Vaccines: how safe and who gets it?
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 5 December 2020
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The UK has become the first country in the world to approve the use of a vaccine for Covid 19. But some people are worried that the decision was taken too quickly - can we really know it’s safe yet? Tim Harford tackles these safety concerns. Plus, what is the best way to distribute the vaccine? How do you maximise the benefit of the first round of vaccines? Stuart McDonald, a fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries in the UK works out what groups would benefit most.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service, with a programme that explores |
| 0:05.3 | the numbers all around us in the news and I'm Tim Halford. This week, the UK managed to achieve |
| 0:12.0 | this landmark. The UK becomes the first country in the world to approve a coronavirus vaccine. |
| 0:17.6 | The Pfizer-Biontech job will be made available from next week. Well, since I live in the UK, |
| 0:23.0 | I think this is excellent news. Okay Tim, let's not get carried away. I have some questions. |
| 0:28.7 | Hello Charlotte. Charlotte McDonald joins me. Come on then, fire away. |
| 0:32.4 | Okay, there have been a number of people, including listeners to this programme, |
| 0:36.4 | who've raised questions about the vaccine's safety. Surely it's been approved too quickly. |
| 0:41.3 | Surely it's too soon to know about possible side effects. |
| 0:44.4 | Ah well, this sounds like an opportune moment to mention another excellent BBC podcast, |
| 0:50.6 | also presented by me, which is called How to Vaccinate the World. It is available in all the |
| 0:56.5 | right podcasty places and we covered this topic in our first episode. I spoke to Paul Offett, |
| 1:02.4 | who developed a rotavirus vaccine and who also sits on the committee in the US that will have to |
| 1:08.3 | decide whether to approve these new vaccines. People do worry about the safety of vaccines. |
| 1:14.0 | How will we first, we go into discover and prove to our own satisfaction that these vaccines |
| 1:18.5 | are safe and then what are we going to do about persuading people who are worried about them? |
| 1:22.4 | Right, so on the one hand, the size of these so-called face retriles, large placebo-controlled |
| 1:28.4 | prospective studies, the size of these trials is the size of any trial that you would do for any |
| 1:33.1 | pediatric vaccine. So that's not the problem. The problem is, is they're much shorter. In other words, |
| 1:38.0 | you're just going to know efficacy for a few months. You're only going to know safety for a few months. |
| 1:41.7 | I think that the safety story is you're going to know that in tens of thousands of people, |
| 1:46.2 | this vaccine didn't cause any serious side effects, at least within two months. Now, if you look |
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