He had time to do his own little performance routine, saying he would only accept a vaccine if it was Russian, and then spent time chatting in English with the French medical staff, who said that all the available vaccines worked, if only people would take them. He said that the only people vaccinated while he was there (for about 40 minutes because it included the compulsory waiting time) was himself and another guy who was in a wheel chair. An English friend who lives and works in St Tropez got vaccinated last week. To make a repellently absurd, petulant and posturing performance even worse, it turns out that the blood clot fiasco has resulted in 14 million doses of vaccine having been left unused, such that Europe is now facing a third wave of infection, and France has just locked down 21 million citizens, while they work out quite what to do with a population which were already vaccine hesitant, and are now vaccine bewildered and downright hostile. The French seem to be particularly peeved because their own vaccine, put together by the Pasteur Institute and Sanofi, flopped, leading to lots of morose soul-searching. The UK also pre-booked lots of other vaccine candidates very early in their development. All this threatening behaviour, just to be able to use a vaccine which is only available because the University of Oxford designed it, and because the University of Oxford partnered with AstraZeneca on the condition it was sold to everybody at cost, and because the United Kingdom then bankrolled it in advance, giving the company a guaranteed income flow in return for a pre-booked delivery schedule. My impression of many national leaders is that they don’t really know much about industrial production processes, namely how long it takes to perfect a technique, and how widely across the world one has to search for all the ingredients and specialist equipment required for mass production of a new vaccine, at a scale never before achieved. However, the European factory is due to come online soon, so the fuss is about who gets the big boost in production. This is a mystifying plan of action, since at the moment the European factories don’t produce this vaccine, and 90% of it comes from England, and the last 10% from India. In an attempt to raise all these rows to a war footing, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, is threatening to use an emergency clause in their constitution to justify embargoing the export of vaccines, which might result in AstraZeneca having to break its prior contract with the UK in order to fulfil a later contract with the EU. As Sir John Bell, Regius Chair of Medicine at the University of Oxford said, their policy is “crackers”. So, if official guidance is to be believed, this vaccine works for the 55 to 65 age group only. The French President had said that the AstraZeneca vaccine was “quasi-ineffective in over 65 year olds” and French health officials are now saying it should not be used on under 55 year olds. About a week later the advice came back that they should resume vaccinations. Whatever the reason, other countries followed suit. Some account say that it was the latter sort which caused some countries to halt vaccinations.
Some happen in 1 in a thousand persons, and others so rarely that it is hard to calculate the base rates. The back story is that there are blood clots and blood clots.
Essentially, the Continent is cut off by fog, a fog of their own creation.
European and international health agencies have told them not to stop vaccinating, so with their refusal we have another festival of confusion across the channel. Slavish compliance with the precautionary principle is like ensuring your knife is correctly buttoned into its scabbard as you head off to a gunfight. I did not know this, but since 2005 this principle has been appended to the French Constitution. It seems that some people who have received the AstraZeneca vaccination appear to have developed blood clots, 37 among 17 million people Europeans given the vaccine, so many European leaders have suspended vaccinations on the basis of “the precautionary principle”. Many European leaders don’t like the sound of them either. I do not like the sound of “blood clots”.
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