Vaccine

January Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, signed the EU withdrawal agreement, sent from Brussels by train. Sajid Javid, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, promised ‘an infrastructure revolution’ in the Budget. An American drone killed Qassem Soleimani, an Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard commander, near Baghdad airport. Iran carelessly shot down a Ukrainian airliner taking off from Tehran, killing 176. Bush fires raged in New South Wales. Cases of acute viral pneumonia were noticed in Wuhan in central China. February Eighty-three British evacuees from Wuhan were quarantined on the Wirral. The Department of Health classified Covid-19 as a ‘serious and imminent threat’. In Hubei 68 million people were made to stay at home.

At the beginning of the Covid crisis, some expressed the hope that a pandemic might at least bring a divided country back together. Instead, public discourse descended to new levels of bitterness as a fresh schism replaced that caused by Brexit. On one side were those who thought tens of thousands would die because government action was too slow and half-hearted, and on the other, those who thought lockdown to be an over-reaction that inflicted grave damage on our economy and society. Both sides ought now to be able to agree that this week marks a significant turning point in the pandemic. The first shot of an approved Covid vaccine to be administered in a public programme anywhere in the world was given to Margaret Keenan, a 90-year-old woman in a Coventry hospital.

The eyes of the world were on Britain today, as the first patients began to receive the Pfizer vaccine, after it was cleared by Britain’s health regulators as safe to use. Unsurprisingly, foreign TV news channels sent their crews to British hospitals to witness the first patients receiving the jab. Outside Guy’s Hospital in London, CNN managed to catch up with one charming 91-year-old, who had managed to receive the jab after ringing up the hospital to see if they had any spare shots going. As Martin Kenyon explained though, his main difficulty in getting the vaccine was finding a parking spot in London. Mr Kenyon explained that he had taken the vaccine as, ‘Well, there’s no point in dying now, when I’ve lived this long.

Home The Commons voted by 291 votes to 78 for new coronavirus regulations putting 55 million people in England into the restrictive Tier 3 or the little less restrictive Tier 2, apart from the 700,000 or so folk of Cornwall, the Isle of Wight and the Scilly Isles. There were 55 Tory rebels, whom the government had attempted to placate by publishing a 48-page dossier, generally regarded as thin stuff. There would, they were also assured, be a review on 16 December of the areas put into tiers. ‘We do want to be as granular as possible,’ Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, told the Commons encouragingly. Labour let the regulations go through by abstaining, though 15 Labour MPs voted against. Wales prohibited pubs from selling strong drink and made them close at 6 p.m.

It’s three for three as far as positive outcomes from Covid vaccine trials are concerned. But the announcement from AstraZeneca and Oxford University, at a first glance, may not seem to be as exciting as those from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. The figures are a bit of a head-scratcher, so let’s look at them in more detail. Monday's results from AstraZeneca and Oxford University state that the combined Phase 3 interim analysis from their COV002 and COV003 studies (based in the UK and Brazil respectively) included 131 Covid-19 cases and that the vaccine was found to be 70.4 per cent effective overall — but that vaccine efficacy in two dosing subgroups was 90 per cent in one and 62 per cent in the other.