Vaccination in sight

Yesterday I walked 13km and went to bed really tired. I slept until nine this morning, an hour longer than usual, and still felt tired until I went for a damp if refreshing walk before lunch. It rained hard overnight, but intermittent light showers driven by a warm wind persisted throughout the day with the temperature again hovering around ten degrees. Heavy rain returned this evening, there's no escaping it.

We heard from Diana that she and Pete, like us in the third priority tier for vaccination, were advised to  arrange to be on the standby list for a jab. It seems that empty spaces due to gaps in the schedule, plus the finding that some vials of vaccine deliver more than the expected number of doses mean that it's possible to inject more people than planned on any day. Rather than waste spare doses people on the standby list willing to travel across the city can be called upon at short notice to be vaccinated. 

Clare wonders if we should get our names on the list. She is keen to be able to visit school again. There must be many more people in our age group who are more vulnerable than us. Social distancing, masking and washing hands will still be necessary after vaccination to avoid all possibility of transmitting the virus for those rendered immune to it. We can't travel out of Cardiff, can't go shopping or socialise as long as the present lock-down persists. I'm not anxious to get vaccinated as soon as possible if others are needier. There have been glitches in the vaccination schedule anyway, due to the bad weather, but NHS Wales is confident that the mid-February target of reaching everyone in the top three priorities will be met.

There are more serious problems in the EU, as the Commission failed to order sufficient vaccines to meet the requirements of member states. It was reported that vaccinations stopped in Madrid as supplies ran out. Britain for once was pro-active in ordering vaccines three months before the European Commission, giving rise to a degree of brexit smugness which is doing nothing to maintain goodwill. The Commission is demanding a share of supplies manufactured in Britain, and threatening legal action if it doesn't. Not an unreasonable request, but as stocks are already committed to the UK market, it's unlikely for the moment. Not a healthy situation.

Epidemiologists are right to insist that nobody is safe until the global population has been vaccinated, rich and poor alike. It's going to be a challenge, as there are cultural reasons for people in some countries to resist being vaccinated, as has been discovered during initiatives to vaccinate populations against other infectious diseases. The scaling up of vaccine production is happening apace all over the world. Supplying enough for seven billion people is a huge logistic and medical challenge, but it seems that manufacturing high volumes presents problems of its own. 

Vaccine components are grown on cultures. Larger cultures produce more, but not always as efficiently or predictably as smaller scale productions, so that precise predictions of industrial scale output aren't available. It's possible this will change given the ingenuity of bio-chemical engineers, but success in improving production isn't a certainty. The one good thing about this crisis is the way it brings to public attention the value and importance of all kinds of scientific endeavour working for the common good.