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  1. #12651
    Thailand Expat misskit's Avatar
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    Coronavirus vaccine demand grows in U.S. amid omicron variant concerns, booster eligibility expansion

    Demand for coronavirus vaccines has spiked in the United States in recent weeks, as more Americans are eligible for booster shots and concerns grow over the omicron variant.

    Health-care providers administered 2.18 million doses of coronavirus vaccines on Thursday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - the "highest single-day total since May," the White House said. According to the latest CDC report, over the week ending on Thursday, the average number of daily administered vaccine doses reported to the agency was 22% higher than the previous week.

    Since omicron was first confirmed in southern Africa on Nov. 25, and soon after listed as a "variant of concern" by the World Health Organization, the Biden administration has been urging as many Americans as possible to get booster shots as the best means to protect themselves against it. All U.S. adults became eligible for boosters on Nov. 19.


    For most of October, fewer than or slightly over 1 million doses of coronavirus vaccines were reported to the CDC as being administered every day in the United States. By mid-November, those numbers hovered around 1.5 million on average. In the past three reporting days, they neared or exceeded 2 million.

    MORE Coronavirus vaccine demand grows in U.S. amid omicron variant concerns, booster eligibility expansion

  2. #12652
    Thailand Expat russellsimpson's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by harrybarracuda View Post
    WASHINGTON — The Biden administration announced Friday that it is sending 9 million Covid vaccine doses to Africa amid growing concerns about the omicron variant.
    The new shipment brings the total U.S. donations to Africa to 100 million vaccines, the White House said. An additional two million vaccines will be sent elsewhere in the world.
    These are ridiculously low numbers. We are all going to have to do much better with our donations which is unlikely to happen as long as variants continue to be a threat. It will be suicide for any governing parties in the wealthier countries to donate away huge numbers of jabs as things stands. That's just the reality. Until the poorer countries are given the right to manufacture their own supplies I don't see much changing.
    A true diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a manner that you will be asking for directions.

  3. #12653
    Thailand Expat harrybarracuda's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by russellsimpson View Post
    These are ridiculously low numbers. We are all going to have to do much better with our donations which is unlikely to happen as long as variants continue to be a threat. It will be suicide for any governing parties in the wealthier countries to donate away huge numbers of jabs as things stands. That's just the reality. Until the poorer countries are given the right to manufacture their own supplies I don't see much changing.
    Except supply is not the only problem.

    South Africa gave away a million doses because it "didn't like them" and by the time it did they were too near expiry to be of any use. Then it asked suppliers to stop sending them, because no-one wanted them.

    The truth is the idiots that run the country were probably peeved that they couldn't skim any money off the top.

    Usual fuck up in that part of the world.
    The next post may be brought to you by my little bitch Spamdreth

  4. #12654
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    Quote Originally Posted by russellsimpson View Post
    Until the poorer countries are given the right to manufacture their own supplies I don't see much changing.
    Two problems with that - aside from the obvious IP one - quality assurance and infrastructure. Very few 'third-world' countries have either.

    And then there is what Harry quite correctly mentioned, the corruption, inefficiency and general unpreparedness.

  5. #12655
    Isle of discombobulation Joe 90's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by harrybarracuda View Post
    The truth is the idiots that run the country were probably peeved that they couldn't skim any money off the top.

    Usual fuck up in that part of the world.
    Are we talking about Thailand

  6. #12656
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    Quote Originally Posted by russellsimpson View Post
    These are ridiculously low numbers. We are all going to have to do much better with our donations which is unlikely to happen as long as variants continue to be a threat. It will be suicide for any governing parties in the wealthier countries to donate away huge numbers of jabs as things stands. That's just the reality. Until the poorer countries are given the right to manufacture their own supplies I don't see much changing.
    The problem is not as simple as vaccine supply. In the countries of Southern Africa, the infrastructure to store, transport and administer the vaccines is simply not comparable to western nations. Add in the prevalence of HIV AIDS at roughly 20% of indigenous populations, and vaccines alone are simply not enough.

