The launch of vaccines gives the United Kingdom a rare victory in the fight against the pandemic

Because the vaccine could only be refrigerated three days after it arrived at the clinic, health workers knew they had to inject 400 doses a day by Saturday to consume. There was already a line of people waiting for “shots”, so the doctors quickly diluted the vaccine, put the vials on the trays and handed them to a team of nurses.

This is the first line in what has become the most ambitious peacetime mass mobilization in modern British history. Britain has set up dozens of vaccination centers in sports stadiums, churches, mosques, and even an open-air museum in the Midlands, known to television viewers as a set for the popular crime series “Peaky Blinders”.

With almost 8 million people, or 11.7% of the population, having already received the first blow, Britain’s vaccination rate is the fastest of all the great nations in the world. Only Israel and the United Arab Emirates are moving faster.

The rapid launch is a rare success for a country whose coronavirus response has otherwise been destroyed – affected by delays, reversals and mixed messages. All this has contributed to a death toll that has recently exceeded 100,000 and strengthened Britain’s status as the most affected country in Europe.

Success has brought its own troubles: doctors are now worried about the lack of supplies, after a vaccine war broke out between Great Britain and the European Union. The EU imposed restrictions on bulk vaccine exports on Friday after it accused a British vaccine manufacturer, AstraZeneca, of favoring its domestic market.

And Britain’s aggressive approach is not without its risks: in order to reach more people quickly, it has opted to delay the administration of second doses up to 12 weeks after the first, rather than for the three or four weeks tested in clinical trials. .

However, at the Bloomsbury clinic there was a distinctly British atmosphere to continue with it. Most elderly patients waited patiently in line, rolled up their sleeves to strike, then retreated to an outdoor gazebo for 15 minutes to be monitored for potential reactions.

“So many of my friends had it,” said Emerenciana Mora, 72, a retired painting operator about the vaccine as she watched a nurse, Nasra Yusuf, prepare the needle. “Even the queen had it.”

The divergence between Britain and its European neighbors has led some to claim an early Brexit zeal. The UK’s divorce from the European Union helped give political freedom to authorize more vaccines in front of the bloc and quickly block its own vaccine production at AstraZeneca and Oxford University.

France, on the other hand, vaccinated only 1.8% of its population and Germany 2.6%, according to figures collected by Our World in Data. This reflects the growing supply shortages across the continent, as well as the slow pace of European Union regulators in approving vaccines.

But Britain’s success is also the result of decisions to return to the basics of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government.

Instead of contracting the campaign to private companies or building it from scratch, as it did with its costly and inefficient contact tracking operation, the government has put vaccination in the hands of the National Health Service, which, despite financial tensions. , is still widely revered by the British public.

Beyond state hospitals, doctors are at the forefront of the program. Not only did this make it available to trusted local doctors who have experience with seasonal flu vaccinations, but it also allowed these doctors to accurately target people in the government’s highest priority groups.

This is in stark contrast to the more fragmented approach in the United States. While Americans have been forced to struggle for meetings on unpleasant online portals and overwhelmed phone lines, British hospitals and doctors have led the programming themselves, allowing them to start with their older and most vulnerable patients.

And while the United States is using complicated rules to dictate who is eligible for vaccines – which has helped slow things down in some places – the UK has a clear system of prioritizing those who, due to their age, are the most exposed. the risk of dying from the virus, along with nurses and healthcare workers treating them.

“We work through these priority groups with absolutely no deviation,” said Dr. Daniel Beck, a general practitioner and head of a federation of physicians who was busy preparing ampoules at the clinic. “It benefits everyone, whether it’s someone who left home uneducated or a lord.”

Among the 6,000 people vaccinated at the Bloomsbury clinic in mid-December was Joan Collins, 87, a British actress famous for her role in “Dynasty”. But Beck said his top priority is to try to reduce the vaccine’s hesitation among racial and ethnic minorities, which polls have shown are more distrustful than whites who support the vaccine by health authorities.

