Readers with longer memories may recall, with a mix of both horror and ironic amusement, the look on the face of John Selwyn Gummer’s daughter as her father made her eat a burger on national news. The aim was to underline the minister’s confidence in meat safety as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (commonly known as mad cow disease) took hold in the UK. Today, we learned how Putin has allowed his daughter (but not himself) to receive a newly announced Russian vaccine against Covid-19, despite no Phase 3 trials yet having taken place and little data beyond the anecdotal having been released.
Russia has a good track record in vaccine production (yellow fever, for example) and the new one sounds promising. It is very similar to the vaccine being developed at Oxford and exploits the immune response to an adenovirus that causes illness in a different primate. The antibodies so generated then disable the spike proteins of SARS-CoV-2. As UK research is published openly for review by the scientific community, there would have been no need to hack computers to access this information.
The pandemic has caught out populist dictator-style leaders. The possibility of claiming ownership of a cure is a nice get-out opportunity. I think we should recognise that today’s ‘Sputnik moment’ will be just the first salvo in a forthcoming propaganda battle – a common cold war anyone? Thank goodness that the WHO will still insist on rigorous data concerning safety and effectiveness before sanctioning worldwide use of any vaccine. And all the key players support the WHO... oh, hang on.
And, from a US paper out this week: ‘By 2050, it is estimated that five billion people worldwide will be myopic, prompting many governments to implement nationwide myopia control policies in the past decade. The rise in usage of digital technology and online e-learning during this pandemic outbreak may jeopardise the effectiveness of these policies.’ See page 19 for more on this.