Boris looking somewhat better. Bit of a haircut. Not as exhausted. Doesn't look 90
Christmas break?
LOL. without the hair he looks like a Lancashire Ogre.
The first huge style mistake of 2022.
It does make him look a bit more thuggish, slightly. The Boris of the football shirt who knocked over a younger player on the pitch. Still, he's probably just happy not to look like total chaos at the moment, given the events of the last few weeks.
'We can’t vaccinate the planet every six months', says JCVI chief Fourth Covid jabs should not be offered until there is more evidence, the head of Britain's vaccine body has said - as he warned that giving boosters to people every six months was “not sustainable”.
6 monthly jabs may or may not be the right thing, but his remit is not "THE PLANET". It's the UK. Once again heading outside their remit.
Unless we vaccinate the planet - collectively - then we aren't immune from the next mutation.
That's another covid myth apparently: Myth #1,765 in a regular series...
We should share Covid vaccines with the world, because it is the right thing to do, but not because it will limit of emergence of 'variants' - vaccines don't generate variants but they don't preclude their emergence either - it's all a bit unclear and complicated.
Not just people either, Covid is a general mammalian phenomenon
Nevertheless a world with Covid raging is more likely to throw up things which come and fuck us up than a world with Covid under control. And the quicker we vaccinate the world the quicker we get from that first situation to the second. It's as much a practical imperative as a moral one.
No it isn't necessarily a practical or moral one and probably not a scientific one either. All governments have their first responsibility to their own population. IMHO, the first priority of Western governments is to figure out how to defeat or contain the virus. The strategies that they use will then inform them how they support other governments to do the same.
The virus respects no borders. It's a global pandemic and the best response to it is global. The more inefficient and illogical is the vaccine rollout - eg 5 or 6 jabs in one country and zero in another - the longer the pandemic will last, and the longer it lasts the more the damage will be and the more likely it is that we will be impacted.
The question then is this - to what extent should the normal rules of national centric politics - which you outline - be flexed in order to facilitate the optimum globally efficient solution?
I say the answer to this is "to a very great extent" and I think this is the correct answer. After all, this is a once-a-century emergency with an awful lot at stake. If we can't get our (global) act together for this, at least better than we are atm, when will we ever be able to?
So I am going to ask a question. I don't claim it is a fair question or perhaps even valid but it is the question that any politician has to be able to answer if they wish to accept your view.
How many people should we allow to die in this country, who could otherwise be saved, so that we can save lives of people in Africa, India, Russia or Poland?
As I say I am not saying it is a fair question but it is the question that cannot be dodged by politicians choosing to follow the route of putting global well being ahead of national well being.
And I know the obvious answer to you and probably to me is that in the long term we might actually save more lives here. But that is not certain and you are asking people to accept deaths now for fewer deaths tomorrow. That is a hard, if not impossible, sell for any politician.
I'll avoid the obvious answer and instead acknowledge what you say - that it's hard for any national government not to be driven entirely by high viz short term national interest, eg (for here) what booster strategy gets us out of all restrictions asap this year, end of story.
So, in practice, I guess the best we can hope for is that the global case is pushed by the likes of the WHO and various leading scientists and that it gets at least some traction with decision makers. Ie I feel the dead opposite to those who see that case being made by such people and respond "They should shut up. Not in their brief". I think the more noise is made about this the better.
Imagine we reach end of 2023 and Covid is conquered (for now) in the developed world but still raging most everywhere else. That, given the early brilliance in developing vaccines and treatments, would be such a shame - and furthermore a depressing sign that for all our tech and intelligence and progress we can't meet the big challenges.
The issue is -
- The supply of vaccines is no longer the issue. We are looking at 24 billion doses manufactured by the middle of this year. There are about 8 Billion people on the planet. - So Harry Hair Shirting about not "hoarding" vaccinations doesn't actually make sense. Not doing boosters or vaccinating children in the UK will not materially effect vaccine availability world wide.
There's loads of issues. Affordable Supply + Logistics & Distribution + Population Demand = Vaccination Outcome. There are problems to fix with all the inputs there.
But my strong sense is that the assertion "the domestic vaccine strategy of rich countries and their interaction with the pharmaceutical giants has no impact on the vaccination outcome in the rest of the world" is a self-comforting falsehood.
Is that like a Spidey Sense?
The fact remains that vaccines are now being made faster than the take-up - to the point where makers are questioning what their strategy in the second half of 2022 will be.
I suppose we could build a nice, comforting mountain of out-of-date vaccine doses. That should make someone feel nice.
Well by "strong sense" I meant "certain knowledge" but I'm feeling a bit shy today.
As for your last sentence I'm afraid that's Reactionary Reductive speak - I'll file along with things like "if you worry about the global poor so much why don't you go and be a missionary in Africa?" Or of course the iconic "if you're so keen on a wealth tax what's stopping you sending a cheque to hmrc?"
O/T - There have been a couple of articles about risks in 2022. None particularly great and worth linking. However they often point to similar themes - Inflation, Putin, Chinese aggression, Chinese collapse. My top two worries would be Putin and inflation.
With Putin nothing is likely to happen until the spring - insane to fight in winter. I don't think it's at all likely that anything will happen anyway.
Inflation - I know monetarism apparently conquered inflation, but the evidence since has been really unconvincing. I really don't think economists (or anyone else) understand economics, and inflation really can be bad in so many ways.
Would others here have similar worries and thoughts?
The collapse in share of economic wealth for small businesses and the transfer of that share to larger corporations.
The restrictions have been catastrophic for many small business owners while bigger companies have been able to ride out the storm due to easier access to cash facilities, better Govt support schemes etc. I am struggling to think of one major corporation (ex-China, which is different) which has gone bankrupt during the pandemic.
To be fair, that's true in every major downturn. The number of FTSE100/250, Russell 2000 companies that goes bankrupt is miniscule even in the deepest of recessions.
This VAT on fuel business is going to dog Boris I fear.
Given the scale of the price increases that are coming - we simply wouldn't notice if VAT was removed. Hey prices have risen only 45% rather than 50%.
The question the Government has to answer is how do they introduce stability into the consumer market while keeping price increases at manageable levels. 1 small local restaurant told me their gas costs have gone from £150 to £1600 a month
Sky reporting from the US saying things are not looking good for Andrew
Camilla Long in the Sunday Times was asking why all the other famous men have (apparently) gotten away with things whilst Prince Andrew is caught in the spotlights.
To me, it seems fairly obvious. Because Andrew is a very useful dead cat to throw on the table. There is enough there to occupy people ("He's the Queen's son!") but not so significant that his trial and conviction would lead to a serious undermining of powerful interests (yes, the Royal Family would get hit but it wouldn't cause its collapse).
Indeed, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Trump etc all met Epstein and Maxwell as did plenty of other wealthy and famous people. Some also went to his island but apparently only Prince Andrew ie a non American foreigner, is to face an action from the US legal system
Andrew faces a civil lawsuit from a particular woman who alleges that he slept with her when she was a minor. I would assume that were she to have similar allegations to make against anyone else where she thought there was a chance of meeting the required standard of proof, she would do so. It doesn't strike me as anything akin to an organised conspiracy against a non-American. What does strike me as odd is that in a case about allegations of powerful men abusing their positions of power, the only person in jail so far is a woman.
Funnily enough, that last bit is precisely how Maxwell's lawyer began their summing up. Something about women always getting the blame for the actions of men.
The amusing thing about identity politics is that occasionally you end up going into bat for some right scumbags, which is precisely what you just did.
Hardly. I'm very happy to see Maxwell in jail, I just think it's odd that nobody else is. Her lawyer has a point but it doesn't strike me as a valid defence.
Sky reporting from the US saying things are not looking good for Andrew
Camilla Long in the Sunday Times was asking why all the other famous men have (apparently) gotten away with things whilst Prince Andrew is caught in the spotlights.
To me, it seems fairly obvious. Because Andrew is a very useful dead cat to throw on the table. There is enough there to occupy people ("He's the Queen's son!") but not so significant that his trial and conviction would lead to a serious undermining of powerful interests (yes, the Royal Family would get hit but it wouldn't cause its collapse).
Indeed, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Trump etc all met Epstein and Maxwell as did plenty of other wealthy and famous people. Some also went to his island but apparently only Prince Andrew ie a non American foreigner, is to face an action from the US legal system
Andrew faces a civil lawsuit from a particular woman who alleges that he slept with her when she was a minor. I would assume that were she to have similar allegations to make against anyone else where she thought there was a chance of meeting the required standard of proof, she would do so. It doesn't strike me as anything akin to an organised conspiracy against a non-American. What does strike me as odd is that in a case about allegations of powerful men abusing their positions of power, the only person in jail so far is a woman.
Funnily enough, that last bit is precisely how Maxwell's lawyer began their summing up. Something about women always getting the blame for the actions of men.
The amusing thing about identity politics is that occasionally you end up going into bat for some right scumbags, which is precisely what you just did.
Hardly. I'm very happy to see Maxwell in jail, I just think it's odd that nobody else is. Her lawyer has a point but it doesn't strike me as a valid defence.
Was Maxwell convicted of offences relating to anyone but Epstein?
Do you think Epstein was the only one sleeping with the girls that Maxwell helped to procure for him? That is not what Virginia Guiffre, for one, says. Hopefully the truth will be established via the courts.
Most shocking to me is that Prince Andrew's attorney wanted the judge to say NY's law giving child sexual abuse victims more time to sue is unconstitutional. This would have blocked access to justice for so many victims. Does the Queen know what her son is attempting to do? https://twitter.com/LisaBloom/status/1478400205179408384
Xian seems to be on everyone's lips but Delta or Omicron they were hard locking the place down ages (weeks?) ago. Because the city is hosting the Winter Olympics so "just in case" China is blitzing it to get Covid cases down because they don't want the global spotlight to show any pox there.
Can we draw any other lessons from it? Nope.
