Vaccine rollout in the UK

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Re: Vaccine rollout in the UK

Post by shpalman » Mon Mar 22, 2021 3:29 pm

One thing that’s worth stressing is that, on the continent right now you can see, sadly, there is a third wave under way, and ...previous experience has taught us that that when a wave hits our friends, it I’m afraid washes up on our shores as well. And I expect that we will feel those effects in due course.

That’s why we’re getting a whole load of their vaccines, so at least we'll be protected as they all get covid.
That’s why we’re getting on with our vaccination programme as fast as we can.

But a vaccination campaign, developing vaccines, rolling them out, these are international projects, and they require international cooperation.
Other nations needs to cooperate with us, in sending us lots of vaccines, while we don't export any
I’m reassured by talking to EU partners over the last few months that they don’t want to see blockades. I think that’s very, very important ... I’ve talked to our friends repeatedly over period, we’re all facing the same pandemic, we all have the same problems.
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Re: Vaccine rollout in the UK

Post by headshot » Mon Mar 22, 2021 3:43 pm

Of course, it also helps when you give emergency approval to the vaccine and don't undermine its efficacy with poor reporting, knee-jerk responses and national leaders undermining its safety.

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Re: Vaccine rollout in the UK

Post by Grumble » Mon Mar 22, 2021 8:35 pm

headshot wrote:
Mon Mar 22, 2021 3:43 pm
Of course, it also helps when you give emergency approval to the vaccine and don't undermine its efficacy with poor reporting, knee-jerk responses and national leaders undermining its safety.
And fund development very early in exchange for favourable terms in contracts.
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Re: Vaccine rollout in the UK

Post by lpm » Thu Mar 25, 2021 10:25 am

lpm wrote:
Mon Mar 15, 2021 10:15 am
I expect Group 9 to be invited for week commencing 15 March and mostly complete by 21 March, then straight on to 40-49 well before Easter.
In my local area, Groups 1-9 are done as of 24 March. If it wasn't for the coming supply crunch, they'd be inviting 40-49 to fill vacant appointments.

Because they are barred from 40-49, vaccination centres are running below capacity, with doses of vaccine available but no arms to put them in. Yesterday they announced they were converting to a drop-in service - no need for appointment, anyone aged 50+ can walk in needing only proof of ID. They are advertising on Facebook etc, trying to drum up business. Their vaccination bus is touring supermarket car parks.

It's not done in the sense that Groups 1-9 are 100% of course. Their stats for % of 50-60 are out-of-date, so hard to get a sense of the numbers of can't-be-bothereds and do-it-laters.

Presumably 2nd doses are going to be accelerated from the 12 week gap, because there's no-one else they can give the supplies to. A better solution would be for the govt to allow a start to 40-49.
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Re: Vaccine rollout in the UK

Post by headshot » Thu Mar 25, 2021 11:07 am

lpm wrote:
Thu Mar 25, 2021 10:25 am
lpm wrote:
Mon Mar 15, 2021 10:15 am
I expect Group 9 to be invited for week commencing 15 March and mostly complete by 21 March, then straight on to 40-49 well before Easter.
In my local area, Groups 1-9 are done as of 24 March. If it wasn't for the coming supply crunch, they'd be inviting 40-49 to fill vacant appointments.

Because they are barred from 40-49, vaccination centres are running below capacity, with doses of vaccine available but no arms to put them in. Yesterday they announced they were converting to a drop-in service - no need for appointment, anyone aged 50+ can walk in needing only proof of ID. They are advertising on Facebook etc, trying to drum up business. Their vaccination bus is touring supermarket car parks.

It's not done in the sense that Groups 1-9 are 100% of course. Their stats for % of 50-60 are out-of-date, so hard to get a sense of the numbers of can't-be-bothereds and do-it-laters.

Presumably 2nd doses are going to be accelerated from the 12 week gap, because there's no-one else they can give the supplies to. A better solution would be for the govt to allow a start to 40-49.
Or maybe open Group 6 back up to the asthmatics and other newly declared "no longer at risk" folks they kicked out a few weeks ago.

