of the end of our civil liberties as we speak.
Fascinatingly stupid comment. Ever heard of Polio? Maybe read up on it to get a minimal clue.
Re: (Score:2)
One could look at the total number of doses in a country as "hoarding".
Yet, in places like Romania, there is very little recent uptake on the Astra Zeneca vaccine, while the number of doses received was relatively large. As such, there is a surplus (we have more doses than we will probably use in the next couple of months).
Due to low vaccination rates and the continuous delivery of Pfizer vaccines, we also have more Pfizer vaccines than we can use in the next couple of months. As autumn approaches, maybe th
Re: (Score:2)
There's probably some snarky perprotive to describe that situation, but "hoarding" isn't it.
The intended meaning is fairly clear, but the actual word - not so much.
I'm guessing you might have been aiming for pejorative?
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. Mistakes are part of being human.
I wasn't trying to be 'funny', just checking my inference engine was working correctly.
Re: (Score:2)
I noticed France only managed to pledge 30mlion doses. Yet England pledged 100 million. England is the size of what? Alabama maybe? France has more population and is almost 6x as large. While they are busy judging everyone else for damn near everything, the best they pledge is 30 million? Yea that will put a dent in 6 billion.
Well, France is part of EU and EU has pledged to supply 1.3 billion vaccines to low and middle income countries. Given that France has 12.7% of the EU population that would correspond to France donating 165 million vaccines.
And it was not England but United Kingdom which pledged the 100 million doses. France and United Kingdom have similar sized populations.
But yes, if EU plus United Kingdom are donating 1.4 billion vaccines that will be enough to vaccinate 700 million people in low and middle income countr
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Scarcity is a bitch (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
France and UK has about the same population (66-67 millions), almost as many as the two most populous states (California plus Texas at some 70 millions).
Each of them has more population than the lower half (by population) of the US states, combined.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I noticed France only managed to pledge 30mlion doses. Yet England pledged 100 million. England is the size of what? Alabama maybe?
Well given that the drugs are manufactured in England and not in France, and given that EU countries pledged as a common block what is your point? Demonstrating the world your ignorance?
The UK pledged 100 million doses.
France pledged 30 milion [sic] doses.
That is on top of the 1.3 billion doses the EU pledged, of which France can be considered to be contributing 15% worth (you are afterall counting population).
So why has the UK pledged only 100million doses when France has pledged 225million in total? What'
Re: (Score:2)
I noticed France only managed to pledge 30mlion doses.
This is quite amazing, since France failed to produce any vaccine. Beyond the shame, I wonder what does it means to say you are going to give something you do not have.
Re: Scarcity is a bitch (Score:2)