Saint wrote: Sun Mar 14, 2021 3:45 pm
TheNatalShark wrote: Sun Mar 14, 2021 2:58 pm
Saint wrote: Sun Mar 14, 2021 2:42 pm
Yeah, I agree it isn't really a European thing - but it can look/feel that way as the EU have been making noises like unsafe, unproven etc before now.
But the decision making on this issue is absolutely nuts, and while it may be being justified in terms of instilling public confidence in the process, the reality is that it's harming confidence each and every time they do this type of thing.
But the problem is you've said it again - where have the EU or EMA said anything about unsafe or unproven? National leaders or the usual bampots in EU parliament yes, but haven't seen anything to date but defence of the vaccine by commission or EMA. Sorry if it seems a pedantic thing and you mean EU = Europe, but it plays into "us vs them"
As for the national regulators, have zero idea about them but would hope it is just something like a certainty threshold of MHRA and others of 99.99% vs 99.999% for those ones. I would wonder if they factor in public confidence in these decisions made, and that they feel this transparency is required for their public to 'maintain'/gain confidence, whilst we see it as unnecessary.
Separate, the MHRA response indicates 11 million doses administered in the UK so far, so assuming that is fairly up to date looks like the majority of doses administered so far are Pfizer, which should change I guess. Not sure why we're so secretive/unopen of the data vs other countries.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/mhra ... 19-vaccine
Anyway, time for match of the weekend
Once the vaccine acquisition process became an EU issue while the delivery was still down to individual countries, and sign-off/approval relies on both, the the conflation of the EU and national politicians becomes inevitable - you might try to separate the two but it;s a distinction that is actually pretty meaningless.
As has been noted elsewhere, the UK is being secretive as they;re wary of other countries looking at our deployment and potentially using that data to block exports etc. While I dislike the concept, I can understand it in light of the EU's behaviour specifically with regards to AZ. The simple, unhappy, truth is that no other country can be trusted not to interfere in supply contracts if they believe that they might gain political capital from it - and on the flip side, the current UK government is doing all it can to gain it's own capital about being ahead of the curve.
I think saying that considering the distinction between the supra and national governments interactions + responsibilities, particularly when we know the difference, is pretty meaningless lies at the heart of our attitude towards the EU - a very deliberate and wilful ignorance. There is plenty of distinction drawn within the continent and it is pertinent they at least make those otherwise nothing - nothing - will be learnt from the crisis. If we don't do the same we just spread disinformation and fail to learn the same in our interactions with "our friends and allies".
Re non-open data, from my perspective to point made, is that the information is easily derived given the public announcement of dosages awarded, fairly public stated aims, ah-hoc annunciation of vaccine specific dosages awarded (eg MHRA 11mm) vs existence of EU export control mechanism and only one other supplier (SII). This opaqueness probably contributed to (hindsight to above discussion of course) the EU's catch-up investigation of exports made prior to 29 Jan export control implementation. I imagine the EU looked at the figures provided by AZ with distrust, thus the police visit of the Italy finish and fill centre (and European gutter press media hysteria about 29 million doses to UK). Is the benefit of open data greater than potential kickback? Obviously not in gov calcs, but can say the same in other data we do release.