Sixth vaccine to join the arsenal

Seven is a magical number from the Seven Wonders of the World to the biblical seventh day on which God rested after creating the world.

And seven is turning out to be pretty magical when it comes to vaccines too. That’s the number of potential vaccine candidates which Kate Bingham, the former head of the government’s Vaccine Taskforce ordered last summer while trials were still taking place.

Bingham’s bet on the seven – out of 160 different vaccines being developed around the world – is looking more extraordinary by the day. Three have been approved by the medical regulator – the Pfizer/BioNTech, Oxford/AstraZeneca and Moderna vaccines – while two have been shown to be highly effective – the Janssen and Novavax vaccines – and hopefully will be approved over the next few weeks.

Now a sixth candidate joins the vaccine arsenal after the government confirmed it has taken out an option on another 40 million doses of the promising Valneva vaccine, which is still in stage 1 and stage 2 trials. (The seventh – the GSK/Sanofi vaccine – has had to be reformulated after trials showed it wasn’t effective in older participants, but the hope is that it will be ready by the end of the year.)

The Valneva vaccine should be available by the second half of the year and experts say this candidate – an inactivated virus vaccine which contains dead Covid-19 particles – could prove essential in defending against new strains.

The UK had already ordered 60 million doses, bringing the total to 100 million but retains options over a further 90 million doses for supply between 2023 and 2025 in case vaccines have to become annual. According to Valneva, the total value of the 190 million doses, if all options are exercised, is up to €1.4 billion.

What this latest deal with Valneva also means is that production can be scaled up massively at its plant in Livingston, West Lothian. Backed with investment from the government, it’s hoped that Valneva’s site will be a Scottish vaccine production “powerhouse.” It is estimated that once the vaccine is approved, the Livingston site will be able to make up to 250 million doses for use in the UK and for selling around the world.

This latest agreement means the UK has now secured access to over 400 million total doses of vaccines for this year and next. What’s also thrilling is that the UK is helping back all these new developments with taxpayer money: we have now invested £300 million in vaccine manufacturing plants while another £548 million in UK aid is going towards distributing 1.3 billion doses of coronavirus vaccines to 92 developing countries this year.

There was other brighter news: daily deaths of those who have died with Covid-19 was down nearly a third on last Monday at 406, and new infections are at a seven-week low of 18,607. It’s the right direction.

Coup in Myanmar

Myanmar’s military has carried out a coup d’état, declaring a state of emergency for one year and detaining democratically elected leaders including the country’s de facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.

The army claims that a recent election which returned Ms Suu Kyi’s party, the NLD, with a landslide, was marred by fraud. International observers agree it wasn’t. Myanmar has been a fragile democracy since multi-party elections in 2010 ended five decades of military rule.

One 25-year-old Yangon resident, who wished to remain anonymous, told the BBC: “Waking up to learn your world has been completely turned upside down overnight was not a new feeling, but a feeling that I thought that we had moved on from, and one that I never thought we’d be forced to feel again.”

Squashed cherry

Fireworks in Scotland: Joanna Cherry has been dropped from the Scottish National Party’s frontbench team at Westminster “despite hard work, results and a strong reputation”.

The Edinburgh South West MP is a close ally of former party leader Alex Salmond, now embroiled in a bitter row with First Minister Nicola Sturgeon over the sexual imbroglio.

Ms Cherry, an advocate and QC, played a key role in a number of Brexit legal challenges and has taken a strong line on transgender issues. She backs JK Rowling in asserting, thank goodness, that biological sex is a fact.

The SNP said it was shaking up its Westminster team ahead of this spring’s Holyrood election but insiders say it’s a way of deflecting attention away from Sturgeon’s bad record on the vaccination roll-out.

See Gerald Warner for what is really behind the latest shenanigans.

Maggie Pagano,
Executive Editor