Australian vaccine withdrawal a disappointment, but other vaccines are close as COVID kills 10,000 a day

A MODERN HOLY GRAIL: The global infection and death rate must surely start to drop in coming months as immunisation programs kick in around the world.

THE termination of the phase one trial of Australia's big hope for our own COVID-19 vaccine - a joint venture between the University of Queensland and home-grown global biotech firm CSL Limited - is a disappointment, but it's not the hope-shattering setback it would have been had it been the only coronavirus vaccine being developed.

Drug approval typically involves three stages of trials, meaning that the Australian vaccine had some way to go, regardless of its performance at this juncture. Indeed, the leading vaccines are already being approved for public use in various countries, and other candidates are on the verge.

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Some, such as the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, require storage at -70C, a limitation that will mean transportation in dry ice.

With the UQ/CSL product out of the picture for the time being, Australia is likely to order more doses of an Oxford University/AstraZeneca vaccine, which can be kept at normal fridge temperature, as can a vaccine from US company Novavax, which was trialled in Australia in May.

OPPORTUNITY COST: The CSL Limited share price, showing the immediate fall as news of the problem with its COVID vaccine are made public. It had fallen by $9.76 or 3.24 per cent by late yesterday afternoon. Even so, the former government owned Commonwealth Serum Laboratories (as in CSL), remains one of the great privatisation success stories.

Then there's the Moderna vaccine, which stores at -20C, Russia's Sputnik V, and various Chinese products, most notably a fridge-temperature Sinopharm candidate, trialled in the United Arab Emirates.

Regardless of which vaccine - or more likely a combination of them - is used in Australia, the broad thrust of our distribution regime is likely to be in line with the global COVAX initiative, which the government announced in September we had joined.

Immunising a substantial proportion of the world's 7.8 billion people represents an unparalleled public health effort, and while COVAX gives Australia access to vaccines, it also obliges us to work within a series of protocols that aim to distribute the products evenly between nations, based on percentages of their populations.

EVERY STORY HAS A PICTURE: The Johns Hopkins University coronavirus dashboard yesterday, recording 69,619,992 positive COVID tests and 1,582,342 fatalities attributed to COVID, or where COVID was a factor. The numbers give a global death rate of 2.27 per cent, or just over one death for every 50 infections.

These and other factors mean the COVID immunisation program, even if it runs without a hitch, will surely be measured in years rather than months.

In the meantime, spreading infections have hit a "new normal" of between 500,000 and 700,000 new cases a day, with the total set to pass 70 million overnight.

For many who caught it, COVID has been a mild annoyance, but at the other end of the scale, almost 1.6 million have died after catching it, and the death toll is rising by between 9000 and 13,000 a day.

Against such a background, immunisation cannot come fast enough.

ISSUE: 39,488.

TEST, TEST AND TEST AGAIN: COVID testing. Picture: Queensland government.

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