We can't draw any lessons, but we can ask questions
Why are they apparently using flamethrowers to disinfect neighborhoods and bus stops etc?
I find it hard to believe this "malfunctioning foam sprayer" argument. I'm not dismissing it, but how would that work?
Also:
1 We have never seen these malfunctions before
2 There are several videos showing this bizarre "malfunction"
3 And the men using the foam sprayers that instead squirt flame don't look at all surprised. They don't react or back away, and frankly if my foam sprayer suddenly started ejecting napalm I would be a little alarmed, and my body language would show that
Chris Whitty avoids the opportunity to call for the seizure of the commanding heights of the economy.
Have to admit, whenever that bloke appears on my telly, I change the channel.
I was actually streaming something on cable the other day and he popped up – was very hard to switch him off then so had to fish around for the fast forward button.
'We can’t vaccinate the planet every six months', says JCVI chief Fourth Covid jabs should not be offered until there is more evidence, the head of Britain's vaccine body has said - as he warned that giving boosters to people every six months was “not sustainable”.
6 monthly jabs may or may not be the right thing, but his remit is not "THE PLANET". It's the UK. Once again heading outside their remit.
Unless we vaccinate the planet - collectively - then we aren't immune from the next mutation.
That's another covid myth apparently: Myth #1,765 in a regular series...
We should share Covid vaccines with the world, because it is the right thing to do, but not because it will limit of emergence of 'variants' - vaccines don't generate variants but they don't preclude their emergence either - it's all a bit unclear and complicated.
Not just people either, Covid is a general mammalian phenomenon
Nevertheless a world with Covid raging is more likely to throw up things which come and fuck us up than a world with Covid under control. And the quicker we vaccinate the world the quicker we get from that first situation to the second. It's as much a practical imperative as a moral one.
No it isn't necessarily a practical or moral one and probably not a scientific one either. All governments have their first responsibility to their own population. IMHO, the first priority of Western governments is to figure out how to defeat or contain the virus. The strategies that they use will then inform them how they support other governments to do the same.
The virus respects no borders. It's a global pandemic and the best response to it is global. The more inefficient and illogical is the vaccine rollout - eg 5 or 6 jabs in one country and zero in another - the longer the pandemic will last, and the longer it lasts the more the damage will be and the more likely it is that we will be impacted.
The question then is this - to what extent should the normal rules of national centric politics - which you outline - be flexed in order to facilitate the optimum globally efficient solution?
I say the answer to this is "to a very great extent" and I think this is the correct answer. After all, this is a once-a-century emergency with an awful lot at stake. If we can't get our (global) act together for this, at least better than we are atm, when will we ever be able to?
So I am going to ask a question. I don't claim it is a fair question or perhaps even valid but it is the question that any politician has to be able to answer if they wish to accept your view.
How many people should we allow to die in this country, who could otherwise be saved, so that we can save lives of people in Africa, India, Russia or Poland?
As I say I am not saying it is a fair question but it is the question that cannot be dodged by politicians choosing to follow the route of putting global well being ahead of national well being.
And I know the obvious answer to you and probably to me is that in the long term we might actually save more lives here. But that is not certain and you are asking people to accept deaths now for fewer deaths tomorrow. That is a hard, if not impossible, sell for any politician.
I'll avoid the obvious answer and instead acknowledge what you say - that it's hard for any national government not to be driven entirely by high viz short term national interest, eg (for here) what booster strategy gets us out of all restrictions asap this year, end of story.
So, in practice, I guess the best we can hope for is that the global case is pushed by the likes of the WHO and various leading scientists and that it gets at least some traction with decision makers. Ie I feel the dead opposite to those who see that case being made by such people and respond "They should shut up. Not in their brief". I think the more noise is made about this the better.
Imagine we reach end of 2023 and Covid is conquered (for now) in the developed world but still raging most everywhere else. That, given the early brilliance in developing vaccines and treatments, would be such a shame - and furthermore a depressing sign that for all our tech and intelligence and progress we can't meet the big challenges.
The issue is -
- The supply of vaccines is no longer the issue. We are looking at 24 billion doses manufactured by the middle of this year. There are about 8 Billion people on the planet. - So Harry Hair Shirting about not "hoarding" vaccinations doesn't actually make sense. Not doing boosters or vaccinating children in the UK will not materially effect vaccine availability world wide.
There's loads of issues. Affordable Supply + Logistics & Distribution + Population Demand = Vaccination Outcome. There are problems to fix with all the inputs there.
But my strong sense is that the assertion "the domestic vaccine strategy of rich countries and their interaction with the pharmaceutical giants has no impact on the vaccination outcome in the rest of the world" is a self-comforting falsehood.
Is that like a Spidey Sense?
The fact remains that vaccines are now being made faster than the take-up - to the point where makers are questioning what their strategy in the second half of 2022 will be.
I suppose we could build a nice, comforting mountain of out-of-date vaccine doses. That should make someone feel nice.
Well by "strong sense" I meant "certain knowledge" but I'm feeling a bit shy today.
As for your last sentence I'm afraid that's Reactionary Reductive speak - I'll file along with things like "if you worry about the global poor so much why don't you go and be a missionary in Africa?" Or of course the iconic "if you're so keen on a wealth tax what's stopping you sending a cheque to hmrc?"
It's a bulging file but there's room.
Sigh.
The point is that not doing boosters and child vaccinations in the UK will not, of itself, effect the actual number of people getting vaccinated in poor countries.
The supply bit of the equation is not the problem. The other bits are. So do the other bits.
It could well be that their annual outbreak of haemorraghic fever in that region is much worse than normal, and that the lockdown isn't primarily for covid - but that the same severe lockdown blueprint from last year is nevertheless now the regular modus operandi for the chinese government in any health emergency.
Sky reporting from the US saying things are not looking good for Andrew
Camilla Long in the Sunday Times was asking why all the other famous men have (apparently) gotten away with things whilst Prince Andrew is caught in the spotlights.
To me, it seems fairly obvious. Because Andrew is a very useful dead cat to throw on the table. There is enough there to occupy people ("He's the Queen's son!") but not so significant that his trial and conviction would lead to a serious undermining of powerful interests (yes, the Royal Family would get hit but it wouldn't cause its collapse).
Indeed, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Trump etc all met Epstein and Maxwell as did plenty of other wealthy and famous people. Some also went to his island but apparently only Prince Andrew ie a non American foreigner, is to face an action from the US legal system
Andrew faces a civil lawsuit from a particular woman who alleges that he slept with her when she was a minor. I would assume that were she to have similar allegations to make against anyone else where she thought there was a chance of meeting the required standard of proof, she would do so. It doesn't strike me as anything akin to an organised conspiracy against a non-American. What does strike me as odd is that in a case about allegations of powerful men abusing their positions of power, the only person in jail so far is a woman.
Funnily enough, that last bit is precisely how Maxwell's lawyer began their summing up. Something about women always getting the blame for the actions of men.
The amusing thing about identity politics is that occasionally you end up going into bat for some right scumbags, which is precisely what you just did.
Hardly. I'm very happy to see Maxwell in jail, I just think it's odd that nobody else is. Her lawyer has a point but it doesn't strike me as a valid defence.
Was Maxwell convicted of offences relating to anyone but Epstein?
Do you think Epstein was the only one sleeping with the girls that Maxwell helped to procure for him? That is not what Virginia Guiffre, for one, says. Hopefully the truth will be established via the courts.
I don't know. Fingers crossed Guiffre doesn't settle...
Xian seems to be on everyone's lips but Delta or Omicron they were hard locking the place down ages (weeks?) ago. Because the city is hosting the Winter Olympics so "just in case" China is blitzing it to get Covid cases down because they don't want the global spotlight to show any pox there.
Can we draw any other lessons from it? Nope.
Their response is a significant order of magnitude than any other restrictions they have imposed, they are even stricter than Wuhan. And its been going on for ages now and they sent 1000s of extra medics, built massive isolation units etc.
At some point it'd not surprise me if China just started dropping massive domes over entire cities in some sort of Stephen King style.
'We can’t vaccinate the planet every six months', says JCVI chief Fourth Covid jabs should not be offered until there is more evidence, the head of Britain's vaccine body has said - as he warned that giving boosters to people every six months was “not sustainable”.
6 monthly jabs may or may not be the right thing, but his remit is not "THE PLANET". It's the UK. Once again heading outside their remit.
Unless we vaccinate the planet - collectively - then we aren't immune from the next mutation.
That's another covid myth apparently: Myth #1,765 in a regular series...
We should share Covid vaccines with the world, because it is the right thing to do, but not because it will limit of emergence of 'variants' - vaccines don't generate variants but they don't preclude their emergence either - it's all a bit unclear and complicated.
Not just people either, Covid is a general mammalian phenomenon
Nevertheless a world with Covid raging is more likely to throw up things which come and fuck us up than a world with Covid under control. And the quicker we vaccinate the world the quicker we get from that first situation to the second. It's as much a practical imperative as a moral one.
No it isn't necessarily a practical or moral one and probably not a scientific one either. All governments have their first responsibility to their own population. IMHO, the first priority of Western governments is to figure out how to defeat or contain the virus. The strategies that they use will then inform them how they support other governments to do the same.
The virus respects no borders. It's a global pandemic and the best response to it is global. The more inefficient and illogical is the vaccine rollout - eg 5 or 6 jabs in one country and zero in another - the longer the pandemic will last, and the longer it lasts the more the damage will be and the more likely it is that we will be impacted.
The question then is this - to what extent should the normal rules of national centric politics - which you outline - be flexed in order to facilitate the optimum globally efficient solution?
I say the answer to this is "to a very great extent" and I think this is the correct answer. After all, this is a once-a-century emergency with an awful lot at stake. If we can't get our (global) act together for this, at least better than we are atm, when will we ever be able to?
So I am going to ask a question. I don't claim it is a fair question or perhaps even valid but it is the question that any politician has to be able to answer if they wish to accept your view.
