Karen Collins/Trunk Archive
On 8 December 2020 in Coventry, UK, 90-year-old Margaret Keenan became the first person to receive a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine the first coronavirus vaccine to be approved for emergency use in the west. (Moderna and the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines were made available soon after.) At last, there was a glimmer of hope that an end was in sight to the worst pandemic for more than a century.
If we could get at least 70 per cent of a country’s population to have a vaccine, we could attain the much sought-after ‘herd immunity’ and hope for a return to some kind of normality. But despite both Pfizer and Moderna reporting their vaccines to have a 95 per cent efficacy with no serious safety concerns, the most recent Ipsos-World Economic Forum survey shows that vaccine confidence has dropped in many countries, most significantly in South Africa, Russia and France where as few as 40 per cent of those asked said they intended to get vaccinated.
The East African
Friday January 08 2021
Overall, willingness, or not, to take the vaccine depended mostly on trust as well as perceptions of its importance, safety, and efficacy, study says. PHOTO | FILE | NMG
Summary
On average 18 percent of Africans believe vaccines generally are not safe and 25 percent think that a Covid-19 vaccine would be unsafe.
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At least eight in 10 people would take a Covid-19 vaccine if it was publicly available and deemed safe and effective, a survey carried out in several African countries shows.
Overall, willingness, or not, to take the vaccine depended mostly on trust as well as perceptions of its importance, safety, and efficacy, according to a survey by the study by the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) in partnership with the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and Orb international.
Meet the scientists tackling vaccine misinformation on TikTok
Sixty seconds to explain all the ingredients in a coronavirus vaccine? You’re on
8 January 2021 • 10:43am
Anna Blakney snaps her fingers and sings into the camera. The backdrop is understated, ordinary even. If it wasn’t for the bright blue of her surgical gown you’d be forgiven for thinking she was just an average social media user. But she’s not.
Dr Blakney works for Imperial College, London. She’s filming in the department of infectious diseases, where she and her colleagues are developing and testing a coronavirus vaccine.
Her catchy tune has been viewed at least 28,000 times on TikTok. That’s a small win in comparison to some of her other videos.
Tsunami of misinformation contributed to drop in vaccine willingness
Willingness around the vaccine was relatively high in April and May but since discussion around vaccines had increased, that had ebbed away
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Israel G Vargas
“It’s time to get rid of the scars,” says Mark Slack, a gynaecologist and co-founder of robotic surgery startup CMR Surgical. Cambridge-based CMR Surgical was founded in 2014 – Slack remembers how, when the company started, surgeons wanted a robot that was suitable for all surgical disciplines: equivalent in cost to a straight-stick surgery, adaptable to any theatre, modular and quick to set up and take down. “There was nothing like it,” he says. “So what did we do? We had to build our own robot.” The result is the Versius, a surgical robot designed to help surgeons perform keyhole surgery. Today, the company employs around 500 people and, after raising more than $100 million (£75.2 million) in June 2018, it’s now valued at more than $1 billion (£759 million), making it one of the rare unicorns in medtech.