Ross Clark

In spite of the approval of one vaccine and the likely approval of at least two others, the government seems determined to push ahead with 'operation moonshot' — mass community testing along the lines of that being trialled in Liverpool. That is astonishing, not least because of the cost — put at £100 billion in one leaked document. There is also, as I wrote here a fortnight ago, the matter of the dismal accuracy of the lateral flow tests being used for community testing. It suggests that the government, for all the Prime Minister’s chirpiness this week, has little confidence that vaccination will put an end to the Covid pandemic any time soon. Otherwise, why spend such a fortune on testing for a disease that ought rapidly to die away?

As a case study of how assertion can end up sounding like fact, I thoroughly recommend the Lancet’s report this morning claiming that the number of heat-related deaths globally has more than doubled in the past 20 years — and in particular the reporting of the story on the Today programme this morning. The message of the BBC report could not have been clearer: climate change is killing us at alarming speed and we’d better do something about it quick. 'Research suggests that the number of older people dying from heat-related causes has more than doubled in the UK since the early 2000s,' it began (01:05:55). 'The report published in the Lancet tracks the links between climate change and health.

Britain, we learned this morning, has become the first country in the world to approve the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, which is likely to be deployed from Monday onwards. Is Britain being reckless, or are other countries dragging their heels?  The first point to make is that, however tempting though it may be to think so, it is not a case of Britain taking advantage of new-found freedoms enabled by Brexit. It may be in the future that Britain develops a more nimble regulatory system than the EU, and that British patients can benefit for the earlier administration of drugs, but the UK will remain under the European Medicines Agency’s regulatory system until the end of the transition period in a month’s time.

We have become used to Mondays bringing good news on the vaccine front. But the publication of interim results from the Astra Zeneca/Oxford University vaccine – AZD1222 – will certainly please the UK government. Not merely because this is the home-grown option and we have already ordered 100m shots, but because, shot for shot, it is considerably cheaper to buy and administer than the other vaccine candidates. The vaccine itself is less than a fifth of the price of the Pfizer vaccine. Moreover, it does not need storing and transporting at minus 70 Celsius – it can be kept at ordinary fridge temperatures (2 to 8 Celsius), greatly facilitating any roll-out.

Now that we seem to have two Covid-19 vaccines that work, do we really need Operation Moonshot, the government’s programme to test 10 million people a day by early next year? It’s a poignant question, not least because of the extraordinary sums which appear to have been committed to it: briefing documents leaked to the BMJ in September suggested that it could cost £100 billion, which is close to the annual NHS budget in England. What would be the point of testing the entire population of Britain once a week if the virus was being controlled by a vaccine? The cost aside, there is growing medical opinion against the idea.

Another week, another set of preliminary results from a Covid-19 vaccine trial. This time it is the Moderna vaccine candidate, mRNA-1273. And, to judge by the figures put out by the company this morning, it has outdone the Pfizer vaccine in its efficacy. Out of the 30,000 people involved in the phase three trial (half of whom were given the vaccine and half of whom were given a placebo), 95 went on to contract Covid-19. Of those who became infected, 90 were in the control group and only five had been given the vaccine. Eleven participants had a severe case of Covid, all of whom were in the control group. The findings have allowed Moderna to claim, provisionally, that the vaccine is 94.5 per cent effective.

So is this the big turning point? Markets certainly seem to think so. No sooner had news broken that the vaccine being developed by Pfizer and German firm BioNTech is 90 per cent effective, the FTSE surged by 5 per cent. Given that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has suggested that any vaccine that proves to be more than 50 per cent effective could be licensed, this suggests the vaccine will go on to be approved around the world. Any vaccine that proves partly effective will be welcomed with open arms by a world which largely remains in lockdown or semi-lockdown. But does the reality live up the surge of relief which has gone around the world this morning?