Frau HS has now had her expected vaccine kicked back twice, after being very careful about contacts for over a year now.

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Re: Vaccine rollout in the UK

Post by badger » Thu Mar 25, 2021 11:18 am

lpm wrote:
Thu Mar 25, 2021 10:25 am
vaccination centres are running below capacity, with doses of vaccine available but no arms to put them in.
Soc Media starting to fill up with "second jab appointment cancelled" complaints. Seems that putting the brakes on nationally has left some places over stocked and some under. Might be better to redistribute to fulfil second jab obligations, both logically and politically (Hancock promised appointments would be honoured...though this is Hancock, so it may have been a very special kind of appointment he was referring too, to be accounted for in a particular way, to make him look good)

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Re: Vaccine rollout in the UK

Post by headshot » Thu Mar 25, 2021 2:45 pm

A 40-something friend (no underlying conditions) has been vaccinated in Sutton Coldfield after his surgery contacted him last week saying they were opening up to 40-somethings.

The inconsistency is extremely frustrating for people who were kicked out of group six...and those having the 2nd appts cancelled if badger's social media is to be believed.

Why does the government and JCVI make statements about which groups are vaccinated if GPs are just going to ignore it?

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Re: Vaccine rollout in the UK

Post by lpm » Thu Mar 25, 2021 3:15 pm

In some areas there are vaccinators sitting around in village halls with vials of doses unused next to them.

Presumably they've been unable to entice enough 50+. I reckon some GPs will be taking advantage of the situation to fudge the rules and invite in younger asthmatics.

But they're going to invite 40-49 unless there's urgent intervention by the govt. The vials are going to be wasted otherwise; there's no seemless way to redistribute.

Bet you a billion zillion pounds that tomorrow there'll be news reports about areas unilaterally opening to <50. Probably they'll do 45-49.
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Re: Vaccine rollout in the UK

Post by discovolante » Thu Mar 25, 2021 3:59 pm

I've mentioned this before, but in Scotland (and I think this is a national thing) NHS Scotland is just sending letters out to people with their appointment date and time and an option to change it if you want.

This has caused a teensy problem in NHS Lothian with apparently 60,000 people missing appointments as their letters were not sent out due to a 'glitch'. Oops.

That aside though, on the face of it it looks like a better system to me in terms of getting people to actually go to an appointment, particularly given the struggles some people seem to be having in booking theirs. The main downside to me seems to be that if people just don't turn up, then the rest of the rollout doesn't go any quicker because the appointment hasn't been filled by someone else.

So I would assume that you may end up with a slower but more thorough rollout than one that requires people to physically book the appointment themselves. I was going to try and find out whether or not that was the case but er, I haven't got round to it. It would be interesting to see if it has made any difference at all though, or even if it's possible to tell factoring in other things that might have an impact (e.g. overall number of available appointments per day in proportion to the population, or whatever).
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Re: Vaccine rollout in the UK

Post by mediocrity511 » Thu Mar 25, 2021 4:13 pm

There's a message going round local social media here that anyone BAME regardless of age can turn up at one particular vaccine centre today. It may just be a rumour, and I pity people turning up and getting turned away if that's the case. But it could be an effective way of using up excess doses if they are not allowed to open bookings to under 50s officially. I might be a bit wound up if I was 45+ and non BAME though.

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Re: Vaccine rollout in the UK

Post by shpalman » Fri Mar 26, 2021 8:46 pm

One in 25 people hospitalised with Covid in UK since December have had vaccine
The median time between vaccination and symptom onset for these patients was five days, indicating that most of them were infected shortly before or around the time of vaccination, with the remainder infected after vaccination but before immunity had developed.

“Elderly and vulnerable people who had been shielding, may have inadvertently been exposed and infected either through the end-to-end process of vaccination, or shortly after vaccination through behavioural changes where they wrongly assume they are immune,” the CO-CIN report said.
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Re: Vaccine rollout in the UK

Post by shpalman » Sat Mar 27, 2021 8:49 am

The AstraZeneca vaccine is sourced from two UK sites, in Oxford and Keele Science Park, Staffordshire, along with the Serum Institute of India and the Halix plant in the Dutch city of Leiden. The UK sites have, however, suffered yield problems, leaving the UK with only 30% of expected deliveries in this first quarter.

