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Vaccine refuseniks are like WW2 blitz blackout breakers – politicalbetting.com
Vaccine refuseniks are like WW2 blitz blackout breakers – politicalbetting.com
In 1940/41 when the German Bombing of British cities was at its height one of the big rules that everybody had to follow was the blackout. Any little light from a building, it was thought, could help enemy pilots to work out whether they were above populated areas where they could cause maximum damage.
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Time for HMG to get tough with the vaccine refusers imo.
About 42,000 Brits were killed in the Blitz, and around 140,000 have been killed by Covid.
Time to update the header.
The polls at the equivalent stage of Ed Miliband’s time as LotO. Can someone run them through Electoral Calculus please, and share with us what the result of the 2015 Election is going to be?
Viral load matters enormously.
If you are vaccinated and get a small dose of Covid, your infection will be so slight, it's highly unlikely you'll even notice. If you are vaccinated and get a massive one, then it's highly likely you'll get pretty sick.
That's why if I'm in a poorly ventilated and crowded environment - like public transport during rush hour - I will wear a face mask, and I would encourage (albeit not force) other people to do similarly. It's just the modern version of putting your hand over your mouth when you cough: it's good manners.
Vaccines are extremely effective, it is reasonably convenient to be jabbed and serious side effects are extremely rare.
Anyway what's your post got to do with vaccine refuseniks? Mike's header is correct, and fair play to Javid.
1. There is a third poll in a row showing McAuliffe and Younkin tied (Emerson after Monmouth and Trafalgar, although I have discounted a Republican-leaning poll with the same result)
2. Joe Biden's falling popularity, which will have an impact;
3. Early voting numbers in the Democrat-leaning Northern suburbs don't look to be great, according to some of the Twitter feeds;
4. More anecdotally, left and right-leaning websites have both suggested there has been a proliferation of Youngkin signs in some of the bluer areas. The number of signs were a fairly decent indicator of Trump's support in 2016 at least;
5. The Republicans seem more enthused and the Loudoun School District issues - especially around the alleged rape of a girl by a transgender support - seems to be crystallising support.
As usual, DYOR. But as we have had three polls in a row showing the race tied, I'm not sure why McAuliffe is at the odds he is.
Can't be arsed, I'm a free thinker was surprisingly uncommon.
He is not some Piers Corbyn style nutcase, and very pro-vaccination. He does however have very strong antibodies as a result of his infection.
What would be the point of forcing him to either resign or have a further vaccine? That is the reality.
Personally, I think anyone with documented antibodies from infection should be vaccine exempt.
Obviously, none of us, other than JackW, were around at that time. But I've read that it lowered morale as much as it raised it, as many people got sick of it very quickly and realised its side effects, which is why the government reduced its severity pretty quickly.
And of course the Luftwaffe learned pretty quickly to navigate up the Thames to find London.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#Total_deaths_by_country
Even if one supports the idea philosophically/ethically etc etc practically it would only take one kid to be in that situation on front page of the Daily Beast for any minister to abandon it.
But overall, I agree that VA-Gov will be a nail-biter. Also the Republicans have a decent chance of flipping the Virginia lower house (House of Delegates). If they did, they would still be short of a trifecta though as the Democrats control the state Senate and that's not up until next year.
The two other big races here in the NE are more cut and dried and positive for the Democrats though. Phil Murphy remains comfortably ahead in the NJ-Gov race.
And as for the NYC mayoral race, well I'd be amazed if Eric Adams does not pulverize Curtis Sliwa (yes, that Curtis Sliwa). Sliwa's only selling point is that as he founded the Guardian Angles vigilante group back in the 70s he's tough on law and order. Unfortunately, so is Eric Adams, who's an ex-cop and has been endorsed by the NYPD union, and Adams, while he has some baggage of his own, has nothing like that of Sliwa. Most NYCers think Sliwa is a bit on the crazy side, and not in the way that appealed to blue-collar voters like Trump.
Interestingly, although Sliwa seems to have enough cash to run plenty of TV ads, possibly more than Adams at the moment, he only seems to have two: one where he comforts a homeless man who interrupted an street appearance of his, and one where he seems to have found the half-a-dozen or so "Democrats for Sliwa". All in all it's a very odd campaign. Adams won the Democratic primary in part by spending heavily on cheap, non-English language local media, especially Chinese-language. I wonder if he's doing the same for the general.
FPT
Annoyingly, my arm aches but my wife's doesn't.
I guess that Boots make a bit of profit from each shot.
If you are over 50, go and get one!
Plenty died in accidents too. Remember hearing about a guy whose train stopped at a signal, he thought it was the station, and fell to his death off a bridge.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker
Hat tip and thanks to @CarlottaVance for pointing out the Boots service last week.
Boots was shut. As was most of Hexham. Plenty bewildered frightfully middle-class families.
This wasn't the half-term luxury they've come to expect.
I thought we were told that there was going to be a shortage of pork
Though I have always been baffled at the low cost of pork compared to beef.
