Coronavirus: UK has started applying vac …

From London

Brian Pinker, a 82-year-old dialysis patient, this Monday morning became the First person to receive Oxford-Astra Zeneca coronavirus vaccine in UK. In an attempt to instill optimism in a critical situation in the UK, the Minister of Health Matt Hancock, told the BBC that incorporating the vaccine into the immunization schedule is a key moment in the fight against the pandemic. “We have some very difficult weeks ahead, but this is the exit”Hancock said.

A clear sign of these “very difficult weeks ahead” is that with nearly a week of over 50,000 new infections per day and the hospital’s capacity at full capacity in many parts of the country, the government has reformulated the inoculation rules for the two approved vaccines, Pfizer and Oxford AstraZeneca. At the end of the year, the government’s medical advisory committee decided that the two doses of vaccine should be given 12 weeks apart, instead of the three weeks previously announced for “public health reasons” to ensure that the first dose, the one with the greatest immunological impact, would cover as many people as possible in the shortest possible time.

In another clear sign of the urgency to advance the vaccination program and counteract the devastating effect of the new ‘British’ strain of the virus, the government published a new protocol authorizing the combination of the two vaccines in cases where the second dose cannot be given due to a lack. “The ideal is to complete the inoculation process with the same vaccine. But if that vaccine is not available, it is reasonable that the dose of the other vaccine be offered in cases where the individual in question is at risk. In all likelihood, this second dose will strengthen the impact of the first, ”notes the new guide.

The The possibility of combining the two vaccines has been questioned by Pfizer and by specialists in the United States who have accused the United Kingdom of playing roulette.. Beyond the debate, the measure shows two things: that the vaccine production is far from meeting global demand and what, in United Kingdom, the situation is critical. “A race against time” was defined by BBC health correspondent Nick Triggle.

In this race against time over one million people have been vaccinated since the first inoculation with Pfizer on December 8. The government has 550,000 doses of AstraZeneca ready to add to your immunization schedule. The UK has purchased some 100 million doses of these vaccines. The question is how many will be available in the coming weeks to join the vaccination program.

The government itself is not very sure. In May, he announced that around 30 million doses would be available by September. By November, that had turned into a pledge of $ 4 million by the end of the year. We are now talking about more than half a million.

The urgency is twofold. On the one hand, neutralize the British strain and avoid a hospital overflow in the middle of the long and harsh winter of this country. On the other hand, the great fear of new mutations in the virus appearing which, unlike the British strain, are immune to the spectrum of vaccines that the world has developed so far.

Towards a new confinement

he 80% of English people are at the highest level of social restriction, Level 4, and from the opposition and the various social sectors, the government demands to act as quickly as possible with a new national confinement, similar to that of March of last year, to avoid a collapse of the system hospital. In a one-page article in the Sunday Times newspaper, several doctors noted that specialists They begin to choose which patients are admitted to the intensive care unit based on “who has the best chance of surviving”.

One of the medics who gave her name, Megan Smith of Guy’s and St Thomas in London, where Boris Johnson was treated in his coronavirus episode in April, explained to Sunday that they faced terrifying decisions due to the number of patients who required insufficient ventilators. “As physicians, we’re used to making tough decisions, but not these,” Smith said.

Two regions of England, Essex and Buckinghamshire, have been declared episodes of force majeure (“major incident”), a category which applies to cases of extreme social gravity such as terrorist attacks or the use of Chemical Weapons. Critically ill patients in London and the south-east of England, epicenters of the current crisis, are being transferred to other departments of the National Health Service to free up beds.

With this panorama, the government is doing in 2021 what it did in 2020: delaying the decisions it will inevitably have to make. This delay translates into tens of thousands of additional cases and the number of deaths which is now close to 75,000 cases, according to official information, although they exceed this figure when the figures and the methodology of counting of the National Statistics Office are tracked (ONS).

A clear example of this flaw in the government’s response is the reopening of classes after the holidays. Under intense pressure, the government announced last week that high school classes, a major source of contagion in recent weeks, would be suspended until mid-March, but fell halfway with primary school. In London and the south-east, he decided that there would be no classes: in the rest of the country, schools should receive his students.

In the north of the country and other parts of England, city authorities have rebelled against this dictation from the central government and have indicated that they will support schools that decide to suspend classes. There is a consensus among epidemiologists, health workers, unions and the opposition. Labor leader Sir Keir Starmer summed it up in one sentence. “We need a national lockdown now. It is not clear why the government is delaying this decision,” Labor Starmer said.