That's interesting because I'm fairly sure AstraZeneca said that the reason the EU had so few doses compared to the UK was that the EU plants had yield problems but that the UK plants had had their problems sorted out:

Why isn’t the UK affected?
“We’ve had also teething issues like this in the UK supply chain,” said Soriot.

The difference, he said, is that the UK signed its contract for 100m doses much earlier. As a result, there has been more time for production problems to be ironed out, meaning vaccine yields are higher.

“So with the UK we have had an extra three months to fix all the glitches we experienced,” he said.
Of course, a problem can arise at any time:

Will AstraZeneca dispatch extra doses to Europe from its vaccine production sites in the UK?
This looks unlikely or very difficult. AstraZeneca has committed to delivering 2m doses a week to the UK as part of its order for 100m doses in total. That is pushing capacity fairly hard and depends on no unforeseen issues arising, such as poor yield as in Belgium or other issues such as batch quality.
Anyway,
Earlier this month, Boris Johnson said the UK had sufficient supplies to ensure that people would be given their second jabs on time. “We will have the second doses that people need within the 12-week window, which means around 12 million people in April,” the prime minister said.
Sufficient supplies from where exactly? Importing it from regions with higher case and death rates? A big stockpile?

Italy's current stockpile wouldn't be enough for the next four days so I expect this is generally true across the EU.*

(* - because provision is proportional to population and Italy is following the EU average for the administration of doses.)
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Re: Vaccine rollout in the UK

Post by shpalman » Sat Mar 27, 2021 11:27 am

By how much has UK’s vaccine progress reduced Covid risk?

tl;dr: f.cked if we know, we're journalists not scientists.

But it repeats that b.llsh.t "Researchers at Oxford University suspect that a first shot of their vaccine reduces transmission by about two-thirds" fuckery with a link to the preprint in which that number doesn't mean that despite what the authors claim, rather than to the peer-reviewed version where the number which doesn't mean that is actually lower than that, and the authors' claims about what it means have been removed.
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Re: Vaccine rollout in the UK

Post by raven » Sun Mar 28, 2021 9:56 am

shpalman wrote:
Fri Mar 26, 2021 8:46 pm
One in 25 people hospitalised with Covid in UK since December have had vaccine
The median time between vaccination and symptom onset for these patients was five days, indicating that most of them were infected shortly before or around the time of vaccination, with the remainder infected after vaccination but before immunity had developed.

“Elderly and vulnerable people who had been shielding, may have inadvertently been exposed and infected either through the end-to-end process of vaccination, or shortly after vaccination through behavioural changes where they wrongly assume they are immune,” the CO-CIN report said.
That's to be expected though. It would be weird not to see some cases arising from travel to/contact at vaccination centres. And a 1:24 ratio of vaccinated to unvaccinated cases seems reassuring, given we've vaccinated getting on for 50% of over 18s. Depending on when these cases were/ages/how many were shielding etc etc.

ETA:
In minutes from its 83rd meeting on 11 March Sage said:“The observation that a significant number of people developing symptoms within a few days of a first dose may suggest some behaviour change following vaccination. It is important therefore that communications around vaccination reinforce the need for safe behaviours to be maintained.”
Of course, it could also indicate that people who got the symptoms I got a day or two after vaccine - fever, slight cough - are worried enough to get a test and that extra testing is picking up asymptomatic cases we'd have missed otherwise.

