Day: November 5, 2020

Two Covid-19 vaccines are on the verge of being certified as safe and effective – but production delays mean the first batches may reach no more than a fraction of the UK population.

A homegrown vaccine, developed by Oxford University and manufactured by AstraZeneca, has the “possibility of being ready before the end of the year”, according to Kate Bingham, the chair of the government’s vaccine task force.

She told MPs yesterday that the first three batches of the drug, now in production, “should get us up to about four million doses by the end of the year”. But as The Telegraph points out, the government pledged in May that “30 million vaccines would be ready by September to allow for immediate mass deployment if trials were successful”.

The delay is down to the technical challenge of splicing an immunity-generating protein from the coronavirus with a harmless chimpanzee virus that will carry it into human cells.

“It’s not through lack of care and attention or availability of equipment or anything like that,” Bingham said. “It’s just that this normally takes a very long time.”

Another potential vaccine, developed in Germany by Pfizer and BioNTech, is simpler to manufacture but “contains a type of genetic material known as mRNA that must be stored at minus 70C”, The Times reports. That makes it difficult and expensive to distribute.

The UK has signed deals to buy 350 million doses of a total of six vaccines, all of which are undergoing trials. Once the results are published, the government’s health authorities will decide whether to approve their widespread use.

“The US regulator, the Food and Drug Administration, has said it wanted at least 50% efficacy to approve a vaccine,” The Guardian reports. “But if one was found to prevent 40% of cases, [UK] policymakers would have to consider whether it would be of help to the NHS.”

The economy was at the forefront of the minds of a third of US voters when deciding who to back in the presidential election, according to early exit polls.

As the vote results continue to roll in, The Times reports that interviews with members of the electorate “indicated that President Trump’s unexpectedly robust showing was driven by millions of voters who believed it a more important issue” than the coronavirus pandemic and other key challenges facing the country.

Of more than 15,500 respondents asked to identify the most important issue from five choices, 35% picked the economy, while 20% chose racial inequality.

The Covid-19 response was the biggest issue for 17%, with crime and healthcare – traditionally major concerns on both sides of the political aisle – coming in joint fourth on 11%.

However, major differences in priorities between voters from either side of the political divide were also revealed by the exit poll, conducted by Edison Research for the National Election Pool syndicate of news organisations.

Of the respondents who cited racial inequality as the most important issue, 91% voted for Joe Biden. The Democrat was also backed by 82% of those who cited Covid as their main concern.

By contrast, 71% of those who chose crime as their key issue backed Donald Trump for the presidency. And crucially for the incumbent, 82% of those who chose the economy voted to give him a second term in the White House.

Healthcare was similarly split down partisan lines, with 63% of those who elevated it above all else pledging their support for Biden.

Although those political divisions come as little surprise, an arguably more surprising finding of the poll is that overall, 48% of US voters believe the nation’s pandemic response is going “very well” or “somewhat well”.

Meanwhile, a separate exit poll conducted by the Associated Press also puts the economy as a major concern for the US public, with 30% of more than 133,000 voters and non-voters quizzed citing it as their top issue.

But the APVoteCast survey found that an even greater percentage were more concerned about the coronavirus response, at 40%.

Whichever way the respondents voted, Trump’s allegations of election fraud appear to have fuelled a major new concern, “with three in ten expressing doubts that their votes would be counted accurately”, the news agency reports.