  7. #12657
    Thailand Expat harrybarracuda's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Joe 90 View Post
    Are we talking about Thailand
    *cough*no comment*cough*

  8. #12658
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    Quote Originally Posted by Switch View Post
    In the countries of Southern Africa, the infrastructure to store, transport and administer the vaccines is simply not comparable to western nations.
    most of Africa actually.

  9. #12659
    Thailand Expat OhOh's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by russellsimpson View Post
    Until the poorer countries are given the right to manufacture their own supplies I don't see much changing.
    Some are already doing that.

    Quote Originally Posted by harrybarracuda View Post
    couldn't skim any money off the top. Usual fuck up in that part of the world.
    "Democratic" countries citizens are above such deviousness, I suppose.

  10. #12660
    Thailand Expat harrybarracuda's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by OhOh View Post
    Some are already doing that.


    "Democratic" countries citizens are above such deviousness, I suppose.
    Ones that aren't run by dictators usually have some form of transparency that prevents this, yes.

    You can be quite clever sometimes.


  11. #12661
    Thailand Expat harrybarracuda's Avatar
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    "JOHANNESBURG — Some South Africa hospital wards are jammed with patients infected with the omicron coronavirus variant as President Cyril Ramaphosa urged South Africans on Monday to get vaccinated.
    In the past week, cases have reached more than 16,000, up dramatically from 2,300 last Monday, according to South Africa's National Institute for Communicable Diseases.
    The NICD says the increase in cases in such a short period of time is “unprecedented” in the trajectory of the pandemic, now in its fourth phase in the country.
    “Unfortunately, we’re seeing a more than doubling of hospital admissions each day,” said Ian Sanne, an infectious diseases specialist who serves on South Africa’s COVID-19 presidential advisory committee.
    Sanne is advising hospitals to prepare for “significant surges” of patients in the coming weeks and months, and to make sure they have plenty of oxygen.
    Dr. Fareed Abdullah, who heads the South African Medical Research Council, says the surges are already happening in Johannesburg and Tshwane.
    Hospitals in South Africa’s Gauteng province, which contains two of the country’s biggest cities, are packed with people infected with the omicron variant. Doctors say most of the patients haven’t been vaccinated, and an alarming number of them are children under the age of five-years-old.
    “There’s been a rather rapid rise in hospital admissions with patients who have COVID, whether they’re presenting with COVID pneumonia or severe COVID disease," Dr. Abdullah said.
    "All of the hospitals in Tshwane are seeing an upsurge, and the COVID bed occupancy is increasing 30% to 40% per day, over the last few days,” he said."

    https://www.voanews.com/a/south-afri...-/6340912.html

  12. #12662
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    Quote Originally Posted by russellsimpson View Post
    We are all going to have to do much better with our donations which is unlikely to happen as long as variants continue to be a threat.
    As usual, another incredibly ignorant and naive comment by you. You can not just throw these vaccines at places like Africa, where the infrastructure is medieval in many areas.

  13. #12663
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    Wdll not all vaccines require sub zero storage such as AZ and despite many African countries having limited health infra they do manage to run child vaccine programmes through mobile clinics.

  14. #12664
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    Omicron is a horrible dilemma for zero-Covid China.

    Stubborn superpower is now flirting with recession

    AMBROSE EVANS-PRITCHARD
    7 December 2021 • 11:20am



    Omicron is the end of the road for China’s zero-Covid policy. The Communist Party cannot plausibly suppress a variant that spreads with lightning speed through asymptomatic cases that escape surveillance.

    Any such attempt would probably fail. Even if total suppression could be achieved, the social, economic, and strategic costs of trying to do the near impossible would become prohibitive over time. It would no longer be rational.

    China has had to deal with scattered cases of the delta variant for months, usually brought in by flight crews, or leaking across the border from Myanmar, Russia, or Korea.

