Perhaps the researchers would like to spend a little time figuring out how to 'democratise', de-politicise and remove the greed factor that males the likes of Pfizer and others hold poorer, developing countries to ransom.

Other flaws that need addressing are consistent population management practices, education/information and removal of class privilege regarding masks/distancing and assembly numbers.

The haphazard management of the entire pandemic gives so much fuel to the dissenters and anti vaxxers that it is a joke.

Some honest reporting from governments would go a long way too.

While you can blame the companies for profiteering, that is what they are supposed to do. The real problem is misaligned incentives. This is why they prefer developing and selling niche treatments for cancers, heart disease, etc. than probably more vital (depends who you ask) vaccines and antibacterial treatments.

Buy health insurance from companies that develop vaccines.

At present we have pharma trying to extract the the maximum profit from drugs and health insurance fanning the fire so your choices are cripplingly expensive insurance, cripplingly expensive medical treatment or crippling diseases.

This has to be turned around so that the companies trying to profit from treatments have to balance that against the cost of insurance payouts for sick leave. I say companies for a reason: a monopoly or cartel is just as bad as what we have now.

This example is slightly off topic, but still illustrates the issue of servicing shareholders/owners at the expense of providing a service

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/10/predatory-financial-tactics-survival-uk-care-system-at-risk

In another sector that effects all/most of the lower income brackets here in the UK, the supermarket group Asda was bought on heavily leveraged terms, and the buy has prior form of disposing of real-estate/leasing it back - the same fate may happen imminently to Morrisons.

In the end we end up paying higher prices for our groceries (and elderly care)

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/10/predatory-financial-tactics-survival-uk-care-system-at-risk

"There are of course limits to viral evolution, so we can expect the virus to eventually reach peak fitness, and new vaccines can be formulated," wrote the researchers.

You might like to reconsider and accept to expect there are so such limits to its constant evolution for increased viral infection/virtual affectation.

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The long term viability of a virus will depend upon several factors but mutability (the ability to mutate faster than defence systems), fatality (too fatal and there's no one left to infect), specificity (how many species are affected and can thus act as a reservoir). Thus far SARS-COVID 2 doesn't seem to be anything like as mutable as, say, influenza but the zoonotic(?) origin, the bidirectional transmission to ferrets, cats and dogs suggest the potential for a reservoid is there. Smallpox was good at wiping everyone out, Polio is happy just to maim.

On the science side: the development both of treatments and vaccines show quite how quickly we can now respond, if we put enough resources at a problem. We could also do the same with malaria, resistant TB and MRSA but there's not enough profit in those, yet.

>same with malaria, resistant TB and MRSA but there's not enough profit in those, yet.

It's a little more difficult to wipe out a parasite with a huge natural reservoir than a single virus.

There are many things wrong with the US medical system, but I'm not sure that insurers are demanding that drug companies not work on MRSA so that they can bill patients more for fatal diseases caught in their own hospitals

Thank you for pointing out that it's not the civilization-ending virus that the mainstream media spouts out....

Had a glance at influenza deaths today - they surpassed Covid back in March 2021 in the UK and are now 10x what Covid is... yet this is vary rarely highlighted anywhere..... BUT remember, HANDS, FACE, SPACE... oh and buy as much toilet paper and hold your breath for 12 months you should be fine.

"...influenza deaths... are now 10x what Covid is..."

Yesterday's Covid figures on the BBC have a 7-day average death rate within 28 days of a positive Covid test as 88 per day. Please provide a link to the figures showing influenza daily deaths in the UK running at >800 per day. I'd really like to see this data. Thanks.

Honestly if you could remember to wash your HANDS on a regular basis and give me more SPACE that would be great at not spreading other diseases too. If you could hide your FACE I'd also appreciate it, although that has nothing to do with reducing infections.

I don't quite understand what triggered this wave of optimism about eradicating COVID-19.

The Polio vaccine is mandatory, at least in the US. So is the Smallpox vaccine. The COVID-19 vaccine is not.

How can we eradicate COVID-19 when there's a 30% contingent of idiots who refuse to get vaccinated.

Coincidentally, they are all Trump fans.

I think you're a tad out of date, routine smallpox vaccinations stopped in the USA in the 70s (most of Europe also stopped in the 70s).

The last natural case was in October 1977, and the WHO classed smallpox as eradicated globally by 1980.

By the mid 80s, all routine vaccinations had stopped Worldwide for smallpox. No point vaccinating for something that doesn't exist anymore outside of a lab!

As far as I know, the only people who routinely get smallpox vaccinations now are lab workers, who are identified as having a risk of exposure to smallpox in the lab where they work.

>The Polio vaccine is mandatory, at least in the US. So is the Smallpox vaccine.

Really? I thought the Smallpox vaccine was heavily restricted and was only handed out to US medics recently when there was a political scare about a terrorist bio-weapons attack (from Al-Queda's secret underground biotechnology labs)

And the polio vaccine isn't mandatory - pretty much no vaccine is mandatory in the US. Unless you are a soldier, in which case being shot at is also mandatory, so a covid jab probably isn't your biggest worry.

@"On the science side: the development both of treatments and vaccines show quite how quickly we can now respond,"

Disagree, a year and a half in and we're still not vaccinated?

If BioNTech were signed to Sinovac, instead of Pfizer, we'd be vaccinated with a decent vaccine already.

