Political warfare, inequity, and insufficient data in coverage of the vaccine rollout

Last week, Handelsblatt, a German business daily, dropped a bombshell story that detonated with particular force in the United Kingdom. Citing unnamed sources, the paper reported that senior German officials believed the coronavirus vaccine developed by AstraZeneca—which Britain is racing to pump into the arms of its oldest residents—to be only 8 percent effective among people over the age of sixty-five, and expected the European Union’s medicines regulator to publicly support that...