Viswanathan K's Thoughts

I read this book on the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine by two scientists involved in it. The book talks of the technical, political and practical aspects. Everything about America’s behavior through all matters infuriated the authors, and since the anti-vaccine US folks are called anti-vaxxers, so this book’s title is Vaxxers !   The World was Prepared (Somewhat) : The authors point out that the Ebola scare of 2014 showed how unprepared the world was for a disease that spread and killed quickly. Fortunately, Ebola didn’t spread beyond a few African countries, but it set off alarm bells on the need to have mechanisms and processes ready for whichever Disease X did go global. While by no means perfect, some baby steps had been taken by the WHO and many countries. For example, platform technologies were recommended – make as many steps in the process common, regardless of the final vaccine. This would also for each new disease/vaccine to require only a few tweaks to the constituent ingred

Moderna and Pfizer are expected to make $18 and $15 billion in revenue this year respectively, thanks to their COVID-19 vaccines. Guess how much Astra-Zeneca, the British company, will make? Zero profit. That’s right, AZ sells at cost price. And yet, see the amount of flak and negative publicity they draw in the West? Sarah Boseley looked into the reasons .   In America, the reasons are not political. Rather, it’s based on their (mis)handling of an early adverse reaction during clinical trial way back in September. In the UK, the trail was stopped and restarted within days. The US regulatory body though felt it had not been told of the issue early enough. The situation was also complicated, says Stephen Evans, a professor of pharmacoepidemiology in London by the intent of the trial: “I think that some of the difficulties were that the trials were being set up by Oxford to answer public health questions, whereas very clearly Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna’s trials in the US were set