Czech fast and cheap Covid-19 vaccine

At first – quick numbers: 8275 confirmed cases, 5058 recovered and 290 dead in Czech Republic.

“SARS-CoV-2-CZ-Preval” Study shows that the degree of immunization of the Czech population is very low. In the most affected localities does not reach the value of 4% – 5%. 27000 tested people revealed 107 positive cases.
The big news is that “Scientists from the Czech Republic top institutes have joined forces to create the new vaccine”. As Czech Health Minister Adam Vojtěch (ANO) said 4.5.2020.

The Minister’s report surprised Czech experts, who immediately opposed it in an open letter as “totally bizarre”, “sewn with a hot needle”, “very naive”, and that it “raises suspicions that people without competent knowledge and necessary experience stood at its (project) beginning”.
In decent speech” “Idea and presentation of the project is very naive, dubious and confusing.”

Now, let’s talk about why is the project wrong on so many levels.

The head of the project is prof. MUDr. Věra Adámková, CSc., cardiologist, member of a “Babiš” political party ANO and self-claimend “certified homeopath“, and winner of 2019 Czech Skeptics’ Club Sisyfos Golden Erratic Boulder award for “blabbering and spreading stupidity in health and science” – for this quote she said in House of Commons:
“Because I am a certified homeopath, I must say that it is absolutely wrong for these drugs (homeopatic pills) to go on sale (without prescription), because they contain very serious substances, even in small dilutions, that can damage the human body.”

Research should be done by three institutions – The National Institute of Public Health (NIPH), The Institute of Hematology and Blood Transfusion (IHBT) and Institute for Clinical and Experimental Medicine (IKEM).
All of them have no experience with vaccine development, all of them are government controlled.

The answer to critics about choosing those institutions (no public tender, no announcement at least) was “Nobody is refusing cooperation, but we (government) did not get it offered… and we cannot force cooperation on anyone.” (Věra Adámková)

Goverment still do nothing useful to coordinate / bring experts together to do better job.

Cost of this vaccine development will be “in the order of tens of millions of crowns” (1 Euro = cca 30 Crowns)
Which is just ridiculous. Maybe it should be in Euros…? No, they mean it.

Cost of feasibility study? “All participants made it in their free time and for free. To some extent. It would cost few tens of milions of crowns now.” But seriously performed feasibility study would be much much more expensive. Also, this work is made by many other institutions in Czech Rep, they just did not talk about it on TV.

And first research results should be published in ONE year!

Czech Republic clearly doesn’t want to share know-how, doesn’t want to share money (donated 730.000 Euro to European Commission #UnitedAgainstCoronavirus fund), wants to look like it races with othe states in who will be the first to develop vaccine.

In real it seems that Czech government just wants to do “populist gestures”.

It did.

It is still doing it.

And Babiš is still winning thanks to steps like this.

resources:

https://covid-imunita.uzis.cz/index.php?pg=vystupy-a-vysledky

https://www.radio.cz/en/section/curraffrs/czech-study-shows-extremely-low-level-of-collective-immunity-to-covid-19-virus

https://www.sisyfos.cz/clanek/1319-zlaty-bludny-balvan-v-kategorii-druzstev-za-rok-2018-tomio-okamura-vera-adamkova-andrej-babis-a-dalsi-hvezdy-ceskeho-politickeho-nebe

https://www.ceskatelevize.cz/porady/10117034229-168-hodin/220452801100510