How many people should we allow to die in this country, who could otherwise be saved, so that we can save lives of people in Africa, India, Russia or Poland?
As I say I am not saying it is a fair question but it is the question that cannot be dodged by politicians choosing to follow the route of putting global well being ahead of national well being.
And I know the obvious answer to you and probably to me is that in the long term we might actually save more lives here. But that is not certain and you are asking people to accept deaths now for fewer deaths tomorrow. That is a hard, if not impossible, sell for any politician.
I'll avoid the obvious answer and instead acknowledge what you say - that it's hard for any national government not to be driven entirely by high viz short term national interest, eg (for here) what booster strategy gets us out of all restrictions asap this year, end of story.
So, in practice, I guess the best we can hope for is that the global case is pushed by the likes of the WHO and various leading scientists and that it gets at least some traction with decision makers. Ie I feel the dead opposite to those who see that case being made by such people and respond "They should shut up. Not in their brief". I think the more noise is made about this the better.
Imagine we reach end of 2023 and Covid is conquered (for now) in the developed world but still raging most everywhere else. That, given the early brilliance in developing vaccines and treatments, would be such a shame - and furthermore a depressing sign that for all our tech and intelligence and progress we can't meet the big challenges.
The issue is -
- The supply of vaccines is no longer the issue. We are looking at 24 billion doses manufactured by the middle of this year. There are about 8 Billion people on the planet. - So Harry Hair Shirting about not "hoarding" vaccinations doesn't actually make sense. Not doing boosters or vaccinating children in the UK will not materially effect vaccine availability world wide.
There's loads of issues. Affordable Supply + Logistics & Distribution + Population Demand = Vaccination Outcome. There are problems to fix with all the inputs there.
But my strong sense is that the assertion "the domestic vaccine strategy of rich countries and their interaction with the pharmaceutical giants has no impact on the vaccination outcome in the rest of the world" is a self-comforting falsehood.
Sorry but it isn't. What you appear to be advocating is that we reduce our booster campaign even though that will not make any further supply available elsewhere. That is like saying: "there are children starving in the world. Until we can feed them we should starve ours too!"
I'm actually not arguing that we shouldn't complete this booster round. We should. Also continue to make inroads into our vaccine refusers. I was talking about the priorities from now on. Let's not be myopic with those.
Sky reporting from the US saying things are not looking good for Andrew
Camilla Long in the Sunday Times was asking why all the other famous men have (apparently) gotten away with things whilst Prince Andrew is caught in the spotlights.
To me, it seems fairly obvious. Because Andrew is a very useful dead cat to throw on the table. There is enough there to occupy people ("He's the Queen's son!") but not so significant that his trial and conviction would lead to a serious undermining of powerful interests (yes, the Royal Family would get hit but it wouldn't cause its collapse).
Indeed, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Trump etc all met Epstein and Maxwell as did plenty of other wealthy and famous people. Some also went to his island but apparently only Prince Andrew ie a non American foreigner, is to face an action from the US legal system
Andrew faces a civil lawsuit from a particular woman who alleges that he slept with her when she was a minor. I would assume that were she to have similar allegations to make against anyone else where she thought there was a chance of meeting the required standard of proof, she would do so. It doesn't strike me as anything akin to an organised conspiracy against a non-American. What does strike me as odd is that in a case about allegations of powerful men abusing their positions of power, the only person in jail so far is a woman.
Funnily enough, that last bit is precisely how Maxwell's lawyer began their summing up. Something about women always getting the blame for the actions of men.
The amusing thing about identity politics is that occasionally you end up going into bat for some right scumbags, which is precisely what you just did.
Hardly. I'm very happy to see Maxwell in jail, I just think it's odd that nobody else is. Her lawyer has a point but it doesn't strike me as a valid defence.
Was Maxwell convicted of offences relating to anyone but Epstein?
Do you think Epstein was the only one sleeping with the girls that Maxwell helped to procure for him? That is not what Virginia Guiffre, for one, says. Hopefully the truth will be established via the courts.
Maxwell still has the opportunity to give evidence against any such individuals, and I hope she does. It would mean admitting her guilt and full disclosure, of course, since the SDNY prosecutors do not do deals easily.
Boris looking somewhat better. Bit of a haircut. Not as exhausted. Doesn't look 90
Christmas break?
LOL. without the hair he looks like a Lancashire Ogre.
The first huge style mistake of 2022.
An important hair and beauty update.
Do we have the latest on Angela's locks as yet?
(Happy New Year, by the way)
Happy New Year. Latest on Angela is a tale of hope. BBC London reporter Caroline Davies tried a multi story car crash style a bit back, but now has the most beautiful lob, the best hair on television. It might just be an unfortunate stop on a necessary journey.
'We can’t vaccinate the planet every six months', says JCVI chief Fourth Covid jabs should not be offered until there is more evidence, the head of Britain's vaccine body has said - as he warned that giving boosters to people every six months was “not sustainable”.
6 monthly jabs may or may not be the right thing, but his remit is not "THE PLANET". It's the UK. Once again heading outside their remit.
Unless we vaccinate the planet - collectively - then we aren't immune from the next mutation.
That's another covid myth apparently: Myth #1,765 in a regular series...
We should share Covid vaccines with the world, because it is the right thing to do, but not because it will limit of emergence of 'variants' - vaccines don't generate variants but they don't preclude their emergence either - it's all a bit unclear and complicated.
Not just people either, Covid is a general mammalian phenomenon
Nevertheless a world with Covid raging is more likely to throw up things which come and fuck us up than a world with Covid under control. And the quicker we vaccinate the world the quicker we get from that first situation to the second. It's as much a practical imperative as a moral one.
No it isn't necessarily a practical or moral one and probably not a scientific one either. All governments have their first responsibility to their own population. IMHO, the first priority of Western governments is to figure out how to defeat or contain the virus. The strategies that they use will then inform them how they support other governments to do the same.
The virus respects no borders. It's a global pandemic and the best response to it is global. The more inefficient and illogical is the vaccine rollout - eg 5 or 6 jabs in one country and zero in another - the longer the pandemic will last, and the longer it lasts the more the damage will be and the more likely it is that we will be impacted.
The question then is this - to what extent should the normal rules of national centric politics - which you outline - be flexed in order to facilitate the optimum globally efficient solution?
I say the answer to this is "to a very great extent" and I think this is the correct answer. After all, this is a once-a-century emergency with an awful lot at stake. If we can't get our (global) act together for this, at least better than we are atm, when will we ever be able to?
So I am going to ask a question. I don't claim it is a fair question or perhaps even valid but it is the question that any politician has to be able to answer if they wish to accept your view.
How many people should we allow to die in this country, who could otherwise be saved, so that we can save lives of people in Africa, India, Russia or Poland?
As I say I am not saying it is a fair question but it is the question that cannot be dodged by politicians choosing to follow the route of putting global well being ahead of national well being.
And I know the obvious answer to you and probably to me is that in the long term we might actually save more lives here. But that is not certain and you are asking people to accept deaths now for fewer deaths tomorrow. That is a hard, if not impossible, sell for any politician.
I'll avoid the obvious answer and instead acknowledge what you say - that it's hard for any national government not to be driven entirely by high viz short term national interest, eg (for here) what booster strategy gets us out of all restrictions asap this year, end of story.
So, in practice, I guess the best we can hope for is that the global case is pushed by the likes of the WHO and various leading scientists and that it gets at least some traction with decision makers. Ie I feel the dead opposite to those who see that case being made by such people and respond "They should shut up. Not in their brief". I think the more noise is made about this the better.
Imagine we reach end of 2023 and Covid is conquered (for now) in the developed world but still raging most everywhere else. That, given the early brilliance in developing vaccines and treatments, would be such a shame - and furthermore a depressing sign that for all our tech and intelligence and progress we can't meet the big challenges.
The issue is -
- The supply of vaccines is no longer the issue. We are looking at 24 billion doses manufactured by the middle of this year. There are about 8 Billion people on the planet. - So Harry Hair Shirting about not "hoarding" vaccinations doesn't actually make sense. Not doing boosters or vaccinating children in the UK will not materially effect vaccine availability world wide.
There's loads of issues. Affordable Supply + Logistics & Distribution + Population Demand = Vaccination Outcome. There are problems to fix with all the inputs there.
But my strong sense is that the assertion "the domestic vaccine strategy of rich countries and their interaction with the pharmaceutical giants has no impact on the vaccination outcome in the rest of the world" is a self-comforting falsehood.
Sorry but it isn't. What you appear to be advocating is that we reduce our booster campaign even though that will not make any further supply available elsewhere. That is like saying: "there are children starving in the world. Until we can feed them we should starve ours too!"
I'm actually not arguing that we shouldn't complete this booster round. We should. Also continue to make inroads into our vaccine refusers. I was talking about the priorities from now on. Let's not be myopic with those.
If the supply is not an issue, why not do another booster round, if it is required?
Boris looking somewhat better. Bit of a haircut. Not as exhausted. Doesn't look 90
Christmas break?
LOL. without the hair he looks like a Lancashire Ogre.
The first huge style mistake of 2022.
An important hair and beauty update.
Do we have the latest on Angela's locks as yet?
(Happy New Year, by the way)
Happy New Year. Latest on Angela is a tale of hope. BBC London reporter Caroline Davies tried a multi story car crash style a bit back, but now has the most beautiful lob, the best hair on television. It might just be an unfortunate stop on a necessary journey.
Glad to hear it. I have no idea what you are talking about but it certainly sounds very positive!!
Xian seems to be on everyone's lips but Delta or Omicron they were hard locking the place down ages (weeks?) ago. Because the city is hosting the Winter Olympics so "just in case" China is blitzing it to get Covid cases down because they don't want the global spotlight to show any pox there.
Can we draw any other lessons from it? Nope.
We can't draw any lessons, but we can ask questions
Why are they apparently using flamethrowers to disinfect neighborhoods and bus stops etc?
I find it hard to believe this "malfunctioning foam sprayer" argument. I'm not dismissing it, but how would that work?
