There is no reason why the UK would block exports of any components, unless it had its back to the wall, and it has not threatened that. It just appears that UVDL has not been properly briefed, when threatening to block supplies to the UK. This stuff is all made all over Europe…
So you will get AZ and Pfizer, as before. The challenge will be acceptance of AZ, due to recent events.
I think the US has export controls on Moderna and J&J.
The top prof in the UK scene has just said on TV that the UK has not detected any connection between the clotting and the vaccination. So I wonder what is different between the UK and the mainland?
Graham wrote:
Simply not true.
Just to be clear. Do you have an affiliation with AZ somehow?
I think we might have a culture problem here.
Norway and most of the other countries that decided to stop roll out of the AZ vaccine are independant sovereign democratic nations who have a perfect right to check out the situation for themselves. Their politicians are responsible to the people of that nation not to those of the UK, whatever you might think.
Some years ago there was a scare started that electric fields from overhead electricity power lines caused chilhood leukaemia. It was a big thing with lots of anecdotal and so called demonstrations of fluorescent bulbs being held under power lines.
Despite the fact that the physics did not add up for that, universities and research establishments around the world could find no causal effect and incidences of the disease were rare (if I remember rightly Sweden has 6 cases in a 25 year period) a great deal of time and money was spent in countries around the world, including the UK to prove a negative.
In the end the world moved on to blaming mobile phones for the same problem but suspicions still remain.
So why are you surprised that countries like Norway have decided to just take a look. Is it because everyone should just automatically trust AZ because its British, or the UK vaccine testing body says its ok or the EMA or WHO for that matter. And when it comes to the WHO or the EMA the Brits have spent months deriding their expertise, when they haven’t fallen into line with UK thinking. So how much weight do you think individuals in these democratic sovereign nations should place on the opinions of these esteemed bodies.
I find that line of enquiry baffling. No one is suggesting they trust it implicitly for reasons of nationality or anything else. Take it or don’t – as I said neither the UK nor AZ are bothered either way, but don’t dress up political posturing as a reasonable scientific approach and expect intelligent people to swallow it.
My concern is for the people who suffer as a result of the political posturing. One day someone will crunch the numbers and work out how many extra people died because the EC gave itself a remit it wasn’t competent to deliver and then tried to deflect blame for its horrendous failure with silly political posturing and making a bogeyman out of the UK.
But in my eyes that is exactly what you and the UK Government are trying to do to the EU,the EEA, and others. Why do you think that your or your Government’s opinion is more valid than anyone else’s.
And if you think that AZ don’t care what the EU think then you are either very naive or AZ are being poorly managed.
My concern is for the people who suffer as a result of the political posturing.
It’s nothing political at all. It’s not a political decision. There have been clear connections between blod cloth and AZ, and several have died in Norway alone. It’s conspiracy thinking to think this is political and with no factual cases.
The common “philosophical” view on this is that it’s a “case” of the state vs nature. Should the state offer you something that may cause you harm even though the danger from nature is low? This is a medicine that may prevent you from getting a disease that has a tiny chance of harming you in the first place. We cannot stop seeing the trees for the forest just because we have a pandemic going.
Seems to me that France has taken a good way ahead. They are using AZ on people above 55 only.
Europe is not one country.
No country has to obey the EMA.
Each country’s politicians are answerable only to their own population.
So this is what we are seeing.
But everybody is in the same boat, because this is a worldwide problem. The virus knows no borders – except in a temporary way, via travel controls.
The UK does have an interest in Europe doing things right, because we are all in the same boat. One aspect is that travel to the continent will be impossible for a long time. Another is that if the virus is not suppressed there will be variants emerging, so earliest suppression is desirable. And the economic destruction of a long shutdown will propagate everywhere; not confined to borders.
And it is clear that the mainland has cocked up the vaccination programme, and mis-judged the slagging off of AZ (which most think is a proxy for the UK and for brexit – because Pfizer is getting none of this). The side effects are miniscule. They are several orders of magnitude below the numbers which are dying of the virus right now. But the result is that much of the mainland population is now going to refuse it.
