Oxford Claim Form Vaccination: Fill & Download for Free

Unlike a lot of the other vaccine candidates in the race, the Oxford ChAdOx1 vaccine is the only one with an established manufacturing process. They have a significant head start over pretty much everyone else because they actually started process development back in April 2018 because of their earlier work on the ChAdOx1 MERS vaccine.Because of those earlier efforts, Oxford is leveraging their prior relationships with Pall, Vaccitech, Halix, and Merck KGaA to accelerate manufacturing and it sounds like they had a lot of the gears moving as early as January. It’s not unrealistic to go into large-scale clinical manufacturing within 6 months if you already have an established process. Halix has a 1000 L scale clinical manufacturing suite which should be able to produce ~ million doses by the fall.

Imagine it is December 5th, 1941.General Montgomery calls up Ike and says: “I’ve been thinking. The Coldstream Guards are the absolute best unit in the British Army. There’s no point using any troops inferior to that — so we’ll just send them in and leave all the other units back here safe in England”Of course that is patently absurd — you don’t solve a huge problem by using only your best, you use as much that is sufficiently good as you have on hand.Nobody can just poof huge quantities of any vaccine into existence. They have stocks of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and can now get more stocks of the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine — more vaccine means more people vaccinated which means fewer hospitalizations and deaths and almost certainly fewer cases overall.The reality is the Oxford vaccine is in the same neighborhood of estimated efficacy, and well above what is considered the minimal acceptable. You will be safer to be vaccinated with it than not vaccinated, and for anyone vaccinated with the other vaccine who isn’t lucky enough to get a neutralizing response, then they are also safer the more people are vaccinated with Oxford.(note: I’m not actually claiming anything about which unit was actually best. As a Yank I’d probably say 82nd Airborne — but there is no way Monty would push a U.S. unit to the front!)

France, Germany and Italy yes - the UK noThis is the danger of letting politicians shoot their mouths off for short term aims.Macron, VdL and some German politicians said the AZ vaccines did not work?Covid-19: Fact-checking Macron's over-65s claim about the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccineAngela Merkel won’t get AstraZeneca Covid vaccine as 1.4m doses left unusedWhich led to widespread doubts about the AZ vaccine that have now developed into a real problemThere seems to be a reversal of the placebo effect taking place. Called the Nocebo effect Nocebo - WikipediaIn Italy and France health staff have reported high levels of side effects.European Healthcare Workers Are Refusing AstraZeneca Vaccine Over Efficacy ConcernsAstraZeneca vaccine faces resistance in Europe after health workers suffer side-effectsMeanwhile the UK gets on with vaccinations in blissful ignoranceHad my first jab last week and feel as dozy as ever:)It cannot be denied that the AstraZeneca vaccine has had a checkered trials programme.This Forbes article covers it well Other Countries Have Authorized AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 Vaccine—Why Hasn’t The U.S.?But, the real world results look promising Covid-19: First doses of vaccines in Scotland led to a substantial fall in hospital admissions.One has to wonder about various countries approvals authorities being more fixated on their approval process than on saving lives and certain politicians sowing seeds of doubt and harvesting major problems.And, outside the American press bubble - have there been any reports of UK folk turning down the AZ vaccine?Someone, no doubt, will try and work out how many people Macron has killed with his big mouth.