Also:
1 We have never seen these malfunctions before
2 There are several videos showing this bizarre "malfunction"
3 And the men using the foam sprayers that instead squirt flame don't look at all surprised. They don't react or back away, and frankly if my foam sprayer suddenly started ejecting napalm I would be a little alarmed, and my body language would show that
Hmmmm
The thing that really gives you a clue something isn't quite right, the story keeps changings. Its a few VHF cases, its a few Delta cases, its the local officials to blame, no its senior officials etc and of course now widespread food shortages. That didn't even happen in Wuhan.
As i said previously, i reckon they have Omicron, with no natural immunity and vaccines don't work, the party are shitting it as there isn't much they can do beyond hope Viagra hard lockdown works.
Most shocking to me is that Prince Andrew's attorney wanted the judge to say NY's law giving child sexual abuse victims more time to sue is unconstitutional. This would have blocked access to justice for so many victims. Does the Queen know what her son is attempting to do? https://twitter.com/LisaBloom/status/1478400205179408384
A reminder, Brenda is paying for The Duke of York's legal bills.
I wonder how Keir Starmer, or someone like him with a sober prosecutorial style, would have done against Thatcher in that crucual election of 1983. Probably slightly better than Foot, I would imagine, but not as well as a Blair-type figure.
I'm surprised to say this about SKS, but that was terrible presentation-wise. Close your eyes, change the voice, and it could be Johnson. Lots of errms and vague waffle. It's neither a fireside chat with a friend, or passionate oratory.
Xian seems to be on everyone's lips but Delta or Omicron they were hard locking the place down ages (weeks?) ago. Because the city is hosting the Winter Olympics so "just in case" China is blitzing it to get Covid cases down because they don't want the global spotlight to show any pox there.
Can we draw any other lessons from it? Nope.
We can't draw any lessons, but we can ask questions
Why are they apparently using flamethrowers to disinfect neighborhoods and bus stops etc?
I find it hard to believe this "malfunctioning foam sprayer" argument. I'm not dismissing it, but how would that work?
Also:
1 We have never seen these malfunctions before
2 There are several videos showing this bizarre "malfunction"
3 And the men using the foam sprayers that instead squirt flame don't look at all surprised. They don't react or back away, and frankly if my foam sprayer suddenly started ejecting napalm I would be a little alarmed, and my body language would show that
Hmmmm
The thing that really gives you a clue something isn't quite right, the story keeps changings. Its a few VHF cases, its a few Delta cases, ...and of course now widespread food shortages. That didn't even happen in Wuhan.
I know 98% of people will reflexively mistrust and reject this source, and fair enough, but this is worth watching - partly because NO ONE ELSE is really reporting on Xian, so we are reduced to Steve Bannon
He gets to Xi'an from about 3 minutes (tho the riots in Holland are also pretty compelling viewing in a bad way)
I wonder how Keir Starmer, or someone like him with a sober prosecutorial style, would have done against Thatcher in that crucual election of 1983. Probably slightly better than Foot, I would imagine, but not as well as a Blair-type figure.
I'm surprised to say this about SKS, but that was terrible presentation-wise. Close your eyes, change the voice, and it could be Johnson. Lots of errms and vague waffle. It's neither a fireside chat with a friend, or passionate oratory.
Sky reporting from the US saying things are not looking good for Andrew
Royal family need to pay careful attention to the parable of Owen Paterson and North Shropshire when thinking about how to respond to whatever the judgment is.
It's hardly surprising as the New York act that allowed cases to be opened was designed to deal with time barred and similar cases.
And the fact that Prince Andrew was so desperate for the legal agreement to protect him shows how utterly guilty he is.
Does it?
"You don't want to be dragged through a court in one of the most questionable legal systems in the world, therefore you must be guilty."
'We can’t vaccinate the planet every six months', says JCVI chief Fourth Covid jabs should not be offered until there is more evidence, the head of Britain's vaccine body has said - as he warned that giving boosters to people every six months was “not sustainable”.
6 monthly jabs may or may not be the right thing, but his remit is not "THE PLANET". It's the UK. Once again heading outside their remit.
Unless we vaccinate the planet - collectively - then we aren't immune from the next mutation.
That's another covid myth apparently: Myth #1,765 in a regular series...
We should share Covid vaccines with the world, because it is the right thing to do, but not because it will limit of emergence of 'variants' - vaccines don't generate variants but they don't preclude their emergence either - it's all a bit unclear and complicated.
Not just people either, Covid is a general mammalian phenomenon
Nevertheless a world with Covid raging is more likely to throw up things which come and fuck us up than a world with Covid under control. And the quicker we vaccinate the world the quicker we get from that first situation to the second. It's as much a practical imperative as a moral one.
No it isn't necessarily a practical or moral one and probably not a scientific one either. All governments have their first responsibility to their own population. IMHO, the first priority of Western governments is to figure out how to defeat or contain the virus. The strategies that they use will then inform them how they support other governments to do the same.
The virus respects no borders. It's a global pandemic and the best response to it is global. The more inefficient and illogical is the vaccine rollout - eg 5 or 6 jabs in one country and zero in another - the longer the pandemic will last, and the longer it lasts the more the damage will be and the more likely it is that we will be impacted.
The question then is this - to what extent should the normal rules of national centric politics - which you outline - be flexed in order to facilitate the optimum globally efficient solution?
I say the answer to this is "to a very great extent" and I think this is the correct answer. After all, this is a once-a-century emergency with an awful lot at stake. If we can't get our (global) act together for this, at least better than we are atm, when will we ever be able to?
So I am going to ask a question. I don't claim it is a fair question or perhaps even valid but it is the question that any politician has to be able to answer if they wish to accept your view.
How many people should we allow to die in this country, who could otherwise be saved, so that we can save lives of people in Africa, India, Russia or Poland?
As I say I am not saying it is a fair question but it is the question that cannot be dodged by politicians choosing to follow the route of putting global well being ahead of national well being.
And I know the obvious answer to you and probably to me is that in the long term we might actually save more lives here. But that is not certain and you are asking people to accept deaths now for fewer deaths tomorrow. That is a hard, if not impossible, sell for any politician.
I'll avoid the obvious answer and instead acknowledge what you say - that it's hard for any national government not to be driven entirely by high viz short term national interest, eg (for here) what booster strategy gets us out of all restrictions asap this year, end of story.
So, in practice, I guess the best we can hope for is that the global case is pushed by the likes of the WHO and various leading scientists and that it gets at least some traction with decision makers. Ie I feel the dead opposite to those who see that case being made by such people and respond "They should shut up. Not in their brief". I think the more noise is made about this the better.
Imagine we reach end of 2023 and Covid is conquered (for now) in the developed world but still raging most everywhere else. That, given the early brilliance in developing vaccines and treatments, would be such a shame - and furthermore a depressing sign that for all our tech and intelligence and progress we can't meet the big challenges.
The issue is -
- The supply of vaccines is no longer the issue. We are looking at 24 billion doses manufactured by the middle of this year. There are about 8 Billion people on the planet. - So Harry Hair Shirting about not "hoarding" vaccinations doesn't actually make sense. Not doing boosters or vaccinating children in the UK will not materially effect vaccine availability world wide.
There's loads of issues. Affordable Supply + Logistics & Distribution + Population Demand = Vaccination Outcome. There are problems to fix with all the inputs there.
But my strong sense is that the assertion "the domestic vaccine strategy of rich countries and their interaction with the pharmaceutical giants has no impact on the vaccination outcome in the rest of the world" is a self-comforting falsehood.
Sorry but it isn't. What you appear to be advocating is that we reduce our booster campaign even though that will not make any further supply available elsewhere. That is like saying: "there are children starving in the world. Until we can feed them we should starve ours too!"
I'm actually not arguing that we shouldn't complete this booster round. We should. Also continue to make inroads into our vaccine refusers. I was talking about the priorities from now on. Let's not be myopic with those.
Let's take a step back
Affordable Supply + Logistics & Distribution + Population Demand = Vaccination Outcome
Now
Supply and price isn't a problem - it's coming from Indian in insane amounts.
Logistics & Distribution is an age old third world problem not easily fixed.
Population Demand - is another age old third world problem not easily fixed when China has spent a year selling their vaccine by discrediting the Western ones.
So the problem we have left are the impossible to fix ones otherwise Africa wouldn't have half the issues it has.
Xian seems to be on everyone's lips but Delta or Omicron they were hard locking the place down ages (weeks?) ago. Because the city is hosting the Winter Olympics so "just in case" China is blitzing it to get Covid cases down because they don't want the global spotlight to show any pox there.
Can we draw any other lessons from it? Nope.
We can't draw any lessons, but we can ask questions
Why are they apparently using flamethrowers to disinfect neighborhoods and bus stops etc?
I find it hard to believe this "malfunctioning foam sprayer" argument. I'm not dismissing it, but how would that work?
Also:
1 We have never seen these malfunctions before
2 There are several videos showing this bizarre "malfunction"
3 And the men using the foam sprayers that instead squirt flame don't look at all surprised. They don't react or back away, and frankly if my foam sprayer suddenly started ejecting napalm I would be a little alarmed, and my body language would show that
Hmmmm
Is this the year China finally loses its mojo? Certainly seems to have been giving an impression somewhat short of invincibility in the last few months. We have Evergrande to come too.
Usually when major powers stumble like this it's the prelude for a bit of "military therapy". Let's hope not.
I wonder how Keir Starmer, or someone like him with a sober prosecutorial style, would have done against Thatcher in that crucual election of 1983. Probably slightly better than Foot, I would imagine, but not as well as a Blair-type figure.
Would there have been an SDP in such circumstances.
Unlikely
Every time Labour (a Democratic Socialist Party) have a Democratic Socialist as leader, the Centrists leave
SDP/Change UK then soon realize there is no way to success as a Centrist Party unless its Labour and give up
This article is just clickbait. If we are to give honours to known war criminals should we also give honours to known drug dealers, money launderers etc?