The side effects are also orders of magnitude below the side effects of common drugs – drugs which a big chunk of any country is on. Statins, beta blockers, antidepressants, you name it. These are being prescribed like they were sweets. A friend got peripheral neuropathy from casually prescribed statins and could not walk properly for ages. Had to give up sports he used do do – e.g. windsurfing. Loads of people get leg and other pains from statins. Medicine is full of stuff which works, but at a price in side effects. In comparion, the AZ and Pfizer vaccines are models of what a drug should be like.
Now the mainland politicians are back-pedalling, going on TV geting vacced with AZ, hoping to turn things around. It’s going to be a big job.
And UVDL is just a joke, like Clint Eastwood riding into town on his mule and shooting up a load of bad guys. The difference is that (a) he could shoot straight and (b) he actually got the bad guys 
gallois wrote:
But in my eyes that is exactly what you and the UK Government are trying to do to the EU,the EEA, and others. Why do you think that your or your Government’s opinion is more valid than anyone else’s.
And if you think that AZ don’t care what the EU think then you are either very naive or AZ are being poorly managed.
I can’t speak for how it looks through your eyes. But I can assure you that the UK just wants to get on with vaccinating its population – at the moment we look across the channel and shake our heads in despair at what’s going on in the EU, but there’s no element of finding a bogeyman because we don’t need anyone to blame. It probably concerns us a bit when the EC makes threats about restricting the activities of a company that is important to us (Pfizer), but that’s the extent of it. UK europhiles such as myself are disappointed that this episode has put back closer UK/EU collaboration for decades and I distance myself from the jingoistic tone of the Daily Mail (which as @Peter says does get the dirt first, however distasteful its presentation).
I’ve never said the UK government’s opinion is more valid that anyone else’s, but it (a) speaks from a position of having a far larger dataset on the AZ vaccine than any other country, and (b) is advised by a medicines regulator of international repute. Thus we are confident in the position we are taking and do not (at the moment) look across the channel wondering if someone else knows better.
As an aside, in the UK’s large dataset on the Pfizer vaccine we see more events (including more clotting) than we do for AZ. Should we stop Pfizer? Or both?
LeSving wrote:
It’s nothing political at all. It’s not a political decision. There have been clear connections between blod cloth and AZ, and several have died in Norway alone. It’s conspiracy thinking to think this is political and with no factual cases.
There are no clear connections. The EMA even says so, and I’m afraid that a dataset of ~15m is not going be trumped by a dataset of a few hundred thousand.
It’s highly political. UVDL and the EC have attacked the UK at every turn – generally in a manner unworthy of civilised political leaders, but perhaps sadly typical of supra-national leadership. First we were taking unnecessary risks because the MHRA approved vaccines before the EMA, then we were apparently responsible for AZ’s low yields in Belgium and should be giving the EU some of the doses made in the UK, then we were taking risks because we were giving it to over 65s, then the stuff we were apparently pushing on the world was “quasi-ineffective”. Now we are taking risks by not stopping when European countries do? Please, these arguments are getting tired and you’ll struggle to convince anyone that it’s not political.
LeSving wrote:
The common “philosophical” view on this is that it’s a “case” of the state vs nature. Should the state offer you something that may cause you harm even though the danger from nature is low? This is a medicine that may prevent you from getting a disease that has a tiny chance of harming you in the first place.
I agree fully with your philosophical approach to this, but you are so far out on the numbers that it isn’t even funny. Even if every clotting event seen everywhere was proven to be directly caused by the vaccine, the statistical risk is still far, far lower than the risk of Covid. Covid is low-risk in the grand scheme of things, yes, and like you I don’t like the rhetoric that calls it a ‘deadly disease’ and other such stuff, but the vaccines (all of them) are many orders of magnitude lower in their risk – and whether or not you ascribe these clotting events to them makes no difference to that.
But you and @Peter have proved my point in the last few posts. You are still portraying other countries and their medical, political representatives and public as bogeymen who should just shut up and do what you think is right.
Please understand that I don’t necessarily disagree with some of the things you write but the slagging off of another country’s elected officials or the EU commission by an "outsider"does not endeer me to understanding your position.
We have different cultures and what upsets/angers/annoys can be very different.
