It is a setting that made me giggle, I had not heard this for decades, I reckon the last time I heard it was in the 70’s, the full phrase was “the lever for the nipple for the trigger that sets the button is out of stock”, a stage that we see in a complex environment where all the eyes are fixated on the engine, and everyone forgot about the control panel that activates the engine. That was the sentiment when I was confronted with ‘“Russian roulette” in Europe as needle shortages hamper COVID-19 shots’. The article (at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-vaccines-needles/analysis-russian-roulette-in-europe-as-needle-shortages-hamper-covid-19-shots-idUSKBN29Y10C) gives us “Laurent Fignon, a geriatric doctor in the south of France, is having to improvise as he gives shots of the COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech to care home residents and health staff because supplies of the right needles and syringes are short”, a stage where everyone sees the need of the vaccine and there is seemingly a national stage (all over Europe) a stage Reuters warned us about a week earlier with ‘EU scrambles for syringes to avoid wasting Pfizer vaccines and extra cost’ yet a lot of people have not caught on, as people scrambled to get their share of 3,000,000,000 vials. Exactly by whom and where do we see the order of a similar amount of syringes?
So when we see ““accordance with locally approved labelling,” Pfizer said after the EU drugs regulator’s decision to shift to a six-dose label”, yet the question in my mind was “who, what, when, where, how and why was the setting of the change to a 6 dose label?” An important setting as we are faced with an seemingly speculated option that the people got shafted for 16% of all vaccines, especially when we consider the quote “It was initially sold in the EU in vials meant to deliver five doses, but a global shortage of shots and a viability assessment on dosage convinced the EU drugs regulator to approve on Jan. 8 the extraction of six doses from the same vials”, so which yahoo was the ‘EU drugs regulator’ approving this part? That person might have valid reasoning, but when I look back at the times when a 60 people life-raft held 61 people, that one person to stay alive basically condemned the other 60 to death, but the people tend to overlook that part too easily. And as we get to “The decision increased availability, prompting Pfizer to raise its output targets for this year to 2 billion vaccines from 1.3 billion initially envisaged”, so who is looking into the 16% shift to account towards the 60% shortage of doses, or is the 16% step a way to hide the fact that matters were much worse? I am merely asking, because either way shows that I have been right since mid 2020, and is it not interesting that it took the media this long to catch on (which is not their fault in this case, mind you)?
So when we see everyone shout for vaccines and we are confronted with “Similar shortages are cropping up elsewhere in Europe, complicating a stuttering start to vaccination efforts”, we need to take a look at their syringe orders as well. So when we see “Pfizer now forecasts it will produce 2 billion doses this year, but this assumes it will be possible to extract the full six from each vial. It charges by the dose, meaning the cost of a vial has gone up 20%” we now get to the question “was the vial created to set 6 doses? As such was it bigger, if not, and we give the people merely 96% of the dose, does it still work properly? More important, when you realise that getting 100% out of a vial is almost impossible, just like the 61st passenger on a lifeboat, how many will be endangered by this? Should the danger be 0% (which is always possible) then why are several EU members making such a ruckus on this? Is it to hide the possibility that they forgot to order the syringes?
And as Reuters gives us “The European Commission is pressing Pfizer and German partner BioNTech to deliver more of the low-dead-space needles to extract the extra dose” we get to the heart of the matter. A mere approach to flim-flam the numbers and how many needles were ordered and more important when were they ordered? Yet in all this, looking at numerous sources, we see a lack of explanation where we get ‘meaning the cost of a vial has gone up 20%’, is that merely the needle? I don’t think so, the numbers are debatable and no one is looking, nw I will be the first to admit that this is not my field of expertise, and optionally it was a Reuters interpretation of the facts (which is optionally not wrong), and it could have been handed to Reuters in this way, but the lack of questions on all this is staggering.
You see, the first in a whole range of questions is seen with “For buyers of the vaccine, however, there was a drawback because EU states face the prospect of paying the price of six doses for each vial, regardless of their ability to extract a sixth shot”, from my point of view I would grasp back to the original sales contract in three cases already the stage was set to emotion, all whilst we are facing the raw sales deal and EU politicians seem to rely on emotion rather than the contract that was drawn up, I wonder why.