Hospitals in England have been told they could receive the first doses of the Pfizer shot as early as the week of Dec. 7 if it receives approval
One question (probably best for Xerty):
Britain has ordered 40 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and 100 million doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine.
Are these foreign orders competing for production capacity with US orders? Or are their deliveries coming out of different supply chains?
Which is to ask, once we finally get around to approving a vaccine, will we have to wait in line behind existing orders from other countries? Or only get a small fraction of what’s produced as it’s being distributed world-wide?
The US pre-ordered and optioned much more of the PFE and MRNA vaccines. We’re going to be getting a lot of those and first in line vs a lot of the other places. UK bet more on the AZN one, and will get most of that one first.
Based on current projections, the companies expect to produce globally up to 50 million vaccine doses in 2020 and up to 1.3 billion doses by the end of 2021. Four of Pfizer’s facilities are part of the manufacturing and supply chain; St. Louis, MO; Andover, MA; and Kalamazoo, MI in the U.S.; and Puurs in Belgium. BioNTech’s German sites will also be leveraged for global supply.
MRNA is a lot smaller company and they’re outsourcing production to locations in the US and EU.
in contrast, Moderna, a biotech firm with nothing like Pfizer’s manufacturing base, has contracted with Lonza, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical services firms, to produce much of the mRNA active for its vaccine, mRNA-1273. Lonza will make the active at its complex in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and at its main site in Visp, Switzerland.
The graph shows excess mortality – it shows that in the first 43 weeks of 2020, almost 400,000 more people died than the average between 2013 and 2019. Even compared to 2019 alone there’s an excess of over 300,000 this year.
It’s likely that fewer people died due to other things, like car accidents during the lock downs, and likely more people died due to healthcare system overload, fear of going to the doctor, or stress. But I think most excess was caused by COVID and the official COVID death count is too low.
Everyone else reading this thread. There have been posts in this thread arguing that many of the people who died from COVID would have died anyway. That position supports the argument that we as a society are overreacting to the virus and should open up the economy and go back to business as usual. But very high excess mortality should prove those people wrong. Sure, it is true that some people who died from COVID would have probably died this year anyway, but as xerty’s link shows, in total a whole lot more people died this year than expected, even more than the official COVID number.
And unless and until we see a breakdown of mortality by specific cause, it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that COVID caused most of the excess.
In an undated photo he shared of Austin appearing to take oxygen, Ice-T wrote that his father-in-law “was a serious ‘No Masker’” until “COVID hit him.”
“Pneumonia in both lungs… 40 days in ICU close to death… Now he’s on Oxygen indefinitely,” the actor tweeted. “Ohhh he’s a Believer now.”
blood donations collected by the American Red Cross from residents in nine states. They found evidence of coronavirus antibodies in 106 out of 7,389 blood donations. The CDC analyzed the blood collected between Dec. 13 and Jan. 17.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the virus was here in Dec/Jan, but remember there were some reports of blood analysis going back to earlier in 2019 that found positives on covid antibody screens and given how out of control things are now, I can’t believe it was running around to any meaningful degree back then or we’d have seen the pandemic then and not a year later.
I think a good part of what this is picking up is that some people, for whatever reason, possibly exposure to non-covid coronaviruses, have antibodies that attack the covid virus.
At our school, there were murmers they might have to close for a couple days since abenstee rates were so high.
Obviously, it’s all speculation at this point. Short of having a confirmed infected person breath directly in your face for an hour and see what happens, there’s simply no way of knowing if you were infected last winter. Realistically it’s more likely a red herring, but still…
The more I hear about how much vaccine will be available and who should get it in what order, I cant help but wonder if everyone would be better off if they’d just administer it in a wave. Start in one area, and (metaphorically) move from town to town giving it to everyone until you run out. Then get the next truck, and continue. Seems like a lot of wasted effort returning to the same area repeatedly over months, while you continuously pick and choose who gets it with each pass.
Monitoring Canada (AM 900 CHML - Hamilton) as I type. They are realizing what Trump has accomplished with Operation Warp Speed and they are blown away and jealous. The realization setting in is that the USA will receive critical millions of vaccinations months before Canada. This is massive failure by man-child Trudeau and it is too late for them to put things right. Everything needed to be set up in advance, as Trump did . . . and they are seeing that.
Obviously Trump will never receive credit. Nothing can overcome the hate. But people in the know are aware of his dominance. And people in Canada are bemoaning the extra months of lockdowns and economic devastation they face for having elected Trudeau.