Corona Virus

We might feel bad about the UK’s inability to manage this pandemic, but it appears the EU is making a worse fist of it:


All changed, utterly changed: the vaccine blunder that shook Europe

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard,
World Economy Editor




The European vaccination fiasco has mushroomed into a larger danger for the EU project itself. Brussels acquired powers beyond its competence. Nothing before has exposed so clearly why the nation-state is the proper fulcrum of government.

This episode is less obviously threatening than the post-Lehman civil war between eurozone creditors and debtors, a clash of interests that has been papered over for the time being. But it may nevertheless be just as treacherous in different ways.

In a matter of three weeks we have seen the germination - excuse the pun - of a novel, broad-based, Teutonic euroscepticism. The front pages of Die Welt, Der Spiegel, and much of the German press are a riot of allegations and indignation. The word Katastrophe is being thrown around liberally.

Bild Zeitung took direct aim at Chancellor Angela Merkel in its splash on Monday, accusing her of sacrificing German lives by overriding the vaccine policy of her own government. She handed over the programme to Brussels in order to play the good European as her swansong gesture.

The European Commission then mangled the job. It drifted through the summer. Under pressure from Paris it ordered 300 million doses of the ‘French’ vaccine from GSK-Sanofi in September, only to discover later that Sanofi’s clinical trials had run into trouble. By then the EU vaccine fund was running low.

Several countries balked at Pfizer’s hard-nosed demands - allegedly $50 (£36.80) a dose - for the ‘German’ BioNTech jab. No firm order was issued until mid-November, even though BioNTech had emerged as a front-runner months before. By then the EU had dropped down the pecking order. “Instead of mass delivery, the vaccine is reaching us as a trickle,” said Bild.

"Obviously, the European purchasing process was flawed,” said Markus Söder, the Bavarian premier and the man that Germans would most like to see as the next Chancellor.

“It’s hard to explain why people elsewhere are being vaccinated more quickly with an excellent vaccine developed in Germany. Time is crucial. If Israel, the US, or the UK are far ahead of us with jabs, they’ll also gain economically."

Israel has vaccinated more than a million people with the German jab. So has the UK. The US has surpassed four million. Germany is moving fast by EU standards at 320,000 but is already hitting buffers, partly because some Länder are struggling with the logistics, but also because supplies are running out.





“I don’t see where the doses are going to come from,” said Prof Karl Lauterbach, the Social Democrats’ science guru.

Supply timetables are an impenetrable secret. Pfizer over-promises. But as far as we know, Germany will not receive more than token deliveries in January, and barely enough to make a decisive impact until late March.

What could change this is rapid approval of the Oxford-AstraZeneca jabby EU regulators. They are taking their sweet time - with the usual pieties about “high EU standards” - and may not act before February.

This is indeed a Katastrophe. One should not pay too much attention to Twitter but I have never before seen such a vehement outpouring of anger and Verzweiflung with EU institutions on German social media. A view is taking hold that the sooner Germany regains control of its core governing functions, the better.

This new mood will collide at some point in 2021 with the economic consequences of the pandemic. Lack of vaccines imply an extra quarter of lockdowns and eurozone recession. This pushes Club debt ratios further beyond the point of no return. It pushes the French ratio into the danger zone. It pushes more struggling firms over the brink. It raises the risk of permanent scarring. It implies that German taxpayers will have to dig deeper into their pockets to beef up the European Recovery Fund.

The current €390bn grant component, spread over five years and 27 countries, is not going to move the macroeconomic needle. It implies too that the European Central Bank is going to have to cross red lines established in last May’s menacing ruling by the German constitutional court.

Ultimately, it brings forward the day when Germany has to decide whether it is willing to take another big step towards fiscal union and agree to transfers that dwarf reunification costs after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In France we are watching the parallel unravelling of the Europeanist Macron presidency. The leader who began this pandemic with the stirring words “we are at war” - repeated ever since - cannot explain why the French state had failed to vaccinate more that 352 people by the beginning of this week when Italy has done 129,000, Poland 51,000, or Denmark 47,000. The Balkans have done better.



Emmanuel Macron risks deepening France's economic problems by failing to roll vaccines out fast enough CREDIT: STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN / AFP


“We are facing a state-scandal,” said Jean Rottner, president of the Grand Est region and himself a critical care doctor. “It is harder to get vaccinated than it is to buy a car.”

Indeed. The elderly must have a medical consultation five days before the jab. There must be a cooling off period after consent in case patients change their minds. The precautionary principle has been pushed to absurdity, which raises suspicions in France that foot-dragging on the roll-out disguises something else: failure to secure the specialist freezers needed for the BioNTech vaccine.

Something similar happened during the mask fiasco. Mr Macron’s government said face masks were useless in the first wave last spring because it had failed to obtain enough of them.

The more forgiving reason is that Mr Macron has been cowed into caution by French anti-vaxxers: 58pc of the population in the latest Odoxa survey, up eight points form a month ago, albeit very soft poll data. If so, he is making matters worse. “It is a gigantic psychological error,” said professor Axel Kahn, a geneticist and head of France’s anti-cancer league.