Xian seems to be on everyone's lips but Delta or Omicron they were hard locking the place down ages (weeks?) ago. Because the city is hosting the Winter Olympics so "just in case" China is blitzing it to get Covid cases down because they don't want the global spotlight to show any pox there.
Can we draw any other lessons from it? Nope.
Their response is a significant order of magnitude than any other restrictions they have imposed, they are even stricter than Wuhan. And its been going on for ages now and they sent 1000s of extra medics, built massive isolation units etc.
At some point it'd not surprise me if China just started dropping massive domes over entire cities in some sort of Stephen King style.
Pull out and nuke the planet from orbit. It is the only way to be sure.
Xian seems to be on everyone's lips but Delta or Omicron they were hard locking the place down ages (weeks?) ago. Because the city is hosting the Winter Olympics so "just in case" China is blitzing it to get Covid cases down because they don't want the global spotlight to show any pox there.
Can we draw any other lessons from it? Nope.
Their response is a significant order of magnitude than any other restrictions they have imposed, they are even stricter than Wuhan. And its been going on for ages now and they sent 1000s of extra medics, built massive isolation units etc.
On topic, I would just like to say that I didn't vote for Tony Blair, would never have voted for Tony Blair, can't and couldn't stand the sight of him, opposed most of what he did as Prime Minster, including opposing the Iraq war at the time and thinking it was ridiculous that anyone believed the nonsense justification he provided for it. Yet, I am also absolutely horrified that six hundred thousand people in this country, apparently in all seriousness, believe he shouldn't receive a knighthood.
Boris looking somewhat better. Bit of a haircut. Not as exhausted. Doesn't look 90
Christmas break?
LOL. without the hair he looks like a Lancashire Ogre.
The first huge style mistake of 2022.
Strange my wife noticed it yesterday, with his new tie and suit, and was quite complimentary
But his long clumps of remaining hair was hiding what he really looks like. Though admittedly he was hurtling to the point of still having hair was making him look ridiculous.
But he is going to look more and more ogre than sexy baldy. Not that is a reason to get rid of him. The fact he has more hair than economic plan is reason to get rid.
I wonder how Keir Starmer, or someone like him with a sober prosecutorial style, would have done against Thatcher in that crucual election of 1983. Probably slightly better than Foot, I would imagine, but not as well as a Blair-type figure.
Would there have been an SDP in such circumstances.
Unlikely
Every time Labour (a Democratic Socialist Party) have a Democratic Socialist as leader, the Centrists leave
SDP/Change UK then soon realize there is no way to success as a Centrist Party unless its Labour and give up
I have to say I do think the country would have been far better for an SDP win in 1983, with both Foot and Thatcher humliated. So much less polarisation, and probably a much more consensual future along more Continental lines.
Xian seems to be on everyone's lips but Delta or Omicron they were hard locking the place down ages (weeks?) ago. Because the city is hosting the Winter Olympics so "just in case" China is blitzing it to get Covid cases down because they don't want the global spotlight to show any pox there.
Can we draw any other lessons from it? Nope.
We can't draw any lessons, but we can ask questions
Why are they apparently using flamethrowers to disinfect neighborhoods and bus stops etc?
I find it hard to believe this "malfunctioning foam sprayer" argument. I'm not dismissing it, but how would that work?
Also:
1 We have never seen these malfunctions before
2 There are several videos showing this bizarre "malfunction"
3 And the men using the foam sprayers that instead squirt flame don't look at all surprised. They don't react or back away, and frankly if my foam sprayer suddenly started ejecting napalm I would be a little alarmed, and my body language would show that
Hmmmm
The thing that really gives you a clue something isn't quite right, the story keeps changings. Its a few VHF cases, its a few Delta cases, ...and of course now widespread food shortages. That didn't even happen in Wuhan.
I know 98% of people will reflexively mistrust and reject this source, and fair enough, but this is worth watching - partly because NO ONE ELSE is really reporting on Xian, so we are reduced to Steve Bannon
He gets to Xi'an from about 3 minutes (tho the riots in Holland are also pretty compelling viewing in a bad way)
What is undeniably true - too many videos to fake - is that the CCP is decamping THOUSANDS of people out of the city in the middle of the night
I expect the "new emerging variant" is probably just Omicron. The authorities have prided themselves on virtually zero cases for months, ad have locked down hard whenever there was an outbreak. If Omicron is proving very difficult to stop then they're going to keep trying harder, because there is no need for population consent.
It seems very unlikely China would be the source of a new immune-escaping variant anyway given the population is quite immune naive so still susceptible to Delta as well as Omicron.
This article is just clickbait. If we are to give honours to known war criminals should we also give honours to known drug dealers, money launderers etc?
Well, we did a lot of that in the last few centuries. Slavers and people traffickers too...
Xian seems to be on everyone's lips but Delta or Omicron they were hard locking the place down ages (weeks?) ago. Because the city is hosting the Winter Olympics so "just in case" China is blitzing it to get Covid cases down because they don't want the global spotlight to show any pox there.
Can we draw any other lessons from it? Nope.
We can't draw any lessons, but we can ask questions
Why are they apparently using flamethrowers to disinfect neighborhoods and bus stops etc?
I find it hard to believe this "malfunctioning foam sprayer" argument. I'm not dismissing it, but how would that work?
Also:
1 We have never seen these malfunctions before
2 There are several videos showing this bizarre "malfunction"
3 And the men using the foam sprayers that instead squirt flame don't look at all surprised. They don't react or back away, and frankly if my foam sprayer suddenly started ejecting napalm I would be a little alarmed, and my body language would show that
Hmmmm
The thing that really gives you a clue something isn't quite right, the story keeps changings. Its a few VHF cases, its a few Delta cases, ...and of course now widespread food shortages. That didn't even happen in Wuhan.
I know 98% of people will reflexively mistrust and reject this source, and fair enough, but this is worth watching - partly because NO ONE ELSE is really reporting on Xian, so we are reduced to Steve Bannon
He gets to Xi'an from about 3 minutes (tho the riots in Holland are also pretty compelling viewing in a bad way)
What is undeniably true - too many videos to fake - is that the CCP is decamping THOUSANDS of people out of the city in the middle of the night
If Steve Bannon released a video claiming that water was wet, the sky tends to blue and the Pope is Catholic, the sensible response would be to demand at least 100 peer reviewed scientific papers on each subject.
Because he is a liar. A malicious, racist, fuckwit liar. On nearly every subject he touches.
Most shocking to me is that Prince Andrew's attorney wanted the judge to say NY's law giving child sexual abuse victims more time to sue is unconstitutional. This would have blocked access to justice for so many victims. Does the Queen know what her son is attempting to do? https://twitter.com/LisaBloom/status/1478400205179408384
A reminder, Brenda is paying for The Duke of York's legal bills.
The Queen must be beyond question though, and when she sticks Andrew in the Tower it'll be fine with me.
Sky reporting from the US saying things are not looking good for Andrew
Camilla Long in the Sunday Times was asking why all the other famous men have (apparently) gotten away with things whilst Prince Andrew is caught in the spotlights.
To me, it seems fairly obvious. Because Andrew is a very useful dead cat to throw on the table. There is enough there to occupy people ("He's the Queen's son!") but not so significant that his trial and conviction would lead to a serious undermining of powerful interests (yes, the Royal Family would get hit but it wouldn't cause its collapse).
Indeed, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Trump etc all met Epstein and Maxwell as did plenty of other wealthy and famous people. Some also went to his island but apparently only Prince Andrew ie a non American foreigner, is to face an action from the US legal system
Andrew faces a civil lawsuit from a particular woman who alleges that he slept with her when she was a minor. I would assume that were she to have similar allegations to make against anyone else where she thought there was a chance of meeting the required standard of proof, she would do so. It doesn't strike me as anything akin to an organised conspiracy against a non-American. What does strike me as odd is that in a case about allegations of powerful men abusing their positions of power, the only person in jail so far is a woman.
To be fair, a man was in jail too for a while, before mysteriously committing suicide.
Xian seems to be on everyone's lips but Delta or Omicron they were hard locking the place down ages (weeks?) ago. Because the city is hosting the Winter Olympics so "just in case" China is blitzing it to get Covid cases down because they don't want the global spotlight to show any pox there.
Can we draw any other lessons from it? Nope.
We can't draw any lessons, but we can ask questions
Why are they apparently using flamethrowers to disinfect neighborhoods and bus stops etc?
I find it hard to believe this "malfunctioning foam sprayer" argument. I'm not dismissing it, but how would that work?
Also:
1 We have never seen these malfunctions before
2 There are several videos showing this bizarre "malfunction"
3 And the men using the foam sprayers that instead squirt flame don't look at all surprised. They don't react or back away, and frankly if my foam sprayer suddenly started ejecting napalm I would be a little alarmed, and my body language would show that
Hmmmm
The thing that really gives you a clue something isn't quite right, the story keeps changings. Its a few VHF cases, its a few Delta cases, its the local officials to blame, no its senior officials etc and of course now widespread food shortages. That didn't even happen in Wuhan.
As i said previously, i reckon they have Omicron, with no natural immunity and vaccines don't work, the party are shitting it as there isn't much they can do beyond hope Viagra hard lockdown works.
Yes, that's still my supposition. Tho there is also the chance that
1. They have a coincidental outbreak of VHF or whatever
2. They have a pretty fucking horrible new variant
Something is definitely up
Incidentally, on the veracity of the videos, out of curiosity I spent an hour or two the other day looking at the first videos that came out of Wuhan (you can still find them easily on Twitter)
Some of the most famous ones - bat-eating woman - moped filming bodies in the street - turn out to be fake. The bat was eaten in Indonesia, the bodies were actually rough sleepers in Shenzen
Yet sone of the most notorious ones - corpses piled high in hospitals, body bags filling up trucks, convulsing patients dying in chaos - turn out to be real. For a start, they have been repeated many times outside China. From Ecuador to Iran to Lombardy
And many of these horrific early videos were dismissed as fakes at the time
I wonder how Keir Starmer, or someone like him with a sober prosecutorial style, would have done against Thatcher in that crucual election of 1983. Probably slightly better than Foot, I would imagine, but not as well as a Blair-type figure.
