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Could Britain’s COVID rate be impacted by the actual jab that was used? – politicalbetting.com
Could Britain’s COVID rate be impacted by the actual jab that was used? – politicalbetting.com
At the weekend I got my “booster” jab and unlike my earlier two vaccinations, it was the Pfizer one and not Astrazeneca which was given to tens of millions of Brits like me in the first waves of the vaccination programme.
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Ministers are understood to be refraining from introducing restrictions including compulsory facemasks, advice to work from home and domestic vaccine passports after seeing projections which show infections declining rapidly within the next few weeks.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10126769/Covid-cases-SLUMP-just-5-000-day-Christmas-WITHOUT-Plan-B-crackdown.html
It's a combination of AZ not being as effective as Pfizer/Moderna - particularly at reducing transmission - and the fact that the UK started earlier.
If you look at the median point - i.e. when 40% of people were jabbed - then the UK got there between three and four months before European countries.
The combination of these two facts means the UK is suffering worst from fading protection.
FORTUNATELY.
This is also happening at the same time that the major transmission vector (schools) is running out of hosts. And the UK is also getting on with getting people booster doses. (Albeit, slightly slower than one might like.) Plus, all the evidence is that AZ + Pfizer/Moderna actually offers the best protection of all.
So long as the UK gets on with booster doses, there is a great deal of reason to be optimistic about the track of cases and hospitalisation.
And what of Europe? Well, right now Eastern Europe (particularly Bulgaria) is being hammered. You also have big outbreaks in Eastern Germany (low levels of vaccination) and in Brussels (ditto).
Most of Europe is not (yet) facing a diminishing vaccine efficacy issue, except for the very old. That will change. But they also have plentiful supplies now, and they have a proven ability to get jabs in arms. They too need to start executing on third doses. They are lucky, however, that they probably have a couple of months on the UK.
So it's not that uncommon.
Plus, of course, our first vaccines were developed quickly, and will be further improved as time goes on. And some things - like tetanus - we get boosters every few years.
My guess is that we'll have annual boosters for a year or two, and then it'll get integrated with the flu shot.
The big danger is a mutation into a disease that renders the current vaccines useless, but thankfully there’s a very small window between a vaccine-resistant virus and an easily-transmissible one.
Edit: Robert beat me to the same point. Need another coffee.
F1: entertaining race, though I prefer normal start times.
Unfortunately, the NHS has now released data that shows that AZ efficacy drops quicker than Pfizer. The FT has a chart of it here: https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1438100728623546373/photo/1
It's notable that Delta is not *different* to earlier strains in terms of our immune system's ability to recognise it - it's just that people with Delta shed a lot more viral matter. Simply, our immune system is just a little slower to respond to 1,000x more viral material.
Commiserations to India. The 'good' Pakistan turned up.
Verstappen almost got screwed by bad traffic. Good result for the title race, I think.
Should be a good conversation today.
The 4th dose will be tweaked against delta. And I suspect that will be that for the crisis phase of this virus. And we can then all focus on how another Gang of 8 member has this week been publicly leaning into aliens disclosure (Adam Shiff), roughly the same time as the Nasa Administrator expresses his “personal opinion” that to understand UAP we need to consider the context of “billions of suns in billions of galaxies” and “perhaps more than one universe”.
For what it’s worth, Lue Elizondo, ex head of the Pentagon UAP programme also said this week that “the time for dropping breadcrumbs is over and for people to be more blunt”. He also then said this:
https://twitter.com/iamdrvenkman/status/1451644308118020100?s=21
We are approaching the crescendo of either the most bizarre bipartisan psyops conspiracy ever undertaken by the US establishment, or the disclosure of something else entirely.
I'm not seeing that in there.
All the evidence seems to show that the perfect dosing strategy is probably AZ followed by Pfizer (or more likely Moderna) eight weeks later.
Which - incidentally - is exactly what Frau Merkel got.
https://twitter.com/shannonrwatts/status/1452449356724912128
Congratulations to Pakistan, Liverpool, Max Verstappen and Jamie Chadwick, among many others.
Looks like dragging of feet and border pedantry is all they have left.
For all of the fuss about AZ which then got hyper-partisan as the jab turned into a proxy Brexit war, it does look like AZ isn't as effective as others. Still worth having, but hardly the world-beating jab it was billed as.
I don't blame the politicians who were ramping it as such, we didn't know. But as I said the other day, Covid has become the most absurd partisan slug-fest, and no more so than in America.
However bad our politics are - and it's not great - pray that we don't follow America down the rabbit-hole to lies are truth land.
It also appears that some countries have been better at breaking down vaccine resistance than us which means that we have slipped to something like mid table in vaccines per hundred people. We need to look and learn from them how to overcome this. Otherwise more of the stupid will die which seems unnecessary.