Month 8: Open up to help out
Month 9: Shutter that window
Month 10: Open all the windows and let light out and celebrate the end of all this.
Month 11: Black out now or lose Xmas
Month New Year: Open up you bastards or the economy is fecked.
Month 5: We may need to black out again unless you are really careful with light.
Month 6: Some people are taking the piss with windows
Month 9: No Tory MP has blacked windows but you SHOULD or the NHS gets it.
Month 10: Black out even though it is not a legal requirement or lose xmas
I would guess at quite a bit higher.
And there have been two fundamental wrong decisions:
Lack of border control
No general health and fitness campaign
http://news.sky.com/story/insulate-britain-nationwide-injunction-granted-against-climate-activists-blocking-roads-12444607
The vaccine covers four strains, so fingers crossed it has the right variant in the mix.
I wonder how long refuseniks will hold out anyway?
The US has just announced it will allow not foreign travellers - if they have proof of the jab. All countries and airlines will do this.
If you refuse the vax you are kissing goodbye to any international travel ever again. Just for starters. That’s an enormous sacrifice
I suspect the hardcore 10% refusers will eventually be whittled down to 1 or 2% of absolute nutters
Oh. And it isn't the Government. JRM didn't stab me.
Yes fair enough. Might be worth checking Boots though... I have a suspicion they will administer free if you qualify on health grounds for an NHS flu jab.
I made the decision to get vaccinated. But I'm not going to poor scorn on anyone who doesn't. Certainly not for 'not understanding science' - almost no-one, on either side of the argument, has read the relevant studies. At best, we have read second or third hand accounts.
I don't fully understand what the motivations of antivaxxers are, but I doubt they are callousness.
Let's not try to demonise people who have reached different conclusions. Not least because it doesn't tend to work.
I can sense her resistance crumbling but I also sense her pain as it happens. Sad, in a way
The idea that you will be denied liberties unless you take government approved medicine for the greater good sounds like a bad scifi plot.
I was thinking about this today. It’s the Budget this week. If we want to incentive vaccine take up, why not do it through the tax system? Give double vaxxed people a tax break, and refuseniks a tax penalty. It would be fairly easy to do: essentially everyone gets a tax penalty unless they prove their vaccination (or medical exemption) status via the NHS app, or some such, within 60 days, in which case the tax penalty becomes a modest tax break.
This removes the horrible admin burden at the point of delivery to venues etc. And it removes the element of compulsion.
I’m of the view vaxports are unnecessary, and I shudder somewhat at the paper-checking that would be required. But I could live with tax incentives, if we have to take some action to grind down the stubborn 10% who won’t get vaccinated.
Better than vax and/or mask mandates certainly - both of which are horribly illiberal.
Now I may be alone in this but I think pork is fundamentally more tasty than beef.
Yet beef holds the psychological top spot - is that anything more than some folk memories of ye olde roast beef of merry olde england.
This plague (probably like all the others in history) has thrown up some intense moral questions.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-58410584
"This new interim injunction will ban activities that obstruct motorways and major A roads across the entire country."
https://news.sky.com/story/insulate-britain-nationwide-injunction-granted-against-climate-activists-blocking-roads-12444607
This, even if the temporary injunction is (a) universally respected, and (b) made permanent, still seems to leave any number of targets which are neither motorways nor "major" A-roads.
https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1452666219971153923?t=fni2GSL0ds1a3vCX5y0C1A&s=19
Current well informed speculation is that many of the conditions of the previously mentally unwell didn't have too rough a time. Their well-honed coping mechanisms kicked in. And many of their fears about the world being scary and dangerous were vindicated.
It is the legions of newly benighted and untreated who are being stowed like a tsunami.
And they have no coping mechanisms. Nor qualified support.
No research, as yet, to definitively prove this of course.
This is another example of the Step Function Fallacy.
Yes, vaccinated people still shed viral matter. But a lot less. Indeed, total viral shedding is probably an order of magnitude lower for the vaccinated.
* Not sure about long term safety of something new
* It doesn't work, I know a bloke who was vaxed and is now dead.
* No need as I have had covid
* No need as I am young/healthy/never had flu etc
* Don't trust doctors
* Don't trust the government
* The vax is all about money for Big Pharma otherwise why boosters?
* Covid doesn't exist
* Piers Corbyn is right
That's off top of my head. First three or four could be worth persuading against and GPs should try, after that one is away with the loons.
So you might be left with they have to choose between 'Piers Corbyn is right' and 'no holiday abroad for you this year or next'.
Tbh it would be far better to mandate the system used in parts of America where recycling is sorted at a central site, rather than relying on the public to put things in the right bin on the right day.
* I retract this if she organised double blind trials which were peer reviewed.
The trouble with otherwise useful services provided by whistleblowers - a lot of the time, you see no sense of proportion. I wonder how it happens. Perhaps because the discourse begins most interesting to those with an axe to grind.