Laos Expecting Shipment of Pfizer Vaccine

[reader]

From Laotian Times

Laos is to receive a shipment of some 100,620 doses of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine through the COVAX facility.

To prepare for the arrival of the vaccine, the National Immunisation Programme has been provided with special freezers because the Pfizer vaccine requires special ultra cold chain storage conditions to preserve it and maintain its viability, according to the Center for Information and Education for Health.

The equipment was provided by the World Health Organization (WHO) with support from the German Federal Ministry of Health.

Laos will roll out vaccinations with the Pfizer vaccine to three priority groups, including medical personnel, the elderly, and people with chronic illnesses.

https://laotiantimes.com/2021/06/01/laos-expecting-shipment-of-pfizer-vaccine/

[Lonnie]

20 minutes ago, reader said:

the German Federal Ministry of Health

Thanks for these articles...it reminds the world that poor countries need much more help. Germany has not done the greatest job themselves but find the resources to help.

What the hell is wrong with the US?

[reader]

Totally agree. Let's hope Biden makes good on his vow to send millions of doses overseas by the end of this month.

From NBC News

 

May 17, 2021, 12:57 PM EDT / Updated May 17, 2021, 2:23 PM EDT

By Lauren Egan

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden announced Monday that his administration will send an additional 20 million Covid-19 vaccines abroad by the end of June, including for the first time vaccines that have been approved for use in the United States.

"Our vaccination program has led the world, and today we are taking an additional step to help the world," Biden said in a speech at the White House.

"No ocean is wide enough, no wall is high enough to keep us safe. Rampant disease and death in other countries can destabilize them — those countries — and pose a risk to us as well," he added.

The 20 million doses of U.S.-approved shots are in addition to Biden's previous commitment to give 60 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to other countries, meaning that 80 million doses are expected to be shared with the world within the next few weeks.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-send-20-million-u-s-approved-vaccines-abroad-end-n1267596

======================================

COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access, abbreviated as COVAX, is a worldwide initiative aimed at equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines directed by Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, and the World Health Organization.

[Lonnie]

 

2 hours ago, reader said:

U.S.-approved shots

Good to know we have pledged some money to help...if I remember right Biden is sharing AstraZeneca with Canada and Europe and as it is not approved for use in the US... it's not that generous but certainly better than nothing.

[faranglaw]

The First World needs to do much more as the virus does not recognize boundaries.  But it’s good to see the Biden administration stepping up.  Part of the reason is that there is a glut of vaccines in the US now; they can’t give them away, and some states are actually offering lottery prizes to get people to vaccinate.  About one third of US citizens are “vaccine hesitant,” which is a rather nice way of putting it.

[tassojunior]

Sending shots is for show. It's a drop in the bucket to what's needed.  20 million vs. 6 Billion. The only solution is to let vaccine factories in other countries make the vaccine and waive the patent. India alone has over 500 vaccine factories. Pfizer bought the patent from a German firm that invented the vaccine and won't let anyone else make it. Moderna is not so mean and AZ has an obligation from the EU to waive it's patent for poor countries. The Sputnik vaccine is excellent and many countries, including Argentina, are manufacturing it free of patent but the US is trying to stop countries from using it for politics.  

Lives should matter most, not corporate profits or politics.    

[Guest]

2 hours ago, tassojunior said:

AZ has an obligation from the EU to waive it's patent for poor countries.

Astra Zeneca has already licensed it's vaccine to many different countries and the EU has had nothing whatsoever to do with that.   

That's the same EU that was moaning about Astra Zeneca vaccines being exported to the UK from a Dutch plant,  when at the time, the EU had not even approved that plant to manufacture the vaccine for the EU.  

 

[Lonnie]

2 hours ago, tassojunior said:

. It's a drop in the bucket to what's needed

Epsteins billionaire pal Bill Gates has some interest and responsibilty in this: (From The New Repubic...they actually get thiings right on very rare occasions)

https://newrepublic.com/article/162000/bill-gates-impeded-global-access-covid-vaccines

When the Financial Times editorialized on March 27 that “the world has an overwhelming interest in ensuring [Covid-19 drugs and vaccines] will be universally and cheaply available,” the paper expressed what felt like a hardening conventional wisdom. This sense of possibility emboldened forces working to extend the cooperative model. Grounding their efforts was a plan, started in early March, to create a voluntary intellectual property pool inside the WHO. Instead of putting up proprietary walls around research and organizing it as a “race,” public and private actors would collect research and associated intellectual property in a global knowledge fund for the duration of the pandemic. The idea became real in late May with the launch of the WHO Covid-19 Technology Access Pool, or C-TAP.

 

By then, however, the optimism and sense of possibility that defined the early days were long gone. Advocates for pooling and open science, who seemed ascendant and even unstoppable that winter, confronted the possibility they’d been outmatched and outmaneuvered by the most powerful man in global public health.

In April, Bill Gates launched a bold bid to manage the world’s scientific response to the pandemic. Gates’s Covid-19 ACT-Accelerator expressed a status quo vision for organizing the research, development, manufacture, and distribution of treatments and vaccines. Like other Gates-funded institutions in the public health arena, the Accelerator was a public-private partnership based on charity and industry enticements. Crucially, and in contrast to the C-TAP, the Accelerator enshrined Gates’s long-standing commitment to respecting exclusive intellectual property claims. Its implicit arguments—that intellectual property rights won’t present problems for meeting global demand or ensuring equitable access, and that they must be protected, even during a pandemic—carried the enormous weight of Gates’s reputation as a wise, beneficent, and prophetic leader. 

How he’s developed and wielded this influence over two decades is one of the more consequential and underappreciated shapers of the failed global response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Entering year two, this response has been defined by a zero-sum vaccination battle that has left much of the world on the losing side.

[reader]

The above posts reflect both the the good and not-so-good of policies put forward as the world attempts to come to grips with the real enemy: the virus itself.

The last time the world attempted to defeat a threat on this scale was in WWII. And that battle was accompanied by the same interplay of political, regional and industrial interests. It was successful only to the degree that individual nations sublimated some of their own priorities and arrived at a grand compromise. 

As in that war, the opponent, the Axis powers, helped shape how the war was conducted. Now, it's the virus itself that is shaping the same political, regional and industrial responses. It's not always--or even rarely--a comforting process to witness. But its success or failure will be measured in the same way: was the threat defeated. At this moment, that remains undecided.

Even many of those who stand to benefit from victory appear undecided on the cure. The same percentage (about two-thirds) of the population in both the US and Thailand are reluctant to receive a vaccine.

The only thing all of us have in common is the desire for victory. And with such daunting odds, it's easy to get side tracked with the differences.

[reader]

Apologies for an error in my previous post. The fourth paragraph should read:

"Even many of those who stand to benefit from victory appear undecided on the cure. The same percentage (about one third) of the population in both the US and Thailand are reluctant to receive a vaccine."