It’s still annoying when the prawn sandwich brigade don’t take turn up and take their seats though. Because it’s the World Cup half the seats in the ground are reserved for the various interests, leaving a sold-out public sale but a bunch of empty seats during the match. Tickets for last night’s match were changing hands for 10x face value on the local secondary market.
That is world beating by any measure.
Why does the government get away with stuff? Because Labour are idiots. Take the storm on Twitter about "my MP voted to flush turds down the river" nonsense. No, they didn't. Labour activists showing their holier-than-thou smug stupidity changes no minds. Attack the water industry for vast profits, crap standards and the government for backing shareholders over the environment. Not a crap (ho ho ho) attack personalised to MPs which will convert zero Tory votes back to Labour.
£12.50 per day for commuting from Wood Green, Walthamstow, Chiswick or Kew out of London if you have the wrong car. £3k a year for all the working days.
Hmmm.
Which does show a significant Pfizer advantage to start, dropping to near parity by 6m.
Although not directly comparable, I note according to Our World in Data that hospital admissions are running about five times higher in the UK than France, Germany and Italy.
It's interesting that these data models that may be very accurate and paint a "don't panic" picture had to be leaked to the media while the "panic now" models with 7k hospitalisations per day get openly revealed by SPI-M and SAGE.
There has been a real lack of honesty by the scientists doing the work.
Anyway, fingers crossed that they (and we) are right about this.
The other thing that was very interesting was the government data modellers now also believe NPIs serve as displacement activity. When we didn't have vaccines displacement activity was a net positive, now it may be a net negative because those of us who got vaccinated may have waning immunity.
Plan B, lockdown, Plan C. They all may end up making everyone feel good about how virtuous they all are saving lives but could end up doing the opposite as we all sit indoors with our immunity dropping off. I'd rather come into contact with the virus at 90% efficacy than 60%.
To be more serious, there is going to be a huge pushback against the green stuff, when people see it affecting their daily lives. How many low-income workers in key services, have old cars they run on shoestring budgets to get to work? It’s millions across the country.
Electorally relevant? Who may this hurt?
Do those of you living there notice this?
Pfizer is certainly better on many specific aspects, but as an overall contribute to the world, less so
The problem with pro-Boris ramping is the rampee almost always ends up looking foolish as the facts quickly disagree with the spin.
What are the impacts of trending towards zero emissions on less well off people.
And what is the practical maths of whether it is in fact possible to reach the maximum target levels of CO2 in the timeframe (or at all), and then keep them there by continuing zero emissions.
This second question is by miles objectively the most important and most interesting. The relative absence of popular and political level discussion suggests both a disquieting answer and denial.
Does anyone know if I am right about this?
(The overall thrust of your post is right though)
He’s also refused to roll back the weekend charge as he promised in the election.
It costs us £20 each time we drive
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/10/24/pm-must-hold-firm-against-winter-plan-doom-mongers-risk-long/
You are being prevented from participating in normal life.
But it's also clear that Sadiq Khan isn't much good. How on earth did the Tories miss the open goal by selecting someone worse as their candidate?
However bad Khan is on whatever the issue, the simple reality is that Bailey would have been worse. The same rationale that saw the Johnson 80 seat win got Khan comfortably re-elected.
Sir Roger Gale MP
I, like many of my constituents, am appalled to see the way in which Southern Water keep using our bathing waters as a dumping site. I have not been able to vote on the amendments or the Environment Bill itself as I chaired the Bill through the committee stages.
https://twitter.com/SirRogerGale/status/1452524041227673602
(Also I do realise that commuting against the flow by public transport can be a fools errand. Services get messed up on the way into town and if anything goes wrong are often sacrificed to protect the inward flow.)
It's a good example of the crap you post if nothing else ....
Sajid Javid suggests vaccinations will soon be mandatory for NHS staff.
“That is my direction of travel”.
Will be welcomed by social care - at the moment some are leaving care to work in the NHS, where jabs are not yet compulsory.
https://twitter.com/PaulBrandITV/status/1452535639489064960
Those who did the right thing, should be able to live their lives as normal.
https://aqicn.org/city/london/
There is evidence of some immunity to SARS still in recovered patients, and this may well hold true for covid. Its not certain that we will need annual boosters for instance - three doses may be enough for ever, or at least until a significantly new variant arrives (if it does).
It seemed fine. It is as always the owners who deserve the opprobrium.
The EU prevented us from failing below minimum standards, it did not prevent us from exceeding them so Gove was being entirely irrational (I suspect intentionally so for those to stupid to realise it).
The fundamental principle is that government is not the boss
There have been about three or four further projections of hospitalisations (generally peaking and declining) since the last one the media highlighted as being "newsworthy" enough. I'm actually a bit surprised that they bothered with this latest one - but the publication route and way they've been revealed have been exactly the same every time.
I remember arguing with someone on another forum about the September ones - he thought they should have been held secret.