    “They have always been able to catch cases early and crush them. But omicron looks so transmissible that it might evade their controls. They can’t keep it out completely,” said Mark Williams, chief Asia economist at Capital Economics.

    My assumption is that the regime will be overwhelmed by events eventually, forced to follow Singapore, Korea, and Australia in switching to a policy of endemic containment – and relying on the propaganda department and totalitarian instruments of media control to get away with the volte-face.

    “They still have a good story to tell. They can say that the rest of the world failed and because of that China will have to live with the virus,” said Mr Williams.

    But Beijing will almost certainly dig in its heels first, and this has implications for commodity markets and the strength of global economic growth over the next year. China may remain stuck in an autarkic recession for months to come as it pursues a near-deranged policy of whack-a-mole.


    The Communist Party has proclaimed zero-Covid status to be a dazzling vindication of Xi Jinping’s rule, presenting the shambolic response of the West as the defining institutional and civilizational failure of our age.

    “Zero-Covid has been their claim to superiority, and to give that up would be a very bitter pill to swallow, so they’ll double down,” said George Magnus from Oxford University’s China Centre.

    “There is next to no chance that they will lift the travel ban and open up before the Winter Olympics (in February), and I doubt they’ll do it before the 20th Party Congress late next year,” he said.

    The Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention published a report in November warning that infections could top 630,000 a day if China gives up its hard-won gains and switches to a Western policy of herd immunity. It warned of a “colossal outbreak which would put intolerable strain on the medical system”.

    The Party actively highlighted this study to stamp out subversive utterances by a handful of Chinese scientists starting to question the rationality of zero-Covid.

    But the work was based on epidemiology from the delta variant. Omicron is another story.

    The cost-benefit calculus changes radically if the new variant proves to be as mild as suggested by the early South African hospital data, but at the same time unstoppable with a spread-rate three times higher.

    The Tshwane study of omicron cases released over the weekend by the South African Medical Research Council is almost miraculously hopeful.

    Most of the patients were admitted for other complaints and did not even know they had Covid. Few required oxygen, and only one needed intensive care. The average hospital stay was cut to 2.8 days from 8.5 in earlier waves.

    But even the best omicron outcome entails far more deaths than China has been willing to tolerate so far.

    The infections would rip through a population with almost no natural immunity from past exposure, reliant on home-grown vaccines that the Chinese authorities would rather not put to the test. This is the horrible dilemma that China now faces.


    Roger Garfield, a former British diplomat in Beijing and author of books on Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping, said last year’s narrative of China as the runaway winner of the pandemic has been inverted.

    “The picture has turned radically against them. They’re in self-imposed isolation, with no route for the exit,” he said.

    Mr Garfield said it epitomises the pitfalls of a totalitarian system. Such regimes look strong but the very tools of power at their disposal end up trapping them in a dysfunctional cul-de-sac.

    Australia’s Lowy Institute said this week in its annual report on Asia’s balance of power that China has lost rank over the last year.

    This is partly because wolf warrior policies have provoked a harder containment alliance led by the US; it is also because the pandemic has tarnished China’s image and inflicted further structural damage to the Chinese economy.

    “Vaccine diplomacy is the new currency of geopolitics, and the United States leads the field. The commercial nature of the majority of China’s bilateral vaccine deals, and the fact that China’s vaccines are generally less effective than leading alternatives, appear to have overshadowed its soft power push and failed to translate into substantial goodwill in recipient countries,” it said.

    The US economy has roared back and – amazingly – is now on a higher growth trajectory through the mid-2020s than it was before the pandemic, thanks to a leap forward in digital productivity as much as New Deal spending.

    China’s recovery has sputtered out. The service sector has not regained its pre-Covid levels, and (true) GDP growth has been hovering near zero for the last two quarters.