Would there have been an SDP in such circumstances.
Unlikely
Every time Labour (a Democratic Socialist Party) have a Democratic Socialist as leader, the Centrists leave
SDP/Change UK then soon realize there is no way to success as a Centrist Party unless its Labour and give up
I have to say I do think the country would have been far better for an SDP win in 1983, with both Foot and Thatcher humliated. So much less polarisation, and probably a much more consensual future closer to Continental lines.
The Falklands put a stop to all that, ofcourse.
The polling data from the period says no. 1983 without the Falklands would have been a smaller, but still substantial majority for the Conservatives.
I wonder how Keir Starmer, or someone like him with a sober prosecutorial style, would have done against Thatcher in that crucual election of 1983. Probably slightly better than Foot, I would imagine, but not as well as a Blair-type figure.
Would there have been an SDP in such circumstances.
Unlikely
Every time Labour (a Democratic Socialist Party) have a Democratic Socialist as leader, the Centrists leave
SDP/Change UK then soon realize there is no way to success as a Centrist Party unless its Labour and give up
I have to say I do think the country would have been far better for an SDP win in 1983, with both Foot and Thatcher humliated. So much less polarisation, and probably a much more consensual future closer to Continental lines.
The Falklands put a stop to all that, ofcourse.
The polling data from the period says no. 1983 without the Falklands would have been a smaller, but still substantial majority for the Conservatives.
Thatcher was in quite bad trouble from the Wets in Winter 1981-2, IIRC from pretty young politics-watching, and was somewhere around -10 at the beginning of the year. There was that slight improvement around the beginning of the year for her, but I think the Falklands changed the entire narrative of her leadership. Suddenly the spirit of confrontation was deemed to be a good thing, which was a complete turnaround of perspective, and the Wets and the SDP with their coalition-building were humbled.
Apparently it is only Remainers who want to abolish the 5% VAT on energy bills.
It’s his own party! I asked Big G and HY down thread what the government policy on it is and now we know.
Conservatives are party of Flat Taxes on fuel.
Hold on. Is this a COVID national address or Boris talking policy to his own party National Address? 🤔
Boris is worse than no-Boris. The Tories lost the next GE with Paterson. I think these things are obvious.
I couldn’t disagree with you more. Swap Boris for Sunak now, 12 months of sane timely response to the economic crisis, and Tories can still win from Spring 2023.
UK will fare worst this financial disaster year than peers because of Brexit, and Boris public response to this will keep the Tories out of power for a generation. Boris is now a danger to the publics trust in Brexit.
Is Boris gonna lock us down again, in some form or other, at 5pm?
Quick vote?
My vote is No, he won't. But I'm worried
I think No. I hope No. I am not 100% convinced though. I think he might crumble.
Johnson is no doubt getting a load of pressure from medical professionals on one side and from Tory MPs on the other. Only one of those groups can remove him this week.
I vote No. He would be deposed within 48 hours I think if he announces lockdown tonight. The data just isn't there and the backbench have run out of patience with SAGE and modelling anyway.
I vote No. He would be deposed within 48 hours I think if he announces lockdown tonight. The data just isn't there and the backbench and the public have run out of patience with SAGE and modelling anyway.
FTFY.
Yes, even with the incidentals it doesn't look like we'll reach anything like 3,000 hospitalisations per day which was the best case scenario for Omicron (not including incidentals).
Care to bet on that? I'm pretty confident we will exceed 3k hospitalizations per day as per coronavirus.data.gov £25 - winnings to pb.com?
Precise terms -> according to coronavirus.data.gov.uk, the UK will exceed 3k hospitalizations per day for at least one day before end of March.
I think Max PB was talking about England Hospitalisation.
Then staying under 3,000 sounds quite possible to me.
If you where prepared to limit it to England, use 7 day average and end date of End Of Feb, then I would take that £25 bet (donation to PB)
How about just England as you suggest -> but just a single day over 3,000 hospital admissions? I feel like that's very fair given the original claim. Happy to have end Feb as the date as you suggest.
With the situation in Xian I get the feeling it's either something genuinely scary going on or you are just seeing an autocratic, authoritarian state just doing its 'thing'.
Xian seems to be on everyone's lips but Delta or Omicron they were hard locking the place down ages (weeks?) ago. Because the city is hosting the Winter Olympics so "just in case" China is blitzing it to get Covid cases down because they don't want the global spotlight to show any pox there.
Can we draw any other lessons from it? Nope.
We can't draw any lessons, but we can ask questions
Why are they apparently using flamethrowers to disinfect neighborhoods and bus stops etc?
I find it hard to believe this "malfunctioning foam sprayer" argument. I'm not dismissing it, but how would that work?
Also:
1 We have never seen these malfunctions before
2 There are several videos showing this bizarre "malfunction"
3 And the men using the foam sprayers that instead squirt flame don't look at all surprised. They don't react or back away, and frankly if my foam sprayer suddenly started ejecting napalm I would be a little alarmed, and my body language would show that
Hmmmm
The thing that really gives you a clue something isn't quite right, the story keeps changings. Its a few VHF cases, its a few Delta cases, its the local officials to blame, no its senior officials etc and of course now widespread food shortages. That didn't even happen in Wuhan.
As i said previously, i reckon they have Omicron, with no natural immunity and vaccines don't work, the party are shitting it as there isn't much they can do beyond hope Viagra hard lockdown works.
Yes, that's still my supposition. Tho there is also the chance that
1. They have a coincidental outbreak of VHF or whatever
2. They have a pretty fucking horrible new variant
Something is definitely up
Incidentally, on the veracity of the videos, out of curiosity I spent an hour or two the other day looking at the first videos that came out of Wuhan (you can still find them easily on Twitter)
Some of the most famous ones - bat-eating woman - moped filming bodies in the street - turn out to be fake. The bat was eaten in Indonesia, the bodies were actually rough sleepers in Shenzen
Yet sone of the most notorious ones - corpses piled high in hospitals, body bags filling up trucks, convulsing patients dying in chaos - turn out to be real. For a start, they have been repeated many times outside China. From Ecuador to Iran to Lombardy
And many of these horrific early videos were dismissed as fakes at the time
There is a third option: they have omicron, and it is spreading. They have expended a heck of a lot of effort convincing their population that their response to Covid has been brilliant, and they don't want the story muddied - especially with the Olympics coming up. So they do what oppressive regimes do: overreact to show that they are doing things. WE ARE STRONG!
An interesting question is what the official state media (i.e. virtually all of it) is saying about the situation there.
Sky reporting from the US saying things are not looking good for Andrew
Camilla Long in the Sunday Times was asking why all the other famous men have (apparently) gotten away with things whilst Prince Andrew is caught in the spotlights.
To me, it seems fairly obvious. Because Andrew is a very useful dead cat to throw on the table. There is enough there to occupy people ("He's the Queen's son!") but not so significant that his trial and conviction would lead to a serious undermining of powerful interests (yes, the Royal Family would get hit but it wouldn't cause its collapse).
Indeed, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Trump etc all met Epstein and Maxwell as did plenty of other wealthy and famous people. Some also went to his island but apparently only Prince Andrew ie a non American foreigner, is to face an action from the US legal system
Andrew faces a civil lawsuit from a particular woman who alleges that he slept with her when she was a minor. I would assume that were she to have similar allegations to make against anyone else where she thought there was a chance of meeting the required standard of proof, she would do so. It doesn't strike me as anything akin to an organised conspiracy against a non-American. What does strike me as odd is that in a case about allegations of powerful men abusing their positions of power, the only person in jail so far is a woman.
Funnily enough, that last bit is precisely how Maxwell's lawyer began their summing up. Something about women always getting the blame for the actions of men.
The amusing thing about identity politics is that occasionally you end up going into bat for some right scumbags, which is precisely what you just did.
Hardly. I'm very happy to see Maxwell in jail, I just think it's odd that nobody else is. Her lawyer has a point but it doesn't strike me as a valid defence.
Was Maxwell convicted of offences relating to anyone but Epstein?
Do you think Epstein was the only one sleeping with the girls that Maxwell helped to procure for him? That is not what Virginia Guiffre, for one, says. Hopefully the truth will be established via the courts.
Procuring is a much bigger deal, legally if not morally, than making use of the procured goods. very easy for people to say they always loved jeff's parties, full of personable and approachable young ladies, and they are shocked, shocked I tell you, to learn about the background to their being there.
Xian seems to be on everyone's lips but Delta or Omicron they were hard locking the place down ages (weeks?) ago. Because the city is hosting the Winter Olympics so "just in case" China is blitzing it to get Covid cases down because they don't want the global spotlight to show any pox there.
Can we draw any other lessons from it? Nope.
We can't draw any lessons, but we can ask questions
Why are they apparently using flamethrowers to disinfect neighborhoods and bus stops etc?
I find it hard to believe this "malfunctioning foam sprayer" argument. I'm not dismissing it, but how would that work?
Also:
1 We have never seen these malfunctions before
2 There are several videos showing this bizarre "malfunction"
3 And the men using the foam sprayers that instead squirt flame don't look at all surprised. They don't react or back away, and frankly if my foam sprayer suddenly started ejecting napalm I would be a little alarmed, and my body language would show that
Hmmmm
The thing that really gives you a clue something isn't quite right, the story keeps changings. Its a few VHF cases, its a few Delta cases, its the local officials to blame, no its senior officials etc and of course now widespread food shortages. That didn't even happen in Wuhan.
As i said previously, i reckon they have Omicron, with no natural immunity and vaccines don't work, the party are shitting it as there isn't much they can do beyond hope Viagra hard lockdown works.
