Good news about Covid-19 vaccines and vaccinations
Covid 19 vaccinations are going well. Quite a number of vaccines have been approved. And these are being used. At the time of writing close to 100 million ‘jabs’ have already been provided, not just of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccine but also of the Sputnic, AstraZeneca and Sinovac vaccines. And the pace is quickening, for instance in countries like Brazil and Morocco (which uses AstraZeneca and Sinopharm vaccines in its 3.000 vaccination centres).
Look here for the scientific results of the Russian Sputnik vaccine. Look here for the results of the Chinese Sinovac vaccine. Look here for the Cuban/Iranian efforts (Cuba has not enough Corona cases to test it at home). Look here for Indian efforts, one for a vaccine which supposedly can be stored at 37 degrees Celsius.
I’m not competent to say anything about the dependability of the data mentioned in the links. But it strikes me that the Johnsson and Johnsson vaccine, which seems to be about as good as the Russian and Chinese vaccine (looking at the numbers) gets a much better press than the Sputnik and Sinovac vaccine.The question is: do vaccines work in ‘real life’? Unfortunately, the jury is still out. New cases in rapidvaxxers like Israel, the UK and Denmark are falling rapidly and even very rapidly (UK) and to remarkably low levels (Denmark) and information about new cases and hospitalizations of the ‘vulnerable’ (read: the old) in Israel are somewhat comforting. Death rates in the UK and Israel are, however, still uncomfortably high.
There is a vaccine quarrel between AstraZeneca and the EU. About this: even when AstraZeneca produces and distributes less than it promised, total supply will still increase. Also, the EU should have negotiated a much better contract which gave them 100% knowledge about numbers produced and distributed as well as ownership of patents. The bottom line: stocks of vaccine in the Netherlands are increasing as the government did not trust professionals to make the decisions about who, when and how to vaccinate and left these decisions to people without knowledge about vaccination campaigns. AstraZeneca is quite right when it decides, in such a situation, to ship 10 to 14 million doses of its vaccines to Brazil (using the much maligned Covax program).
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Real-World Economics Review Blog 
Thank you for the rare mention of what Cuba is doing here. I would add that Cuba “does not have a high infection rate due to its successful management of its outbreak” because, since the revolution it has built one of the world’s finest public health systems, while USA neoliberalism has continuously cut theirs through at least 6 presidents.
Reading the link shows this as the first sentence from Reuters, “Communist-run Cuba said late on Friday …”. Yet the first reference to Iran does not say, “an accord with with Shia-fundamentalist-run Iran …”.
I have said for decades that the single individual most responsible for the reactionary USA foreign policy has been Fidel Castro. When will this western culture get over this anti-communist virus, this obsession?
Better healthcare priorities yes, but also very few people travel to Cuba. Same with New Zealand. It’s much easier to manage the pandemic if you’re isolated.
Happy days are here again! The orange clown/monster was thrown out of office. Now Amazon and Bezos are $70 billion richer since mid-March and public life is frozen or paralyzed to ward off the virus. That excess money could pay for nurses or be dispersed to the 50 strapped states! Authoritarian neoliberalism chooses ignoring and marginalizing instead of compromise. Corona magnifies the contradictions in late-stage finance capitalism where only mini-jobs are created and tents and homeless expand. Only the propertied seem to have enforceable rights. Many repugnacrats refuse to accept President Biden. Our country is surely rich in things and poor in soul, a failed state, an untied state! Another world is possible! After removing the upside-down misanthrope, the upside-down GDP, shareholder value, profit maximization and the self-healing market must be finally overcome!
In the UK the metric used is “Deaths of people who had a positive COVID test in the past month”. It’s reasonable to assume COVID contributed to the person’s death, but we don’t know how much and the variance could be a lot. This metric shows a huge 2nd wave spike. However the metric “Excess mortality compared to previous years” shows a much smaller bump. Excess mortality is the better metric because it more accurately estimates the deaths due to COVID (and any indirect effects such as lockdowns and depression).