Comment on Covid booster jabs to be approved for sale to UK public
merridew@feddit.uk 10 months ago
The current criteria for qualifying for an NHS winter COVID vaccine are far stricter than the criteria for the NHS flu vaccine.
If you are asthmatic, you can easily be considered vulnerable enough to need the flu vaccine, but still not qualify for the COVID vaccine.
midgephoto@photog.social 10 months ago
@merridew You might find it helpful to see this as lining up the whole population, of the world, in ranks, ordered by how useful or urgent it is to immunise them.
You have enough doses for fewer ranks than are there. You have more doses of flu vaccine than of COVID.
In what order have you put your ranks?
Are the ranks identical for the 2 (and several other) vaccines?
You may care to imagine being in rank n+1
Why should you be swapped with someone in rank n?
merridew@feddit.uk 10 months ago
No, I don’t see that as particularly helpful.
Global annual influenza vaccine manufacturing capacity is around 1.68 billion doses. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10309624/
Pfizer alone can churn out 4 billion COVID doses annually. www.pfizer.com/…/manufacturing-and-distribution
I eat more than the minimum required to live despite others living in poverty, and I use more energy than the minimum despite others living in poverty, and I bet you do too. I’m not going to pretend that refusing to get privately vaccinated against COVID is going to change anything except my risk of serious adverse outcomes from exposure to COVID.
midgephoto@photog.social 10 months ago
@merridew Interesting paper. On COVID I didn't see the 4 billion in there, but I didn't do adding up, either.
I've ignored all the vaccines that are not mRNA for assorted reasons, but they must be potentially useful still.
On Influenza, I think the capacity is greatly more than that, but much of it is potential and/or used for other purposes. Given a 1919-like strain we could ramp it up rapidly.
merridew@feddit.uk 10 months ago
It’s under this heading:
How is the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine being distributed?
Pfizer has activated its extensive U.S. and European manufacturing network, including thousands of highly skilled U.S. workers in multiple states and localities, to prepare to produce the COVID-19 vaccine. We currently have the capacity to produce 4 billion doses annually, pending demand.
Influenza they reckon could be scaled up to between 6-8 billion annually, if needed.
midgephoto@photog.social 10 months ago
@merridew
...There are many things we could do, many of which are good or at least not bad, and deciding how much of each we do is a strange business.
I think resource allocation and deployment could be done better, but I don't have ambitions as planetary overlord or whatever.
A while after I was born there were 4 billion of us*, and soon there will be 9 billion. Some things we should be able to do much more of and better, some we do, and some things we may need to share more widely.
* ish