Vaccines
This graph comes from a tweet from someone I don’t know claiming to use Our World in Data data. I have not verified it, but it looks plausible:
Note that 80% of the doses in Uruguay are Sinovac. Hungary uses a lot of different vaccines — Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Covishield, Sinopharm, Sputnik V, and Convidecia — but I don’t know what the proportions are of which vaccine. Many of those are from either Russia or China and ah might have issues.
Duke University is trialing a combined flu+COVID-19 vaccine using influenza vaccine infrastructure. They did this by basically splicing some COVID-19 DNA into a flu DNA, and showed that this frankenvirus can be used in the normal flu vaccine process and give resistance in vitro to both that flu strain and COVID-19. (Duke is also working with the US NIH to make an mRNA vaccine against many (all?) influenza varieties, which is cool and shows that they have expertise with influenza, but I don’t think the two vaccines are related.)
So you were still worried about P.1? I keep telling you, it’s not that scary. Here’s a preprint showing that as vaccination (mostly Sinovac, but some AZ) in people over went up, deaths went way down.
I missed this yesterday: Canada is holding off on distributing the J&J vax (which just arrived) because of concerns about quality control at the Emergent plant in Baltimore. (Here’s another article from the Globe&Mail that I like better, but it’s paywalled.) Canada originally thought that the J&J it just got was not from the US plant, but it turns out that the active ingredient was made at the Emergent plant and then shipped somewhere else for “fill and finish” i.e. putting the goo into bottles.
The Globe & Mail article made me realize why the J&J shipment had to get thawed when it arrived: to test it. It makes perfect sense that when a shipment of vax comes in, that there are some acceptance tests the government does on the shipment to make sure it’s legit. We wouldn’t want counterfeit vax to show up and just move right into the distribution network.