The Hill -Recall the desperate early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in early Spring 2020. Researchers worried that the Spanish flu of 1918 that cost millions of American lives could be a possible model.
The Imperial College of London released a projection of over 2 million deaths in the U.S. alone if the government failed to take action. The government’s top advisor, Anthony Fauci, recommended a strategy of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) to “bend the curve.” However, the highly infectious nature of the disease meant that they could offer only a temporary respite.
Adding to the gloom was the scientific community’s pessimism concerning the prospects for an early vaccine. Past history suggested that vaccines required years to get through regulatory approval — and then an additional year or more to scale-up for the millions of doses needed. Four months into the pandemic in the Spring of 2020, the most optimistic observers projected that we were well more than a year away from a viable vaccination program.
Contrary to earlier expectations, two vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) were approved in December 2020, and the first doses were administered less than a week later. These advances occurred under the auspices of Operation Warp Speed, a joint government, business, and military venture. Its unique feature was to guarantee purchases of experimental vaccines as they proceeded through regulatory approval in order to scale-up quickly the successful ones.
To date, more than 89 million Americans have received at least one vaccination dose — 27 percent of the population. For the high-risk 65 and over age group, more than 38 million (71 percent) have received at least one dose. Although some small risk of COVID infection remains, the vaccines appear to have rendered symptoms milder, and deaths exceedingly rare. The CDC and FDA conclude that a review of available clinical information — including death certificates, autopsy, and medical records — revealed no evidence that vaccination contributed to patient deaths.
The primary reason to fear COVID-19 has been its lethality. It has killed over a half million — largely the elderly — in the United States. With the vaccines being widely administered, we can now introduce a more benign statistic; namely, “deaths averted” by vaccination. Here is a possible approach:
In my back-of-the-envelope calculation, I consider only the 65 and over. The lethality rates for those under 65 are low and would not add much to the outcome. Of those over 65, 38 million have received at least one dose. My data are primarily from CDC sources: here, here, here, and here.
In the absence of Warp Speed there would be, as of today’s date, no vaccinations. We therefore proceed to follow these vaccinated elders in their hypothetical world of no vaccine. As time passes, some will contract COVID-19, and some of them will die. How many? Erring on the very conservative side, we assume that they would be subject to the current mortality risk (COVID deaths divided by population) of the 65 and older group, which stands at approximately 8 tenths of 1 percent (.008 percent). Applying this rate to the 38 million who would not have been vaccinated in the absence of Warp Speed, we get 295,000 deaths averted as a result of vaccination.
That figure is likely an underestimate because we use the latest mortality rate (which has dropped considerably). On the other hand, one third currently lack the second dose, but we have few if any cases of deaths attributable to COVID-19 after the first dose.
As time passes, scientists can produce complex models of “averted deaths” due to vaccination, but for now this simple back-of-the-envelope calculation provides a rough order of magnitude.
Operation Warp Speed is a rare example of a successful government-business-military endeavor. It is reminiscent, in my view, of the Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic bomb. Both worked because of the extreme importance of the undertaking, as all participants realized we could solve this problem only one shot at a time.
‘Lack of perspective’: why Ursula von der Leyen’s EU vaccine strategy is failing
European commission president accused of focusing too much on UK and domestic German image
Von der Leyen speaking in Brussels. ‘Fundamentally she seems to be struggling with her basic narrative,’ said one commentator. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
When Jean-Claude Juncker, her predecessor in the commission’s Berlaymont headquarters, took aim at the EU’s error-strewn vaccine strategy last week, it prompted a tweet of appreciation from Dominic Cummings, former chief adviser to Boris Johnson and key architect of Brexit.
“Juncker no dummy, he right,” the ex-Vote Leave strategist wrote. “& if Commission, now melting down, don’t listen, UK shd NOT tit-for-tat but shd make generous offer over heads of EU leaders to EUR peoples – will bring years of goodwill, good policy & politics, & Cmsn will cave shortly after.”
Von der Leyen is unlikely to lose sleep over the barb. As for Juncker’s intervention, sources close to the ex-president say his target was not Von der Leyen but instead the EU’s member states.
Between calling on his successor to drop the “stupid vaccine war” with Britain and criticising an overly cautious and budget-conscious approach to vaccine procurement, he dismissed calls for her resignation. “These are not failures of the commission. These are failures of the member states in total and so I don’t think that the getting rid of Mrs Von der Leyen would be helpful,” he told the BBC’s HARDtalk programme.
But critics within the commission describe Juncker’s broadside as “unprecedented”. It has been seen by many in Brussels as a reflection of the growing exasperation, both within the institution and the governments, of some of the member states at Von der Leyen’s performance.
The European commission was always likely to have a difficult pandemic, without the fiscal firepower and autonomy of action of a nation state. “We’re tired of being the scapegoat,” Von der Leyen said in a recent interview. But since January, she has been engaged in a bitter row with the Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, and in turn the British government, over a shortfall in EU vaccine supplies, culminating last week in a broadening of the bloc’s powers to block exports.
