Dödligt virus från Kina orsakar panik (SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19)

Hur långt bak i vaccinkön hade Sverige stått utan EU?

Innan EU-kommissionen klev in fick Sverige fick nobben till att vara med i de stora ländernas vaccinpakt.

Fyra länder i en pakt – Tyskland, Frankrike, Italien och Nederländerna – slängde sig över egna läkemedelsfirmor för att garantera ett kommande vaccin. Danska regeringen ringde Berlin och bad att få vara med i vaccinpakten men fick nej. Samma svar fick de svenska och belgiska regeringarna

Storbritannien erbjöds att ingå i EU-uppköpen men tackade nej. I december blev britterna tre veckor snabbare med att godkänna tysk-amerikanska Biontech-Pfizers vaccin.
Ny kritik mot EU.
Godkännandet dröjde bland annat för att EU krävde att vaccintillverkaren skulle ta juridiskt ansvar för produkten. EU fick vaccinet till ett lägre pris och med garanti – vilket britterna har avstått ifrån.

When the number of COVID-19 cases began to rise again in Manaus, Brazil, in December 2020, Nuno Faria was stunned. The virologist at Imperial College London and associate professor at the University of Oxford had just co-authored a paper in Science estimating that three-quarters of the city’s inhabitants had already been infected with SARS-CoV-2, the pandemic coronavirus—more than enough, it seemed, for herd immunity to develop. The virus should be done with Manaus. Yet hospitals were filling up again. “It was hard to reconcile these two things,” Faria says. He started to hunt for samples he could sequence to find out whether changes in the virus could explain the resurgence.

On 12 January, Faria and his colleagues posted their initial conclusions on the website virological.org. Thirteen of 31 samples collected in mid-December in Manaus turned out to be part of a new viral lineage they called P.1. Much more research is needed, but they say one possibility is that in some people, P.1 eludes the human immune response triggered by the lineage that ravaged the city earlier in 2020.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) spread rapidly in Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state in northern Brazil. The attack rate there is an estimate of the final size of the largely unmitigated epidemic that occurred in Manaus. We use a convenience sample of blood donors to show that by June 2020, 1 month after the epidemic peak in Manaus, 44% of the population had detectable immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies. Correcting for cases without a detectable antibody response and for antibody waning, we estimate a 66% attack rate in June, rising to 76% in October. This is higher than in São Paulo, in southeastern Brazil, where the estimated attack rate in October was 29%. These results confirm that when poorly controlled, COVID-19 can infect a large proportion of the population, causing high mortality.