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Re: Vaccine rollout in the UK

Post by shpalman » Sun Mar 28, 2021 10:23 am

Don't waste doses but also don't give them to people

Especially interesting is the idea (at the end of the article) that once you get near the end of a cohort, there won't be enough people turning up in a day to justify opening the batches, but there won't be a green light on the next cohort until this cohort is finished.
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Re: Vaccine rollout in the UK

Post by raven » Sun Mar 28, 2021 10:46 am

shpalman wrote:
Sat Mar 27, 2021 11:27 am
By how much has UK’s vaccine progress reduced Covid risk?

tl;dr: f.cked if we know, we're journalists not scientists.
I've been look for some sort of clear signal vaccines are having an effect in the weekly surveillance reports here

It's difficult to see* one against the background of falling cases we've got thanks to lockdown, but there's some positive signs. Particularly in ICU admissions (fig 44a here), where a rapid drop-off in the top 3 age categories seems like it correlates with the vaccination schedule, although there's a recent rise for 65-74yr olds.

<grumble>* it would be easier to see if they hadn't used crappy graphs with lines that stay thick even when zoomed in, and some random colour legend for age groups that changes between graphs...<grumble>

There's a section for 'Vaccine Impact on Surveillance Indicators' in the graphs document . The graph of cases in the over 60s seems to indicate fewer cases post vaccination, but it's cumulative and there's no younger age groups to compare the decrease with. If you squint at cumulative hospitalisations it looks like the older age groups may have leveled off more than the under 50s, but there's a clear indication in the graph of weekly admissions that those are falling faster in the over 75s. ICU admission, there's similar signs of a fall for 75-84yr olds, but not in the 55-74 age groups yet.

tl;dr: looks like vaccines might be stopping severe disease, less clear if they're reducing cases.

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Re: Vaccine rollout in the UK

Post by lpm » Sun Mar 28, 2021 10:51 am

shpalman wrote:
Sun Mar 28, 2021 10:23 am
Don't waste doses but also don't give them to people

Especially interesting is the idea (at the end of the article) that once you get near the end of a cohort, there won't be enough people turning up in a day to justify opening the batches, but there won't be a green light on the next cohort until this cohort is finished.
Merseyside, Stockport, Nottingham, Bath, Surrey and Devon have all quietly opened centres to walk in 45-49s.

Except not so quietly - they post on Facebook and Twitter to lure customers in.
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Re: Vaccine rollout in the UK

Post by raven » Sun Mar 28, 2021 10:54 am

But now they [medical staff and volunteers at vaccine clinics] have all been jabbed, vaccinators are turning to police officers, firefighters, taxi drivers, teachers, supermarket staff and family and friends – anyone who can be contacted easily and is free to hotfoot it to the clinic at a few minutes’ notice.
Good. Reading was doing that, calling round police stations and telling them to turn up for leftover doses at the end of the day. Seems eminently sensible to me as all those groups are frontline.

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Re: Vaccine rollout in the UK

Post by shpalman » Sun Mar 28, 2021 2:02 pm

The UK has ordered 17m Moderna doses, which will start arriving in April

Does it say within what time they'll finish arriving?

Italy was supposed to have had 1.3 million Modernas by the end of this month, they started arriving at the beginning of February, we've so far had 826,000. The plan was to have a total of 6 million by the end of June.
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Re: Vaccine rollout in the UK

Post by jdc » Sun Mar 28, 2021 2:50 pm

shpalman wrote:
Sun Mar 28, 2021 10:23 am
Don't waste doses but also don't give them to people

Especially interesting is the idea (at the end of the article) that once you get near the end of a cohort, there won't be enough people turning up in a day to justify opening the batches, but there won't be a green light on the next cohort until this cohort is finished.
Some clinics have ended up throwing away supplies. A woman in her 30s told the Observer how she had been turned away after a friend working at a clinic in East Anglia said that they needed to find people for five leftover Pfizer doses. “When I got there I said, quite straightforwardly, that I’d been told there were some doses left over. The woman looked at me and said ‘how’s that going to look on social media?’ It was as if it was quite unethical for me to even be there.

“But afterwards my friend told me those five doses were wasted. I completely understand that I’m not in a high priority group. I wouldn’t want to push my way in front of anybody. But I do think I’m worth more than a bin.”
Maybe we should run vaccine policy by twitter first then.

Where should leftover doses go? Retweet for into someone's arm, like for into the bin.