    It is made worse by a deflating property bubble and by Xi Jinping’s political purge of unruly tech companies, or the broader purge of what he calls “disorderly capital” (i.e. capital that threatens Party hegemony).


    This assault on economic pluralism is to drain the lifeblood that has sustained China’s growth miracle since the Deng era.

    China is on a flatter economic trajectory than pre-Covid forecasts. Productivity growth has largely converged with US levels but at a lower level of development, a textbook case of the middle income trap.

    The last window for China’s great strategic sorpasso may be closing before its demographic crisis arrives in earnest.

    “On current trends, Beijing is now less likely to pull ahead of its peer competitor in comprehensive power by the end of the decade. Importantly, this change suggests that there is nothing inevitable about China’s rise in the world. Across the range of feasible outcomes, it appears unlikely China will ever be as dominant as the United States once was,” concluded the Lowy Institute.

    This is a startling conclusion. Almost nobody would have predicted the superpower relegation of Xi Jinping’s China 18 months ago. The pandemic keeps deceiving.


    Omicron is a horrible dilemma for zero-Covid China

  15. #12665
    Thailand Expat harrybarracuda's Avatar
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    relying on the propaganda department and totalitarian instruments of media control to get away with the volte-face.
    Which is a really long winded way of saying "lying as usual".









    Warning: Be cautious if you are a fragile pink
    Last edited by harrybarracuda; 07-12-2021 at 10:19 PM.

  16. #12666
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    So far, from the information coming out of South Africa, It appears that Omricon Covid is highly infectious but has symptoms like a cold, So far the only hospitalizations in SA are incidental, To me it sounds pretty good, this thing will spread fast but most people won't even know they have it. let'e hope it stays like that and finally we can treat it like a cold or flu.

  17. #12667
    Thailand Expat OhOh's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by taxexile View Post
    AMBROSE EVANS-PRITCHARD
    Is suggesting that China will be the only country unable to cope with the new variant.

    Recent performance suggests otherwise.

  18. #12668
    Thailand Expat harrybarracuda's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by beam8 View Post
    So far, from the information coming out of South Africa, It appears that Omricon Covid is highly infectious but has symptoms like a cold, So far the only hospitalizations in SA are incidental, To me it sounds pretty good, this thing will spread fast but most people won't even know they have it. let'e hope it stays like that and finally we can treat it like a cold or flu.
    What, like this information?

    By Friday night, 24.3% of all test results were positive, compared with 9.2% a week earlier. A total of 16 055 new cases were reported, compared with 2 828 last Friday.

    Hospitalisations have also increased again. By yesterday morning, 3 202 Covid-19 patients were in hospital, of whom 274 were in intensive care, according to the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD). A week ago, there were 2 232 patients in hospital, of whom 231 were in intensive care.
    Dr Waasila Jassat, a specialist at the NICD, said at a media conference on Friday that the current increase in infections had started among people aged between 10 and 29, but had since spread to all age groups.

    Omicron spreads like wildfire | Citypress



    Quote Originally Posted by beam8 View Post
    So far the only hospitalizations in SA are incidental
    No, so far most of the hospitalisations in SA are among the unvaccinated and cover all age groups.

    That's probably why they're calling it "highly transmissible".

  19. #12669
    Thailand Expat harrybarracuda's Avatar
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    Ah fuck "Stealth Omicron". I thought this week's big bad news would be the flesh eating Vulture Bees.

    Scientists have identified a new Covid-19 lineage responsible for a number of recent Covid cases in South Africa, Australia and Canada that displays “many of the defining mutations of B.1.1.529 (Omicron) [but does] not have the full set. These cases also have “a number of their own unique mutations,” according to analysis posted on information sharing platform GitHub. The platform is widely used by top researchers to share data and information related to Covid-19.
    As a result of those similarities and differences with the original Omicron, which was first identified about two weeks ago, the new sequence is being called BA.2, while the original variant has been dubbed BA.1.
    The new lineage is being called “stealth” Omicron by some scientists and news outlets because, while PCR tests do identify it as Covid, the mutations on BA.2 defy a shortcut used by scientists to identify a Covid case specifically as Omicron.
    Why does that matter? It makes tracking the spread of Omicron more difficult at a time when surveillance of the new variant is critical to understanding it. Only seven cases of BA.2 have been identified thus far, reported the Guardian, the picture is still far from complete.

    https://deadline.com/2021/12/stealth...a2-1234886790/

  20. #12670
    Thailand Expat harrybarracuda's Avatar
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    One year ago. It seems longer.

