Powerscourt Coronavirus Briefing – 16 October 2020

As Wave Two engulfs Europe, the urgency for a coronavirus vaccine has never been greater. Exhausted, increasingly cynical citizens face a bleak few months as officials in each region try variations on the theme of restricting movement to get through the winter period.

The first country to get a vaccine candidate approved will win huge global capital.

Alleged Russian propaganda reported in The Times, apparently designed to undermine and spread fear about the Oxford University-led coronavirus vaccine, illustrates the extent to which vaccine nationalism has become not just a key policy goal but a major propaganda effort.

Pictures and memes apparently originating in Russia lead on the idea that because the vaccine relies on a chimpanzee viral vector, it could turn people into monkeys.

The toxic combination of anxiety and crude digital propaganda may help to explain, perhaps, why confidence in vaccination among citizens is so low, just as it should be a key priority for everyone.

A poll by the Wall Street Journal/NBC News found that half of Americans surveyed would want to wait some time before taking the vaccine. Nearly 20% would not have one at all.

Concern about the perceived safety of the vaccines may have been amplified by the fact that several of the leading vaccine trial candidates are currently on hold due to safety concerns. Vaccine test programmes from Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca have been paused while these are investigated. This sort of halt is routine – but amid paranoid levels of scrutiny around the world it has not supported confidence in the idea of vaccination.

Europe has now overtaken the US as the virus epicentre of the developed world, with daily confirmed COVID-19 cases per million people on a seven-day basis now higher than the US.

Rising numbers in all European countries are forcing politicians to reimpose restrictions across the continent, triggering COVID fatigue and, in turn, growing political unrest.

On Thursday, France, Italy, Poland and Germany all recorded their largest daily rises in new cases since mass testing began. Russia reported its highest number of daily deaths since the start of the epidemic.

Schools in Southern Italy will close for two weeks while Germany has ordered bars and restaurants in high-risk areas to close earlier. The Netherlands has closed all bars and coffee shops. Portugal has imposed what it ominously describes as a “state of calamity”.

The UK on Thursday was forced to step up restrictions on people in London, meaning that from Saturday households in the Capital will be prevented from mixing indoors. London’s mayor Sadiq Khan warned London’s nine million citizens that they face a “difficult winter ahead”.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson is facing growing discontent over the UK government’s patchwork approach to coronavirus restrictions around the country. He faces a full-throated political rebellion from MPs in the North of England after Liverpool, with soaring infection levels and hospital ICU beds at near capacity, was put under severe restrictions. The government is trying effectively to force many other parts of the North into the same level of restriction but wants local politicians to take the lead. Local politicians, however, are not obliging.

Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, has become a de facto spokesman for people in the region who feel that the restrictions hit people in the North disproportionately hard and that the Westminster government is not properly compensating people for the inevitable loss of income that the restrictions will bring.

The bleak picture in Europe, combined with jitters ahead of the forthcoming US election, has finally taken the shine off Asian equities, with Chinese, Australian and Japanese stocks down into Friday.

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