Prof Kahn said roll-out pedantry beggars belief in a fast-moving emergency. “You have to face reality. I am afraid that within a few weeks we’re going to have a knife to our throats, just like the English,” he said.

Mr Macron has woken up to the political danger. He can hardly do otherwise. He issued a theatrical coup de colère over the weekend, insisting that he was as furious as everybody else over the delays. “We are ambling along at the rhythm of a family walk,” he told Journal du Dimanche.

“This is going to have to change fast and change for real, and it will,” he said. Yet it is he who controls and micro-manages the most centralised state in Europe. It has been his policy all along. The prevailing view of French elites is that this episode will be forgotten if Mr Macron gets a grip immediately. Perhaps, but this is not a question of media management.

Vaccine immobilism and dose shortages until the spring condemn France to a health and economic crisis as far out as April and probably May, by which time the battered British will be long over the hump and enjoying a V-shaped boomlet.

 

I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance

I just happen to think the Swedes got it most right of all.

 

C19 mortality rates per 100,000
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

Italy is 1st @ 125
UK is 2nd @ 114
US is 5th @ 108
Brazil is 9th @ 94
Sweden is....not in the top 20 countries
[edited] I manually calculated Sweden's rate and it is 90 (10mill population by 9,000 deaths)

I reckon its here to stay in some form or other, with long lasting cultural changes such as distancing and PPE being used much more commonly

 

Do you ever originate any of your posts or just cut and paste?

 

in this data set https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ Sweden is 25th. But compared to Finland 100th, Denmark 73rd and Norway 111th they are not doing particularly well given similar geography’s and population density’s.

The virus does seem to favour densely populated areas, no surprise really.

 

This article's part about France is really well sourced and accurate. And quoting Axel Kahn is a very good thing. Professor Kahn is a brillant searcher and an humanist. The big question right now in this country is to try to get vaccines faster, and at a larger scale. So far it's not an anti-vaxxer issue (not yet), but organization to get/stock/dispatch vaccine. Our German neighbors are much better prepared and organized.

 

Sweden clearly made a mistake with the attempt of immunity.
Their own scientists recognized that. But who can blame them? no one knew about this new virus..

 

Apart 2 or 3 we all know who he is. I help you, do you have a mirror in the house?
You want another gig with the pig?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._H._Boetcker

This in particular, also by Boetcker, sadly seems to fit much of the U.S. (maybe the globe?) these days. I might add one to his list. "If I do read, it's some opinion on Facebook or Twitter".

 

The essential feature missed by the casual observer is previous seasonal deaths.

The worst affected countries all had mild flu seasons in preceding years and vice versa. Sweden had larger numbers of frail elderly than its Nordic neighbours who had lost them in preceding years to other respiratory infections.

If you subtract them from the equation most countries have pretty similar profiles.

 

Maybe those people would have lived happily for a few more years without Covid. Just because they didn’t die last year doesn’t mean they should have died this year, to take them out of the numbers is frigging the statistics to get an answer you want! It’s an interesting fact for the epidemiologists to play with, but not to be scratched from the playing field.

 

You are right of course. The health statisticians might talk about ‘dry tinder’ but that is someone’s relative and they all have value. We do however accumulate more moribund elderly in mild flu years. Pneumonia wasn’t called the old man’s friend for nothing.

 

Wow I said something similar on Uncle Sam's Scorecard yesterday, what do I win?

 

In the interests of equity you ought first to address that question to Messrs F & L. Next to them I am a mere amateur and usually just recourse to visual aids like graphs. With them you get full ‘behind the paywall’ access.

 

Scotland as of 12pm today has 92 people in intensive care with Covid. No ages or conditions given. It may be they are all over 75 or have underlying conditions. It may be they are all 25 years old and are marathon runners. we have not been informed.

And that's the problem, init!

Which brings me to my next point. If you consider the amount of air time this is getting, ( Almost constant on Radio Scotland), it has to be concluded that there is a huge lack of real sourced, confirmed investigated,coroberated hard fing facts.

There has been zero presentation of the overall picture from A to Z by any party, media, or school.
Although, facts do not paint the whole picture, without a comprehensive review and presentation, we end up looking at preliminary sketches and at blank canvas.



I enjoy the adversarial nature of this thread. The debate is inspirational.
Please bear in mind that if Callumity stopped posting the thread would lesson for lack of counterpoint.
Go @Callumity ya aul dug.

 

A perfectly circular argument
.If they hadnt died last year, don't mean they would have lived this year and died next either

 

Phew! praise be to Allah another lockdown.
Which means Marky cant join a gym as instructed by the memsahib.

 

You are too kind. I think of it as missionary work bringing light to those that live in darkness. I don’t expect troglodytes to necessarily be conspicuously grateful.

 

In France we have region by region curve compared years by years (INSEE data from ARS departments daily data collected from each hospital). this year even with less flu death (lockdown drastically reduced flu and other infections), but still more death that year than past years. No rocket science..

 

Who you calling a what?