Yes, that's still my supposition. Tho there is also the chance that
1. They have a coincidental outbreak of VHF or whatever
2. They have a pretty fucking horrible new variant
Something is definitely up
Incidentally, on the veracity of the videos, out of curiosity I spent an hour or two the other day looking at the first videos that came out of Wuhan (you can still find them easily on Twitter)
Some of the most famous ones - bat-eating woman - moped filming bodies in the street - turn out to be fake. The bat was eaten in Indonesia, the bodies were actually rough sleepers in Shenzen
Yet sone of the most notorious ones - corpses piled high in hospitals, body bags filling up trucks, convulsing patients dying in chaos - turn out to be real. For a start, they have been repeated many times outside China. From Ecuador to Iran to Lombardy
And many of these horrific early videos were dismissed as fakes at the time
Well, you said yourself some of the most famous ones turned out to be fake
'We can’t vaccinate the planet every six months', says JCVI chief Fourth Covid jabs should not be offered until there is more evidence, the head of Britain's vaccine body has said - as he warned that giving boosters to people every six months was “not sustainable”.
6 monthly jabs may or may not be the right thing, but his remit is not "THE PLANET". It's the UK. Once again heading outside their remit.
Unless we vaccinate the planet - collectively - then we aren't immune from the next mutation.
That's another covid myth apparently: Myth #1,765 in a regular series...
We should share Covid vaccines with the world, because it is the right thing to do, but not because it will limit of emergence of 'variants' - vaccines don't generate variants but they don't preclude their emergence either - it's all a bit unclear and complicated.
Not just people either, Covid is a general mammalian phenomenon
Nevertheless a world with Covid raging is more likely to throw up things which come and fuck us up than a world with Covid under control. And the quicker we vaccinate the world the quicker we get from that first situation to the second. It's as much a practical imperative as a moral one.
No it isn't necessarily a practical or moral one and probably not a scientific one either. All governments have their first responsibility to their own population. IMHO, the first priority of Western governments is to figure out how to defeat or contain the virus. The strategies that they use will then inform them how they support other governments to do the same.
The virus respects no borders. It's a global pandemic and the best response to it is global. The more inefficient and illogical is the vaccine rollout - eg 5 or 6 jabs in one country and zero in another - the longer the pandemic will last, and the longer it lasts the more the damage will be and the more likely it is that we will be impacted.
The question then is this - to what extent should the normal rules of national centric politics - which you outline - be flexed in order to facilitate the optimum globally efficient solution?
I say the answer to this is "to a very great extent" and I think this is the correct answer. After all, this is a once-a-century emergency with an awful lot at stake. If we can't get our (global) act together for this, at least better than we are atm, when will we ever be able to?
So I am going to ask a question. I don't claim it is a fair question or perhaps even valid but it is the question that any politician has to be able to answer if they wish to accept your view.
How many people should we allow to die in this country, who could otherwise be saved, so that we can save lives of people in Africa, India, Russia or Poland?
As I say I am not saying it is a fair question but it is the question that cannot be dodged by politicians choosing to follow the route of putting global well being ahead of national well being.
And I know the obvious answer to you and probably to me is that in the long term we might actually save more lives here. But that is not certain and you are asking people to accept deaths now for fewer deaths tomorrow. That is a hard, if not impossible, sell for any politician.
I'll avoid the obvious answer and instead acknowledge what you say - that it's hard for any national government not to be driven entirely by high viz short term national interest, eg (for here) what booster strategy gets us out of all restrictions asap this year, end of story.
So, in practice, I guess the best we can hope for is that the global case is pushed by the likes of the WHO and various leading scientists and that it gets at least some traction with decision makers. Ie I feel the dead opposite to those who see that case being made by such people and respond "They should shut up. Not in their brief". I think the more noise is made about this the better.
Imagine we reach end of 2023 and Covid is conquered (for now) in the developed world but still raging most everywhere else. That, given the early brilliance in developing vaccines and treatments, would be such a shame - and furthermore a depressing sign that for all our tech and intelligence and progress we can't meet the big challenges.
The issue is -
- The supply of vaccines is no longer the issue. We are looking at 24 billion doses manufactured by the middle of this year. There are about 8 Billion people on the planet. - So Harry Hair Shirting about not "hoarding" vaccinations doesn't actually make sense. Not doing boosters or vaccinating children in the UK will not materially effect vaccine availability world wide.
There's loads of issues. Affordable Supply + Logistics & Distribution + Population Demand = Vaccination Outcome. There are problems to fix with all the inputs there.
But my strong sense is that the assertion "the domestic vaccine strategy of rich countries and their interaction with the pharmaceutical giants has no impact on the vaccination outcome in the rest of the world" is a self-comforting falsehood.
Sorry but it isn't. What you appear to be advocating is that we reduce our booster campaign even though that will not make any further supply available elsewhere. That is like saying: "there are children starving in the world. Until we can feed them we should starve ours too!"
I'm actually not arguing that we shouldn't complete this booster round. We should. Also continue to make inroads into our vaccine refusers. I was talking about the priorities from now on. Let's not be myopic with those.
But what specifically would us doing no 4th jabs do to help someone is Lesotho get a vaccine dose? Their government are already able to buy them at cost, they've already received millions via COVAX for free yet they've had little to no take up.
You want to blame western countries and companies but the problem is far, far more complicated than your reflex action.
What specific actions would you take to help vaccine take up in the developing world, assume vaccine availability is unlimited and free.
Xian seems to be on everyone's lips but Delta or Omicron they were hard locking the place down ages (weeks?) ago. Because the city is hosting the Winter Olympics so "just in case" China is blitzing it to get Covid cases down because they don't want the global spotlight to show any pox there.
Can we draw any other lessons from it? Nope.
We can't draw any lessons, but we can ask questions
Why are they apparently using flamethrowers to disinfect neighborhoods and bus stops etc?
I find it hard to believe this "malfunctioning foam sprayer" argument. I'm not dismissing it, but how would that work?
Also:
1 We have never seen these malfunctions before
2 There are several videos showing this bizarre "malfunction"
3 And the men using the foam sprayers that instead squirt flame don't look at all surprised. They don't react or back away, and frankly if my foam sprayer suddenly started ejecting napalm I would be a little alarmed, and my body language would show that
Hmmmm
The thing that really gives you a clue something isn't quite right, the story keeps changings. Its a few VHF cases, its a few Delta cases, its the local officials to blame, no its senior officials etc and of course now widespread food shortages. That didn't even happen in Wuhan.
As i said previously, i reckon they have Omicron, with no natural immunity and vaccines don't work, the party are shitting it as there isn't much they can do beyond hope Viagra hard lockdown works.
Yes, that's still my supposition. Tho there is also the chance that
1. They have a coincidental outbreak of VHF or whatever
2. They have a pretty fucking horrible new variant
Something is definitely up
Incidentally, on the veracity of the videos, out of curiosity I spent an hour or two the other day looking at the first videos that came out of Wuhan (you can still find them easily on Twitter)
Some of the most famous ones - bat-eating woman - moped filming bodies in the street - turn out to be fake. The bat was eaten in Indonesia, the bodies were actually rough sleepers in Shenzen
Yet sone of the most notorious ones - corpses piled high in hospitals, body bags filling up trucks, convulsing patients dying in chaos - turn out to be real. For a start, they have been repeated many times outside China. From Ecuador to Iran to Lombardy
And many of these horrific early videos were dismissed as fakes at the time
There is a third option: they have omicron, and it is spreading. They have expended a heck of a lot of effort convincing their population that their response to Covid has been brilliant, and they don't want the story muddied - especially with the Olympics coming up. So they do what oppressive regimes do: overreact to show that they are doing things. WE ARE STRONG!
An interesting question is what the official state media (i.e. virtually all of it) is saying about the situation there.
I suspect we are discovering the answer to the question of how bad is omicron when you haven't been subjected to the previous variants and your vaccines don't protect from it.
And the only places that could answer that sort of questions are the Covid zero places such as China and New Zealand / Australia but even those latter places have vaccines in place.
On topic, I would just like to say that I didn't vote for Tony Blair, would never have voted for Tony Blair, can't and couldn't stand the sight of him, opposed most of what he did as Prime Minster, including opposing the Iraq war at the time and thinking it was ridiculous that anyone believed the nonsense justification he provided for it. Yet, I am also absolutely horrified that six hundred thousand people in this country, apparently in all seriousness, believe he shouldn't receive a knighthood.
More mystified that they could be arsed to sign an online petition about it. Looks like virtue signalling is still in fashion, sad to say.
On topic, I would just like to say that I didn't vote for Tony Blair, would never have voted for Tony Blair, can't and couldn't stand the sight of him, opposed most of what he did as Prime Minster, including opposing the Iraq war at the time and thinking it was ridiculous that anyone believed the nonsense justification he provided for it. Yet, I am also absolutely horrified that six hundred thousand people in this country, apparently in all seriousness, believe he shouldn't receive a knighthood.
More mystified that they could be arsed to sign an online petition about it. Looks like virtue signalling is still in fashion, sad to say.
Xian seems to be on everyone's lips but Delta or Omicron they were hard locking the place down ages (weeks?) ago. Because the city is hosting the Winter Olympics so "just in case" China is blitzing it to get Covid cases down because they don't want the global spotlight to show any pox there.
Can we draw any other lessons from it? Nope.
We can't draw any lessons, but we can ask questions
Why are they apparently using flamethrowers to disinfect neighborhoods and bus stops etc?
I find it hard to believe this "malfunctioning foam sprayer" argument. I'm not dismissing it, but how would that work?
Also:
1 We have never seen these malfunctions before
2 There are several videos showing this bizarre "malfunction"
3 And the men using the foam sprayers that instead squirt flame don't look at all surprised. They don't react or back away, and frankly if my foam sprayer suddenly started ejecting napalm I would be a little alarmed, and my body language would show that
Hmmmm
The thing that really gives you a clue something isn't quite right, the story keeps changings. Its a few VHF cases, its a few Delta cases, its the local officials to blame, no its senior officials etc and of course now widespread food shortages. That didn't even happen in Wuhan.