If Pfizer cannot manufacture in volume, then what are they adding to the process? A fee? Some crypto block chain crap? Meetings with lots of Soy Decaf Lattes? What? It's literally their only job.

Astra Zeneca, likewise, did you need to stop and have some tea? Did H&S need to come around and test the kettle for earth safety, and put a little sticker on it to say you are allowed to plug it in, and only then after they'd done that, you could have your tea and make some vaccines? Pathetic volumes, pathetic scaling.

If its one thing we've learned its that China delivers in volume but lacks the expertise, and the west has the expertise but cannot deliver in volume.

Its not difficult to predict the future: The efficacy of Chinese vaccines is piss poor 51%, the efficacy of US and EU made vaccines is 0% IF YOU DO NOT DELIVER THEM.

Ten years from now, do you still want to be the worlds major pharmaceutical exporters? THEN MANUFACTURE AND EXPORT!

Err, do you know what is involved in the manufacture of the different types of vaccine?

Hint in the question: they are different types with very different processes, and none are as simple as mixing up a new colour of paint.

Well obviously the drug companies should have had vaccine plants, optomised for this particular novel vaccine, built and staffed and sitting idle ready for such a contingency.

The same way that the NHS should have had 10x as many ICU beds sitting empty waiting for such an outbreak.

What delivery issue?

UK is currently at 88.9% with the first jab, and 2nd is at slightly off 74.5%.

The first jab numbers are only going up slowly now, as the remaining 11% unvaccinated people are most likely going to be those who can't, or don't want, to take the vaccination for some reason.

The 2nd jab numbers, if they continue at current rate, should hit 90% in around 6 to 8 weeks.

You don't even need an appointment now, just drop in at a walk-in centre.

.. of adults, but you ignore the festering 15% of the population that is children, spreading it far and wide.

So OF THE POPULATION we are around 73% first jab and 60% double-jabbed.

It's still a respectable figure, but with the R of Delta around >=5 you need to have > 80% of the population double-jabbed to suppress it, and have no restrictions.

" On a scale of 0 to 3, the median score for COVID-19 was 1.6, compared to polio's 1.5 and smallpox's 2.7. "

It turns out from the paper that each of 17 loosely described factors (e.g. "Relatively low up-front cost of achieving eradication") were subjectively scored 1 to 3 meaning "high", "medium" or "low" and the numbers were then averaged for each disease. The classic mistake of doing math on category labels that look like numbers but aren't really.

So the results to one decimal place are really quite arbitrary because [a] the math is intrinsically invalid and [b] a different team would be very likely to arrive at different scorings for at least some of the factors, not least because many of them are wide open to subjective interpretation. If they'd restricted themselves to expressing the opinion that Covid manageability falls somewhere between that of polio and smallpox with the caveat that there's a wide margin for error, it would've been good work, but pulling numbers out of a hat by unsound means to a resolution of 1 percent reduces it to the borders of nonsense.

This is yet another example of the problem that besets risk assessment - superficially convincing results that won't stand up to rigorous scrutiny because they don't actually reflect any stable or concrete reality.

So my plan to save money on the LHC by commissioning a poll of 1M people to ask them the mass of the Higgs boson (margin of error 0.01%) wasn't a good idea ?

This paper isn't about the science. It's basically a funding application to give them resources to come up with some (slightly) less contrived numbers.

"Give us money and we'll prove this"

Using pseudo-scienfic mumbo jumbo and using numbers to make it seem more mathematical and hence valid. Where have I seen that before in the covid debate?

Given that the virus gives politicians a justification for fulfilling their authoritarian wet dreams, I don't think there is an appetite to completely eradicate the disease.

Plus given the rampant unabated corruption in the pharmaceutical industry, we are likely going to see frequent vaccination programs. We will be getting less effective and more expensive vaccines to keep us "safe".

This way government will also get a nice weapon against any political dissent - if they find your political views are a danger to the status quo, you'll get a clotting agent at your next vaccine appointment. "Oh vaccines carry a risk, oopsie daisy".

Like everything to do with covid, there is no-one asking (economists) about the cost benefits of various measures. We had plenty of models showing the possible downsides of no policy or behavioural changes, but none of them were ever close to accurate (always erring on the side of panic) and absolutely zero analysis of the many impacts of lockdown type measures on anything other than covid death rates in the models.

"public acceptance of infection control measures"

Sure, lock everyone up and have people going door to door giving out vaccines would be a good start, but does not seem proportionate and the potential downsides may well kill many, many more than covid every could (think mass uprisings and civil wars). Not to mention the more mundane issues of economic impact, mental health issues, and delays in other treatments: how many thousands will die of potentially avoidable diseases because the NHS was completely focussed on covid for 2 years? Plus the fundamental change in balance of power between citizens and the state - which it looks like we're getting anyway.

"how many thousands will die of potentially avoidable diseases because the NHS was completely focussed on covid for 2 years?"

In July 2020, the Government's own estimate was that lock down had killed 25,000 (actually dead before July) and would kill another 185,000 (missed cancers etc) in years to come. Those were not dead 'of covid' or 'with covid' but specifically 'without covid' / due to lock down effects.

I can't track down the news story now, so not sure if that was UK or just England. That was also with reference to Lock-down 1. (Looking back at past posting, I discussed this in a post I made in August 2020, where I said UK).

Lock-downs 2 and 3 presumably have pushed up that number, though there may be more recent assessments that may have revised it down (though logically, the 25,000 actually dead should be a fairly reliable number).