“Our vaccination campaign is a success: the gap with Great Britain has narrowed from 25% to the current 5% and is getting smaller and smaller, but we must not give in. Because there are still big differences between Member States, Delta variants are spreading and too many doses are not used and remain in the refrigerators”.
“Being able to offer a dose of vaccine” against Covid “less than 200 days after the start of the campaign is one of our country’s greatest achievements”. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote this on Twitter to mark the fact that from today in the UK all people aged 18 and over can book for a vaccine against the coronavirus.
China has offered to urgently send Covid-19 vaccines to Taiwan at a time when the island is facing a massive wave of infection but has received a flat refusal. In a late-night statement, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office said it was very concerned about the pandemic currently affecting Taiwan, noting that it had repeatedly offered help and that some groups and individuals had requested the purchase of Chinese vaccines.
The first deliveries of anti-Covid vaccines on board drones in the United States will start in June: these will be ‘flights’ experimental with the aim of reaching the most remote corners of the country where citizens have difficulty in going to doctors or hospitals. These include, for example, workers on oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.
The first ‘top-down’ deliveries of vaccines will be implemented by drone company Draganfly, in partnership with Coldchain Technology Services: its drones will bring the immunization vials to Texas.
Coldchain has already developed thermal containers in the shape of cubes about a foot long; the temperature-controlled boxes can hold between 600-1,500 vials, depending on how they are stored by manufacturers. The cubes were built to maintain very low temperatures sufficient to safely store Pfizer’s vaccines for 48 hours and Moderna’s for 72 hours.
The second company authorized to use drones to transport medical supplies is San Francisco-based Volansi, which has already transported Merck’s medicines to North Carolina in since last October, but has not yet experimented with transporting vaccines. “Our containers,” however, recently said the administrator, Hannan Parvizian, “are also designed to transport anti-covid vaccines2.
The European Commission has signed the third contract with the pharmaceutical companies BioNTech and Pfizer. It will reserve an additional 1.8 billion doses on behalf of all EU Member States between the end of 2021 and 2023. It will allow the purchase of 900 million doses of the current vaccine and a vaccine adapted to variants, with the possibility of purchasing another 900 million doses.
Extending the timing of Pfizer/BioNTech’s Covid vaccine booster to 11-12 weeks – as the UK has been experimenting with, not without controversy, since the start of its sprint vaccination campaign – greatly improves the serum’s immune efficacy compared with the 3 weeks recommended by the company.