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A disease control official in China has said there is no sign that new coronavirus variants will affect the immune impact of a vaccine that China has just authorised for public use.
The shot by an affiliate of state-backed company Sinopharm was approved on Thursday, the day after news of China’s first imported case of a variant first identified in the UK.
Jeeves Wijesuriya, a junior doctor working at a London hospital and a member of the Healthcare Workers’ Foundation, writes that Covid conspiracies are “a kick in the teeth” for exhausted healthcare workers like her.
Covid is ripping through hospitals at an unprecedented rate, while an exhausted workforce, already running on fumes not from “just another winter surge”, but due to a second wave of Covid cases worse than the first, attempts to battle it. For us, the objective truth is undeniable: patients are desperately sick. Patients who often decline quickly and suddenly, needing intensive care, ventilation and specialist support.
And yet in the outer world, our social media and even newspapers amplify a different ‘truth’. That there is no major emergency, that it’s misdiagnosis or global hysteria, which every major country, and their established academic and medical bodies, has inexplicably and simultaneously fallen prey to.