Abdul Mathlib, 85, a retired worker who had just been shot, said he was concerned that the vaccine was causing side effects, even years later. But Mathlib said it’s a risk worth taking, adding, “You have to take it, don’t you?”

While some observers point to a greater tolerance of Britain for risk than the European Union, they give more success to vaccinating the country’s strong scientific base as well as “good old-fashioned training,” said David Goodhart, a writer. whose latest book, The Road to Somewhere, explored Brexit Britain.

It was by no means typical of Britain’s wider response.

Few foreign leaders have fought the pandemic like Johnson. He abandoned large-scale contact tracking and resisted a blockage, then ended up in an intensive care unit himself after contracting the virus.

But in those chaotic early days, his ministers moved to invest in vaccines and secured early contracts with producers. They also recruited Kate Bingham, a British venture capitalist, to lead a government vaccination group.

In March, the government provided initial funding – £ 2.6 million, or $ 3.5 million – to the Oxford research team. By May, when the vaccine was still in clinical trials, the UK had reached an agreement with AstraZeneca to buy tens of millions of doses, three months before the European Union negotiated its acquisitions.

As concerns about vaccine protectionism were already flaring, British officials were determined to make any home vaccine quickly and easily accessible to the British. They spoke with the Oxford team as they negotiated with Merck and other drug companies to find a partner to mass-produce and distribute the vaccine.

Oxford has finally struck a deal with Cambridge-based AstraZeneca.

“They made it quite clear to me and others that they wanted to know about the business and were concerned about the nationalism of the vaccine,” said John Bell, an Oxford professor and member of the government’s vaccine working group last year. the British. health officials.

Two factories in England are now producing the vaccine, and a Welsh company is preparing it for distribution. The British government has stated that most of its deliveries of AstraZeneca vaccines come from that supply chain.

AstraZeneca said its early agreement with the UK helped it resolve the inevitable manufacturing hiccups before it began distributing the vaccine. Production problems at a Belgian plant have led the company to announce that it will reduce its deliveries to Europe by 60%, which has sparked a cross-channel dispute.

“With the UK, we had three more months to fix all the problems we experienced,” Pascal Soriot, CEO of AstraZeneca, told an Italian newspaper in Repubblica this week.

On Friday, EU drug regulators authorized the AstraZeneca vaccine for all adults, following the precedent set last month by the UK regulator.

In the meantime, the UK could soon receive another vaccine.

Novavax, a biotechnology company based in Gaithersburg, Maryland, reported Friday that its vaccine was 89.3% effective in a large-scale study in the UK. The government has provided 60 million doses, which will be made at a factory in the north-east of England. If approved by the UK regulators, the vaccine will be delivered in the second half of 2021.

However, the British government has spent at least £ 11.7 billion, or $ 16 billion, on the development, manufacture, purchase and administration of vaccines.

“Vaccination is the only thing I understand,” said Christina Pagel, a professor of operational research at University College London.

This does not mean that the launch was without tensions. With the overcoming of hospitals and a more contagious variant that pervades the country, the United Kingdom has opted to offer more people the partial protection of a single dose, rather than quickly offering fewer people the full protection of two doses.

Doctors whose booster shots were postponed were upset by the approach, accusing the government of making them the subject of a new risky, worrying experiment that will make vaccines less effective. Immunologists have expressed concern that a country full of people with partial immunity could generate vaccine-resistant mutations, while Pfizer said the strategy is not supported by data collected in clinical trials.

But the idea of ​​giving priority to the first photos has gained some traction, as countries struggling with the growing virus and deficiencies in vaccine supply are looking for ways to gain partial protection in their populations.

For harassed doctors at the Bloomsbury Clinic, the biggest challenge is simply getting a steady amount of doses.

“Our biggest problem is that we don’t know, week by week, what deliveries we receive,” said Dr. Ammara Hughes, the clinical director, as she eagerly scans her iPhone for news of the next delivery. “Logistics is difficult.”

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