Goodwin
You can believe what you like but there are many indicators that China and Australia have managed to suppress the virus.
But I do not agree with Clark that “China and Australia both succeeded from infection levels comparable to and even locally greater than those seen in the UK.”
When China introduced the lockdown in March 2020 there was a total of about 80,000 cases and this in a country with 25 times the population of UK. Early on they introduced a total ban on travel, which to this day we have never done and will never do. Australia at the peak of their 2nd wave in late August had 27,000 cases with a population of just under 40% of that of UK. There is no way this government is going to impose these stringent measures.
AS to vaccines, yes this is a common theme that has been taken on by the covid deniers, that there has not been a successful vaccine against corona viruses. But there have been a lot of background work going on but of course because of the containment of both SARS and MERS, research became rather low key. But many companies have been primed to start this research again. I think we now have proven efficacy of the vaccines in the trials, but more recently also real life evidence that the vaccine works and protects and reduces transmission. There may be loss of efficacy with mutations, but this will not translate to figures of zero effects. Also the vaccines can be quickly tweaked.
As to big pharma cashing in, this is the real issue. But at least Astra Zeneca is now getting the vaccine produced under license and selling it with minimal margins, and there are vaccines from Russia and China and those produced under license in India to distribute to third world countries. Relying on vaccines is not ideal but we have seen that our ‘democratic’ individualistic societies cannot relinquish the selfishness that has been born since Maggie Thatcher transformed society for the worse.