A single dose of covid vaccine can stop transmission of the virus by almost 50%. The data comes from a study, yet to be reviewed, made public on Wednesday morning by Public Health England (PHE).

Fears of another wave of coronavirus are spreading and Europe lacks vaccines and, above all, the capacity to produce more. The heads of state and government of the European Union are meeting this Thursday in a virtual meeting with this unresolved problem and all the conflicts that arise from it. The first, the war with AstraZeneca that this Wednesday has lived a heated last chapter with the discovery of 29 million doses of its vaccine in an Italian factory ready to be shipped, at the same time that the pharmaceutical claims not to be able to deliver even half of the units committed to the EU in the first quarter. AstraZeneca has assured later, however, that half of the 29 million are for the Union.

The secretary of Public Health, Josep Maria Argimon, has confirmed that this Wednesday the vaccination with AstraZeneca will resume in Catalonia, and has taken for granted that the Ministry of Health will authorize the elimination of its 55 year-old age limit, as Catalonia and other autonomous communities have been asking for weeks. In an interview with TV3, he explained that today there is a vaccine commission and tomorrow a public health commission, and that Catalonia will insist on the idea of being able to administer this vaccine to everyone regardless of their age. "Today or tomorrow the age limit will be lifted," he said.

The data used by the World Health Organization (WHO), the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the British Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) suggest that in reality the cases of thrombi that have alerted Europe and have paralysed the AstraZaneca vaccination campaign in at least 17 countries around the world, turning the immunisation process into a real chaos, are fewer than could be expected without the vaccine.

Direct threat from the President of the European Commission to AstraZeneca. The pharmaceutical company will no longer export vaccines from EU territory as long as it does not fulfil its contract. The announcement was made by Ursula von der Leyen in a meeting with women journalists on Monday in Brussels, with whom she met on the occasion of International Women's Day, and also in an interview with a newspaper in Germany.

Beyond the phenomenal political mess between the European Commission and AstraZeneca, the truth is that the excuses shared by the CEO of the pharmaceutical company, Pascal Soriot, in an interview published in four European media on Tuesday, are perfectly possible. This is what Salvador Macip, a doctor and researcher at the University of Leicester and the UOC, assures to the ARA. "That the production of the vaccine would have ups and downs was to be expected. At the beginning the supply went very well because companies have been accumulating doses even before the vaccine was approved. But now we are already streaming, and production has a biological component, as Soriot explains, which is not accurate. What he says can happen. Now, whether this is the reason for the decrease in doses or whether there are other political motives behind it is difficult to know. In any case, the excuse is plausible". However, it could also be that there is an excess of ambition or optimism.

Science has managed to accelerate the production of a vaccine against covid-19 to unthinkable limits. When the pandemic began, there was talk that it would take perhaps five years or more to have a vaccine, and it was not even clear that one would be obtained. Within a year, however, vaccination has already begun in several lucky countries depending on the availability of the product. This milestone is worth remembering because now that we have entered a new phase of maximum impatience, with fears that new variants will negate the effectiveness of vaccines, we are reading as a failure what is actually a success of global collaboration.

The efficacy data of the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca were published on December 8 in the journal The Lancet. The scientific article included the analysis of 11,636 participants in clinical trials conducted in the United Kingdom and Brazil. In these trials, people over the age of 55, who were recruited later, accounted for 12% of participants (8% were in the 56-69 age group and 4% were in the 70+ age group). According to the publication, the overall results of the trial showed an average efficacy of 70% against infection and a decrease in hospitalisations for covid-19 in the vaccinated group (there were two, one on the day of the first dose and one ten days later). In the unvaccinated group there were eighteen hospitalizations for covid-19.

The European Commission is in the spotlight, as it is solely responsible for the purchase of vaccines to ensure that the doses reach the 27 European partners. However, only Brussels and, for example, AstraZeneca know what conditions were agreed upon in contracts that are secret, also for the rest of the pharmaceutical companies, with the partial exception of the one signed with CureVac.