A world roll-out of Covid vaccine? It's not happening.

We in the UK are lucky. The Boris Johnson government took swift action, thanks to a brilliant vaccine task force, to order millions and millions of different vaccines, well before they were even authorised and found to be effective. So now, with three vaccines approved and more on the way, the UK is sitting pretty for a large-scale vaccination programme. But programmes around the world are sketchy and in some areas, non-existent. The US started slowly and even now has only managed to vaccinate about eight per cent of the population. The 27 countries of the European Union are in all sorts of trouble as I have documented before. But there seem to be huge variations across the globe. Take Peru for example. Peru has had three different presidents in a comparatively short period and as a result none of them managed to be around long enough to get orders in for vaccines. So as of now there is no vaccine programmme underway in Peru. Argentina of course has gone for the Russian Sputnik V vaccine which has now been given the green light by the Lancet magazine, the bible of the medical world. They say it's 92 per cent effective. So after all the initial doubts about the rushed Russian programme, it seems it's ok after all. I expect a lot more countries, perhaps Peru, with no or limited programmes will turn to Russia. I know why the world was sceptical about the Russian Sputnik V vaccine which was developed and tested with breakneck speed, the first one on the planet. It was all about Vladimir Putin. No one believes what he says and when he said Russia had developed a vaccine no one trusted him and certainly didn't put in any orders. But the fact is Russia has brilliant scientists and engineers and doctors, like so many other advanced countries, and so Sputnik V had as good a chance of being effective as any of the vaccines being developed. Now Lancet says it is. This is good news. The more vaccines the better and the more they can be distributed to every corner of the globe, the more likely we will come out of this pandemic nightmare sooner rather than very much later.