The Build-up to the Winter Crisis: Brick 9

Some weird stuff from the Scare Agency, and the two old geezers are not quite sure what to make of it. Here we go.

Share

Preparations for the Winter Crisis are now up and running in earnest. No, it’s not too early.

For example, the Scare Agency keeps us updated every month on the level of coverage of RSV vaccination (including for example training slides sets) while in Brick 1 we reported on the generous offer of free influenza vaccination for the homeless — in June.

·

Jun 18

After an intense debate amongst the four occupants of the TTE office, the two ancient geezers decided to prospectively chart the governmental and mediatic build-up to the annual winter crisis, which …

So, given that the Scare Agency kindly lets us know whenever it spends more than £25,000, we thought we’d ask how much it had spent on the three cornerstone vaccines of the Winter Crisis: Influenza, Covid and RSV.

We also planned to repeat the FOI request periodically, so we could keep track of the mounting cost of averting the Winter Crisis, or not averting it, as the case may be.

And this is where things get a little weird.

Here is the FOI exchange, started on 31 July, which you can read and follow the correspondence on WhatDoTheyKnow, or read our summary below:

Freedom of Information request

Subject: Breakdown of vaccine expenditure by target viral agent

Dear UK Health Security Agency, in your June Spend over GBP 25,000 report you provide a breakdown of expenditure by item. One line item is:

Vaccines & immunisation (MSD, Seqirus, GSK, Pfizer, Sanofi)

£45.07m

Would you please provide me with a breakdown of expenditure by the following vaccine target agents:

Influenza

SARS-CoV-2

RSV

To clarify, I am not interested in a breakdown by manufacturer, only by target agent.

Yours faithfully.

The hyperlinked sheet did not specify by line which vaccines they were spending money on, just the generic entry “vaccines” and the total by manufacturer.

We got an answer, or rather a request for clarification, which floored us as we fell off our wheelchairs:

Dear [Old geezers]

We would be grateful if you could identify the line item:

Vaccines & immunisation (MSD, Seqirus, GSK, Pfizer, Sanofi) £45.07m in the

attached spreadsheet.

Yours sincerely,

The emphasis is ours.

Yes, you read that correctly. The Scare agents were asking us to identify the relevant line in their own spreadsheet.

Once we had been lifted off the floor and back into our wheelchairs — a manoeuvre requiring the assistance of half a dozen people — we wrote back on 4 August.