EU leaders back ‘global value chains’ instead of vaccine export bans
Her aides point to the necessity of challenging a company that has fallen dramatically short on its promise of 120m doses of vaccine this quarter – just 30m are expected – and the need to confront Britain over its refusal to export any of those being made in the firm’s plants in Oxford and Staffordshire.
Others, however, question the tone of the commission’s communications and the subsequent focus on the UK’s lack of exports, a country with a population a seventh the size of the EU and with a small and stuttering vaccine production line. AstraZeneca has only delivered a third of expected deliveries to the UK in the first quarter of the year.
Diplomats complain Von der Leyen may be overly concerned about sating her critics in the CDU, the centre-right political party of which she and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, are members, ahead of September’s federal election, where the slow progress of vaccination is being seen as a vote-decider. Britain’s success has heavily featured in the German media as a point of comparison.
Officials who have worked alongside Von der Leyen, who has chosen to live in an apartment on the 13th floor of the commission HQ in Brussels, add that she is overly insular, trusting and confiding in a small group, namely her head of cabinet Björn Seibert and communications adviser, Jens Flosdorff, both Germans. “Sleeping in the office doesn’t make for good decisions – rather a lack of perspective and political feel,” said one.
Last week’s events were a fresh cause of irritation for some. On Wednesday, the commission published a revised regulation to allow the EU to block vaccine export requests to countries with better vaccination coverage or where, through contracts or law, exports or raw materials are being blocked from being sent to the bloc’s 27 member states.
The revised regulation had not been shared with a number of capitals, coming as a fait accompli just 24 hours before a summit of leaders. The prime ministers of Belgium and the Netherlands, Alexander De Croo and Mark Rutte, insisted on additional commitments to open supply chains in the Thursday night summit communiqué.
That development follows the debacle of the aborted attempt to draw an export border on the island of Ireland at the time of the announcement of the original export authorisation regulation. “It has been noticed that the commission has a habit of landing things on the member states and a number of us have raised our concerns,” said a senior diplomat.
Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund thinktank in Brussels, believes Von der Leyen’s gravest mistake is missing an opportunity to tell a “fantastic story” about EU openness.
“I think fundamentally she seems to be struggling with her basic narrative,” he said. “She tries to either be this sort of vaccine nationalist that is going to block exports of Pfizer even though they are in full compliance – a sort of sawn-off-shotgun approach, where you can fire it but you never know what you will hit; and on the other hand, the really good story of the EU basically at cost to itself in the short run helping supply the world.” About 77m doses of vaccine have been exported from plants located in EU member states to 33 countries.
Kirkegaard said the enormous scale-up by Pfizer and other suppliers, with a further 360m doses by June set to join the 100m delivered this quarter, had only been possible due to the policy of keeping the EU open. The bloc will also be best placed to respond to new Covid-19 variants. “A leader that was a leader would have told that story,” he said. “She is the German commissioner, it is the biggest country, she has a special role in ‘keeping Germany happy’, so there is a lot of pressure coming from there. You look at the polls and there [are] a lot people in the CDU who are going to lose their jobs. They are looking for a scapegoat and she is in the firing line.”
But, Kirkegaard said, the battle over exports had been “nonsense”. Von der Leyen, he suggests, may have been guilty of letting Boris Johnson get under her skin.
“The UK is a tiny, tiny vaccine producer and will always be that. One of the biggest communication mistakes they made was that AstraZeneca supplies were down in the EU because they were up in the UK, which is absurd,” he said.
“They think of the UK [as] much more of an equal than it is. In vaccine production it is a mouse and the EU will very soon by far be the largest producer in the world … I think they should stop reading the Daily Mail.”
Mexico’s government acknowledged Saturday that the country’s true death toll from the coronavirus pandemic now stands above 321,000, almost 60% more than the official test-confirmed number of 201,429.
Mexico does little testing, and because hospitals were overwhelmed, many Mexicans died at home without getting a test. The only way to get a clear picture is to review “excess deaths” and review death certificates.
On Saturday, the government quietly published such a report, which found there were 294,287 deaths linked to COVID-19 from the start of the pandemic through Feb. 14. Since Feb. 15 there have been an additional 26,772 test-confirmed deaths.
The higher toll would rival that of Brazil, which currently has the world’s second-highest number of deaths after the United States. But Mexico’s population of 126 million is far smaller than either of those countries.
The new report also confirms just how deadly Mexico’s second wave in January was. As of the end of December, excess death estimates suggested a total of about 220,000 deaths related to COVID-19 in Mexico. That number jumped by around 75,000 in just a month and a half.
Also suggestive were the overall number of “excess deaths” since the pandemic began, around 417,000. Excess deaths are determined by comparing the deaths in a given year to those that would be expected based on data from previous years.
A review of death certificates found about 70.5% of the excess deaths were COVID-19 related, often because it was listed on the certificates as a suspected or contributing cause of death. But some experts say COVID-19 may have contributed to many of the other excess deaths because many people couldn’t get treatment for other diseases because hospitals were overwhelmed.
Former President Felipe Calderón wrote in his Twitter account Saturday that “more than 400,000 Mexicans have died, above the average for previous years … probably the highest figure in the worl