    The UK administered the first COVID-19 vaccine in the world, outside of clinical trials, one year ago today as the Health and Social Care Secretary Sajid Javid urges people to get their booster jab as soon as they are eligible.
    On 8 December 2020, 90-year-old Margaret Keenan received a Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at University Hospital in Coventry, administered by Matron May Parsons.
    Thanks to the UK Government’s quick action to secure the most promising vaccine doses in advance, almost 120 million doses have been administered across the UK in a year, saving countless lives and helping stop the NHS from being overwhelmed.
    In light of the new Omicron variant and following advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), the government is expanding the booster programme to all adults over 18 and announced that all eligible people will be offered a top-up jab by the end of January, as well as halving the minimum gap between second doses and boosters.
    To speed up the vaccination programme, around 450 military personnel have been drafted in to support deployment, with extra community pharmacy sites, hospital hubs, and pop-up sites opening in convenient locations across the country. Payments to GPs, community pharmacies and primary care staff will help boost capacity and encourage more visits to those who are housebound.

    UK marks one year since deploying world's first COVID-19 vaccine - GOV.UK

  21. #12671
    Thailand Expat harrybarracuda's Avatar
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    WASHINGTON: Existing vaccines should still protect people who contract the Omicron variant from severe Covid cases, according to a World Health Organization official.
    It comes as the first lab tests of the new variant in South Africa suggest it can partially evade the Pfizer jab, BBC has reported.
    Researchers say there was a “very large drop” in how well the vaccine’s antibodies neutralized the new strain, it said.
    However, the WHO’s Dr Mike Ryan said there was no sign Omicron would be better at evading vaccines than other variants.
    “We have highly effective vaccines that have proved effective against all the variants so far, in terms of severe disease and hospitalisation, and there’s no reason to expect that it wouldn’t be so,” for Omicron, Dr Ryan, the WHO’s emergencies director, told AFP news agency.
    He said initial data suggested Omicron did not make people sicker than the Delta and other strains. “If anything, the direction is towards less severity,” he said.

    Vaccines should work against Omicron variant, WHO says - Khabarhub Khabarhub

  22. #12672
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    Quote Originally Posted by taxexile View Post

    AMBROSE EVANS-PRITCHARD
    7 December 2021 • 11:20am


    Omicron is the end of the road for China’s zero-Covid policy. The Communist Party cannot plausibly suppress a variant that spreads with lightning speed through asymptomatic cases that escape surveillance.

    The Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention published a report in November warning that infections could top 630,000 a day if China gives up its hard-won gains and switches to a Western policy of herd immunity. It warned of a “colossal outbreak which would put intolerable strain on the medical system”.

    The infections would rip through a population with almost no natural immunity from past exposure, reliant on home-grown vaccines that the Chinese authorities would rather not put to the test. This is the horrible dilemma that China now faces.
    CCP vs Omicron.

    I'm betting on Omicron.

  23. #12673
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    Thank goodness they ended the one child policy.

  24. #12674
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    Quote Originally Posted by sabang View Post
    Thank goodness they ended the one child policy.
    Yes, that should bring the global famine a bit nearer, not to mention the extinction of pangolins, rhinos, etc.

  25. #12675
    Guest Member S Landreth's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by OhOh View Post
    Is suggesting that China will be the only country unable to cope with the new variant.

    they should purchase a real vaccine

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