33
Covid booster jabs to be approved for sale to UK public
(www.theguardian.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
33 points (90.2% liked)
United Kingdom
4060 readers
247 users here now
General community for news/discussion in the UK.
Less serious posts should go in !casualuk@feddit.uk or !andfinally@feddit.uk
More serious politics should go in !uk_politics@feddit.uk.
Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
@merridew You might find it helpful to see this as lining up the whole population, of the world, in ranks, ordered by how useful or urgent it is to immunise them.
You have enough doses for fewer ranks than are there. You have more doses of flu vaccine than of COVID.
In what order have you put your ranks?
Are the ranks identical for the 2 (and several other) vaccines?
You may care to imagine being in rank n+1
Why should you be swapped with someone in rank n?
No, I don't see that as particularly helpful.
Global annual influenza vaccine manufacturing capacity is around 1.68 billion doses. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10309624/
Pfizer alone can churn out 4 billion COVID doses annually. https://www.pfizer.com/science/coronavirus/vaccine/manufacturing-and-distribution
I eat more than the minimum required to live despite others living in poverty, and I use more energy than the minimum despite others living in poverty, and I bet you do too. I'm not going to pretend that refusing to get privately vaccinated against COVID is going to change anything except my risk of serious adverse outcomes from exposure to COVID.
@merridew Interesting paper. On COVID I didn't see the 4 billion in there, but I didn't do adding up, either.
I've ignored all the vaccines that are not mRNA for assorted reasons, but they must be potentially useful still.
On Influenza, I think the capacity is greatly more than that, but much of it is potential and/or used for other purposes. Given a 1919-like strain we could ramp it up rapidly.
@merridew
...There are many things we could do, many of which are good or at least not bad, and deciding how much of each we do is a strange business.
I think resource allocation and deployment could be done better, but I don't have ambitions as planetary overlord or whatever.
A while after I was born there were 4 billion of us*, and soon there will be 9 billion. Some things we should be able to do much more of and better, some we do, and some things we may need to share more widely.
* ish
It's under this heading:
How is the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine being distributed?
Pfizer has activated its extensive U.S. and European manufacturing network, including thousands of highly skilled U.S. workers in multiple states and localities, to prepare to produce the COVID-19 vaccine. We currently have the capacity to produce 4 billion doses annually, pending demand.
Influenza they reckon could be scaled up to between 6-8 billion annually, if needed.
@merridew sounds fair. Potential, easily available.
Someone might chip in at this point, noting the suggested rate, to ask if we can think of anything else to spend G£400 on that might be more useful.
And most of us would point to some sort of crossover, applying some resources to this and some to (those) other things.
And then there are the loonies, quacks, and horrors with their views, but enough of them.
I suspect ...
@merridew
... suspect we are under-immjnising; boosting here, and our interests would be better served by assisting more distant neighbours more.
Well you are free to suspect that.
But I'm not going to put the health of my family on hold pending the (impossible) total eradication of global health inequity.