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Covid vaccine makers are rightly getting praise, financial awards, Barbie dolls made in their image and soon Nobel Prizes. But no matter how many lives vaccines save, they are no magic wand to bring us back to pre-pandemic standards.
In the United States, companies deny this. Faced with the resurgence of Covid cases but determined to return to old working rhythms after Labor Day, the inescapable response, from Walmart to Goldman Sachs, is a vaccine mandate.
It is not an easy option. It is bold to impose a vaccine requirement on reluctant staff in a tight labor market where they can quit. The policy is also fiercely opposed by many Republican politicians, who attempt to ban it.
As laudable as the results are, it will not guarantee safe workplaces. Studies have shown that people who are vaccinated can become infected with the Delta variant and pass it on to others.
Businesses need other tools if they want to get more people back to the office in September at a time when Covid hospitalizations are nine times higher than the same time last year in the UK and three times higher high in the United States, despite vaccination programs. .
“There was so much support for the vaccination strategy, so much hype behind it, that instead of being seen as part of the whole response, it became the response,” says Sanjeev Krishna , professor of medicine at St George’s, University of London, and consultant for the British testing company Mologic.
The tests do not have the hallmark of vaccines. Diagnostic companies like Roche, Abbott and Quidel are not on the tip of their tongue like Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Moderna.
It doesn’t help that the industry’s most famous face appeared in a San Jose courtroom this week: Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was there for the start of her fraud trial.
Theranos’ promise, if not reality, is what we need now: breakthrough, fast, and accurate testing. (Have no doubt that if Theranos was still around, he would have pivoted to Covid-19, just as he did with previous high-profile threats such as Zika.)
For Covid, cheap and reliable antigen tests are available, although they have never been deployed in the numbers desired by their advocates. Weak demand in the United States at the start of the summer was such that one of the largest suppliers, Abbott Laboratories, scrapped unused test cards and laid off workers, as reported by The New York Times. . Now it can no longer meet the renewed demand.
Even when tests are available, they are often not deployed effectively. In a workplace that says it requires testing twice a week, a straw poll of staff found that only 1 in 10 complied, although most of the rest said they were testing, a little less frequently, and would be prepared to meet the schedule if there was no verification process.
One source of friction that has yet to be resolved is the wait time for results. Even 15 minutes is an obstacle to the wider deployment of testing as a monitoring tool in workplaces, concert halls or airports.
“There is a lot of research and development. . . on new technologies by doing tests of 10 seconds, 20 seconds, but none of them are yet suitable for use, ”explains Tim Peto, professor of medicine at the University of Oxford. Having a sniffer where you breathe out, like a breathalyzer, is what you want.