Vaccines shine a light in the lockdown gloom
LAST weekend’s Covid-19 outbreak and the sudden lockdown that followed has understandably dominated island news.
It has been an unsettling period for a Bailiwick which has grown used to viewing the virus with concern and sympathy but a degree of detachment.
It would be a pity, however, if the clamour that erupted after the discovery of on-island seeding drowned out the good news that keeps coming in the form of vaccines.
Every day this week hundreds of elderly and vulnerable islanders have trooped up to Beau Sejour for their inoculation.
They are taking the first steps in the islands’ long journey out of the darkness. Each day that passes gives the vaccine time to get working and offer them protection.
Good news came too in the form of new vaccines. The Moderna vaccine has been approved in both the UK and Guernsey and yesterday we learned that the Novavax vaccine has been shown to be almost 90% effective against even the new UK virus variant.
The UK government has pre-ordered 17 million doses of the Moderna vaccine, a proportion of which should start arriving here in the spring.
Novavax is yet to be fully approved by medical authorities but it is hoped that 60 million doses will ultimately be available.
When added to the 100 million of the Oxford-Astrazeneca vaccine and the 40 million of Pfizer-BioNTech, the NHS is building up a sizeable arsenal. Britain has firm orders in place for three more strong candidates while worldwide up to 60 vaccines are going through stage three clinical trials.
All of which is great news for the Bailiwick. Regardless of the wrangling between the vaccine-starved EU and AstraZeneca, the islands can have growing confidence that a fair share of NHS supplies puts us in a strong position.
In total, the UK plans to have enough supplies for the equivalent of five doses per person.
That should be enough not only to secure British people a steady supply over coming months – and maintain its place near the top of the world leader board for per capita inoculations – but also ensure that poorer parts of the world are not ignored in the global scramble for precious stocks.