What just happened
- AstraZeneca reported that its Covid vaccine is, on average, 70 per cent effective (more below).
- Downing Street said non-essential shops would be allowed to reopen in England when lockdown ends on 2 December.
- Joshua Wong, the Hong Kong democracy activist, pled guilty to unlawful assembly and could face five years in jail.
- Joe Biden let it be known he wants Tony Blinken, a lifelong internationalist, and keen singer, as his secretary of state.
The most eagerly awaited vaccine news in British and possibly world history arrived at 7am in a press release from AstraZeneca that at first felt like a disappointment. Early results suggest the vaccine the company has developed with Oxford University offers 62 per cent protection when delivered in two full doses and around 90 per cent when a half dose is followed by a full one, for an average of 70.4 per cent.
That is lower than Pfizer’s or Moderna’s, whose preliminary phase III clinical trial results indicated 95 per cent efficacy. However…
- Unlike the other two, the Oxford vaccine is built for global distribution because it doesn’t have to be heavily refrigerated. It needs to be stored at 2-8 degrees Celsius – household fridge temperature – compared with minus 70 and minus 20 for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines respectively.
- It’s also cheap, so low- and middle-income countries are depending on it. AstraZeneca says it will make the vaccine available at cost for “a few dollars” or around £3 per dose, compared with close to $20 for the Pfizer vaccine and more for the Moderna one.
- Mass production is already under way in the UK and elsewhere under supply deals agreed earlier this year, notably with the Serum Institute of India and in Brazil. Before today’s results the UK government ordered 100 million doses and AstraZeneca said it could in principle produce three billion doses a year.
- The regimen that appears to offer 90 per cent protection against Covid – a half dose followed by a full dose – may also give better protection against transmission by asymptomatic carriers, according to Professor Andrew Pollard, the trial’s lead investigator. If so, he said, “we might be able to halt the virus in its tracks”.
- The 95 per cent numbers from the US trials raised expectations beyond what even their own investigators hoped for. Even the 62 per cent protection offered by the full dose regimen would drive down infection rates given sufficient uptake.
Four million doses of the vaccine have already been stockpiled in the UK. Assuming it is approved for public use the first people to get it will be care home workers and residents, followed by people over 80.
Questions:
- Will some people demand the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine over the Oxford one for the sake of a few extra points’ worth of protection? If so, will they have the choice? Would they have to pay?
- What if uptake is not sufficient? A Pew survey in the US in September found that 49 per cent of Americans would not accept a vaccine. Tom Tugendhat, the Tory MP, has a solution: don’t let people who haven’t had it into pubs.
- Is it easy to repackage full doses of a vaccine as half doses? One hopes it is.
Hollow city
New office construction in central London fell by half in the six months to September compared with the six months before, and by 60 per cent in the City. In the later period there were just ten big schemes being worked on in the Square Mile compared with 16 in the preceding one, according to Deloitte. “The crowd flowed up the hill and down King William Street,” the poet wrote. Not anymore. Covid drove it away, Zoom kept it busy at home and the chance of lower overheads means the big question is whether it will ever return.
Vanadium batteires
The FT’s big read on batteries opens on the north Kent coast, where locals are worried that a giant new solar farm and containers full of lithium ion batteries will spoil the view. But the tech news buried in the piece is the emergence of vanadium-based batteries for large-scale power storage to even out supply curves from renewable sources. Vanadium batteries have the twin merits of low flammability and long life (up to 30 years). The catch: vanadium is scarce and its price is volatile, which may be why scientists have been so slow to take another look at it after Nasa proved the concept of so-called redox flow batteries early in the space race. So far battery progress has been generally glacial. Are we due a Great Acceleration?
