How AstraZeneca threw away its shot

&gt; One of the most damaging moments was when French President Emmanuel Macron openly disparaged the jab in January, calling it quasi-ineffective.<p>What do you want people to say when you report a 6.3% efficacy (against serious illness in over 65&#x27;s) in a phase 3 clinical trial? Sure it was a small sample and thus statistically useless blah blah, but design your trials better.

I feel bad for the Oxford people.

Way to spin the article. This has literally barely to do with the EU<p>&gt; South Africa itself decided not to use the vaccine and infamously sold its doses to other African nations.<p>Yes, because efficiency results showed it is barely efficient against the South African variant (not sure which letter it is) - the lack of efficiency is apparently not a concern with other variants. But why should SA buy an ineffective (for them) vaccine?<p>AZ conducted the Phase 3 tests. AZ &quot;is responsible&quot; for the serious adverse effects (not blaming them - it is most likely due to poor application method and the vaccine getting into the bloodstream) and now that the adverse effects are known it&#x27;s easier to treat it correctly.<p>That being said it fills its role of being an effective vaccine. If your area is not concerned with the SA variant I wouldn&#x27;t worry about taking it.

The article is sligthly better than the headline, but still I don&#x27;t think it if fair to blame the EU for this. And one part the article doesn&#x27;t mention is that limiting the use of AZ in younger people wasn&#x27;t just decided by politics, in many countries this was done by independent scientific bodies.<p>There were a bunch of times were communication was bad, and I&#x27;d blame individual politicians here as well as some parts of the media. But this is also a fundamentally difficult thing to convey, the vaccine is not bad and far better than no vaccine for people above a certain age. But it has certain rare and serious side effects, and at lower ages the cost&#x2F;benefit calculation for the AZ vaccine is not really in favor of it.<p>I don&#x27;t think there is anyone to blame if people chose a vaccine with fewer serious side effects if they have access to it.<p>And all the talk didn&#x27;t prevent people from still getting the AZ vaccine at a time vaccines were scarce, even if you&#x27;re in an age group where it wasn&#x27;t recommended. I got the first dose AZ myself, and I&#x27;m outside the age group it is recommended for in Germany.

This is a bad faith article that would have ended the same either way. Right now western countries are getting taken to task for not approving the vaccine quick enough. Had they approved it quickly in spite of the blood clot concerns, the headline would be something like, &quot;Wealthy Western Countries use Africa to test questionable vaccine&quot; and there would have been references to Tuskegee and some such.<p>Everyone is in unknown territory with this pandemic and frequent judgment calls have to be made before all the evidence is in. Sometimes you get it right and sometimes you don&#x27;t. But saying countries &quot;ruined&quot; an entire continent&#x27;s chance out of the pandemic is blatantly dishonest reporting.

&gt; <i>Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi — who made a public show of getting the Oxford&#x2F;AstraZeneca jab as their first shot to boost confidence — opted for an mRNA vaccine as their second dose.</i><p>This is a classic example of putting a &quot;spin&quot; on a certain information. I&#x27;m not aware of the situation in Italy, but in Germany the current official recommendation is for <i>everyone</i> who got a first dose of AstraZeneca to get an mRNA shot (either Biontech&#x2F;Pfizer or Moderna) as the second dose to increase the efficacy. So Merkel is not &quot;opting&quot; for anything personally, just following the recommendation...

So western countries should have pretended that adenovirus vaccines are on par with mRNA vaccines such that people in Africa would have been more willing to use it?

Really, sometimes I wonder if Pfizer is paying journalists to publish this kind of FUD article.