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Re: Vaccine rollout in the UK

Post by Herainestold » Sun Mar 28, 2021 3:24 pm

shpalman wrote:
Sun Mar 28, 2021 2:02 pm
The UK has ordered 17m Moderna doses, which will start arriving in April

Does it say within what time they'll finish arriving?

Italy was supposed to have had 1.3 million Modernas by the end of this month, they started arriving at the beginning of February, we've so far had 826,000. The plan was to have a total of 6 million by the end of June.
Moderna, like everybody else, is behind on deliveries.
Once the vaccines have been developed then countries should take over manufacturing and distribution to control the flow and keep them from being exported, except to covax.
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Re: Vaccine rollout in the UK

Post by Herainestold » Sun Mar 28, 2021 3:27 pm

jdc wrote:
Sun Mar 28, 2021 2:50 pm
shpalman wrote:
Sun Mar 28, 2021 10:23 am
Don't waste doses but also don't give them to people

Especially interesting is the idea (at the end of the article) that once you get near the end of a cohort, there won't be enough people turning up in a day to justify opening the batches, but there won't be a green light on the next cohort until this cohort is finished.
Some clinics have ended up throwing away supplies. A woman in her 30s told the Observer how she had been turned away after a friend working at a clinic in East Anglia said that they needed to find people for five leftover Pfizer doses. “When I got there I said, quite straightforwardly, that I’d been told there were some doses left over. The woman looked at me and said ‘how’s that going to look on social media?’ It was as if it was quite unethical for me to even be there.

“But afterwards my friend told me those five doses were wasted. I completely understand that I’m not in a high priority group. I wouldn’t want to push my way in front of anybody. But I do think I’m worth more than a bin.”
Maybe we should run vaccine policy by twitter first then.

Where should leftover doses go? Retweet for into someone's arm, like for into the bin.
Leftover doses should go into the next cohort, prioritizing BAME and POC people.
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Re: Vaccine rollout in the UK

Post by jdc » Sun Mar 28, 2021 3:44 pm

Herainestold wrote:
Sun Mar 28, 2021 3:27 pm
jdc wrote:
Sun Mar 28, 2021 2:50 pm
shpalman wrote:
Sun Mar 28, 2021 10:23 am
Don't waste doses but also don't give them to people

Especially interesting is the idea (at the end of the article) that once you get near the end of a cohort, there won't be enough people turning up in a day to justify opening the batches, but there won't be a green light on the next cohort until this cohort is finished.
Some clinics have ended up throwing away supplies. A woman in her 30s told the Observer how she had been turned away after a friend working at a clinic in East Anglia said that they needed to find people for five leftover Pfizer doses. “When I got there I said, quite straightforwardly, that I’d been told there were some doses left over. The woman looked at me and said ‘how’s that going to look on social media?’ It was as if it was quite unethical for me to even be there.

“But afterwards my friend told me those five doses were wasted. I completely understand that I’m not in a high priority group. I wouldn’t want to push my way in front of anybody. But I do think I’m worth more than a bin.”
Maybe we should run vaccine policy by twitter first then.

Where should leftover doses go? Retweet for into someone's arm, like for into the bin.
Leftover doses should go into the next cohort, prioritizing BAME and POC people.
And if you aren't able to get someone from the next cohort there in time, where should the leftover doses go?

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Re: Vaccine rollout in the UK

Post by headshot » Sun Mar 28, 2021 4:03 pm

Whosever arm is available.

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Re: Vaccine rollout in the UK

Post by TopBadger » Sun Mar 28, 2021 9:37 pm

TopBadger wrote:
Wed Mar 17, 2021 9:27 pm
Wife and I are group 10 (early 40's) and have been invited for vaccinations 10 days from now...
And got vaccinated yesterday... so in this area they're well into this age group.

I often wondered if I might have had Covid already and been asymptomatic, given my reaction to the vaccine I dont think so! Felt very crap last night, headaches, muscle ache, felt like skin was on fire. Feeling ok now some 36 hours later, but that was rough.

And thats with the body fighting a 'card board cut out' that isn't multiplying and fighting back. Very glad to have had the vaccine, the real thing would have likely floored me.
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