As i said previously, i reckon they have Omicron, with no natural immunity and vaccines don't work, the party are shitting it as there isn't much they can do beyond hope Viagra hard lockdown works.
Yes, that's still my supposition. Tho there is also the chance that
1. They have a coincidental outbreak of VHF or whatever
2. They have a pretty fucking horrible new variant
Something is definitely up
Incidentally, on the veracity of the videos, out of curiosity I spent an hour or two the other day looking at the first videos that came out of Wuhan (you can still find them easily on Twitter)
Some of the most famous ones - bat-eating woman - moped filming bodies in the street - turn out to be fake. The bat was eaten in Indonesia, the bodies were actually rough sleepers in Shenzen
Yet sone of the most notorious ones - corpses piled high in hospitals, body bags filling up trucks, convulsing patients dying in chaos - turn out to be real. For a start, they have been repeated many times outside China. From Ecuador to Iran to Lombardy
And many of these horrific early videos were dismissed as fakes at the time
There is a third option: they have omicron, and it is spreading. They have expended a heck of a lot of effort convincing their population that their response to Covid has been brilliant, and they don't want the story muddied - especially with the Olympics coming up. So they do what oppressive regimes do: overreact to show that they are doing things. WE ARE STRONG!
An interesting question is what the official state media (i.e. virtually all of it) is saying about the situation there.
I suspect we are discovering the answer to the question of how bad is omicron when you haven't been subjected to the previous variants and your vaccines don't protect from it.
And the only places that could answer that sort of questions are the Covid zero places such as China and New Zealand / Australia but even those latter places have vaccines in place.
Jeez. We are discovering the answer to the question of how much an authoritarian government wants to ensure that a global event attended by people from over a hundred countries and covered by the global media goes ahead with as few issues as possible which might derail this, their flagship event, in particular Covid.
I mean that is pretty brutal but that is really "all" there is to it.
Xian seems to be on everyone's lips but Delta or Omicron they were hard locking the place down ages (weeks?) ago. Because the city is hosting the Winter Olympics so "just in case" China is blitzing it to get Covid cases down because they don't want the global spotlight to show any pox there.
Can we draw any other lessons from it? Nope.
We can't draw any lessons, but we can ask questions
Why are they apparently using flamethrowers to disinfect neighborhoods and bus stops etc?
I find it hard to believe this "malfunctioning foam sprayer" argument. I'm not dismissing it, but how would that work?
Also:
1 We have never seen these malfunctions before
2 There are several videos showing this bizarre "malfunction"
3 And the men using the foam sprayers that instead squirt flame don't look at all surprised. They don't react or back away, and frankly if my foam sprayer suddenly started ejecting napalm I would be a little alarmed, and my body language would show that
Hmmmm
The thing that really gives you a clue something isn't quite right, the story keeps changings. Its a few VHF cases, its a few Delta cases, its the local officials to blame, no its senior officials etc and of course now widespread food shortages. That didn't even happen in Wuhan.
As i said previously, i reckon they have Omicron, with no natural immunity and vaccines don't work, the party are shitting it as there isn't much they can do beyond hope Viagra hard lockdown works.
Yes, that's still my supposition. Tho there is also the chance that
1. They have a coincidental outbreak of VHF or whatever
2. They have a pretty fucking horrible new variant
Something is definitely up
Incidentally, on the veracity of the videos, out of curiosity I spent an hour or two the other day looking at the first videos that came out of Wuhan (you can still find them easily on Twitter)
Some of the most famous ones - bat-eating woman - moped filming bodies in the street - turn out to be fake. The bat was eaten in Indonesia, the bodies were actually rough sleepers in Shenzen
Yet sone of the most notorious ones - corpses piled high in hospitals, body bags filling up trucks, convulsing patients dying in chaos - turn out to be real. For a start, they have been repeated many times outside China. From Ecuador to Iran to Lombardy
And many of these horrific early videos were dismissed as fakes at the time
There is a third option: they have omicron, and it is spreading. They have expended a heck of a lot of effort convincing their population that their response to Covid has been brilliant, and they don't want the story muddied - especially with the Olympics coming up. So they do what oppressive regimes do: overreact to show that they are doing things. WE ARE STRONG!
An interesting question is what the official state media (i.e. virtually all of it) is saying about the situation there.
I say in my comment, my FIRST supposition is Omicron
Is Boris gonna lock us down again, in some form or other, at 5pm?
Quick vote?
My vote is No, he won't. But I'm worried
After his poll bounce from not locking down over Christmas and New Year I would guess not.
Nothing in it for him. Those who want a new lockdown or more restrictions are almost all Labour or SNP voters anyway
Are they? I thought they skewed predominantly old? The young and city dwellers seem to be the ones getting on with it.
If that was the case why has Boris got a bounce in the latest poll for the Tories after imposing not a single new restriction over Christmas and New Year almost entirely from anti restriction voters going back from RefUK and LDs to the Tories while the Labour vote is little changed?
Cos some people are very strongly motivated by this issue? I don't see how that justifies the claim that people who support a lockdown are Labour or SNP voters. Do you have any evidence for that?
Xian seems to be on everyone's lips but Delta or Omicron they were hard locking the place down ages (weeks?) ago. Because the city is hosting the Winter Olympics so "just in case" China is blitzing it to get Covid cases down because they don't want the global spotlight to show any pox there.
Can we draw any other lessons from it? Nope.
We can't draw any lessons, but we can ask questions
Why are they apparently using flamethrowers to disinfect neighborhoods and bus stops etc?
I find it hard to believe this "malfunctioning foam sprayer" argument. I'm not dismissing it, but how would that work?
Also:
1 We have never seen these malfunctions before
2 There are several videos showing this bizarre "malfunction"
3 And the men using the foam sprayers that instead squirt flame don't look at all surprised. They don't react or back away, and frankly if my foam sprayer suddenly started ejecting napalm I would be a little alarmed, and my body language would show that
Hmmmm
The thing that really gives you a clue something isn't quite right, the story keeps changings. Its a few VHF cases, its a few Delta cases, its the local officials to blame, no its senior officials etc and of course now widespread food shortages. That didn't even happen in Wuhan.
As i said previously, i reckon they have Omicron, with no natural immunity and vaccines don't work, the party are shitting it as there isn't much they can do beyond hope Viagra hard lockdown works.
Yes, that's still my supposition. Tho there is also the chance that
1. They have a coincidental outbreak of VHF or whatever
2. They have a pretty fucking horrible new variant
Something is definitely up
Incidentally, on the veracity of the videos, out of curiosity I spent an hour or two the other day looking at the first videos that came out of Wuhan (you can still find them easily on Twitter)
Some of the most famous ones - bat-eating woman - moped filming bodies in the street - turn out to be fake. The bat was eaten in Indonesia, the bodies were actually rough sleepers in Shenzen
Yet sone of the most notorious ones - corpses piled high in hospitals, body bags filling up trucks, convulsing patients dying in chaos - turn out to be real. For a start, they have been repeated many times outside China. From Ecuador to Iran to Lombardy
And many of these horrific early videos were dismissed as fakes at the time
There is a third option: they have omicron, and it is spreading. They have expended a heck of a lot of effort convincing their population that their response to Covid has been brilliant, and they don't want the story muddied - especially with the Olympics coming up. So they do what oppressive regimes do: overreact to show that they are doing things. WE ARE STRONG!
An interesting question is what the official state media (i.e. virtually all of it) is saying about the situation there.
I suspect we are discovering the answer to the question of how bad is omicron when you haven't been subjected to the previous variants and your vaccines don't protect from it.
And the only places that could answer that sort of questions are the Covid zero places such as China and New Zealand / Australia but even those latter places have vaccines in place.
Jeez. We are discovering the answer to the question of how much an authoritarian government wants to ensure that a global event attended by people from over a hundred countries and covered by the global media goes ahead with as few issues as possible which might derail this, their flagship event, in particular Covid.
I mean that is pretty brutal but that is really "all" there is to it.
I for one am glad that "Topping" off of PB has personally solved a mystery that has much of the world puzzled, including the Chinese themselves
Xian seems to be on everyone's lips but Delta or Omicron they were hard locking the place down ages (weeks?) ago. Because the city is hosting the Winter Olympics so "just in case" China is blitzing it to get Covid cases down because they don't want the global spotlight to show any pox there.
Can we draw any other lessons from it? Nope.
We can't draw any lessons, but we can ask questions
Why are they apparently using flamethrowers to disinfect neighborhoods and bus stops etc?
I find it hard to believe this "malfunctioning foam sprayer" argument. I'm not dismissing it, but how would that work?
Also:
1 We have never seen these malfunctions before
2 There are several videos showing this bizarre "malfunction"
3 And the men using the foam sprayers that instead squirt flame don't look at all surprised. They don't react or back away, and frankly if my foam sprayer suddenly started ejecting napalm I would be a little alarmed, and my body language would show that
Hmmmm
The thing that really gives you a clue something isn't quite right, the story keeps changings. Its a few VHF cases, its a few Delta cases, its the local officials to blame, no its senior officials etc and of course now widespread food shortages. That didn't even happen in Wuhan.
As i said previously, i reckon they have Omicron, with no natural immunity and vaccines don't work, the party are shitting it as there isn't much they can do beyond hope Viagra hard lockdown works.
Yes, that's still my supposition. Tho there is also the chance that
1. They have a coincidental outbreak of VHF or whatever
2. They have a pretty fucking horrible new variant
Something is definitely up
Incidentally, on the veracity of the videos, out of curiosity I spent an hour or two the other day looking at the first videos that came out of Wuhan (you can still find them easily on Twitter)
Some of the most famous ones - bat-eating woman - moped filming bodies in the street - turn out to be fake. The bat was eaten in Indonesia, the bodies were actually rough sleepers in Shenzen
Yet sone of the most notorious ones - corpses piled high in hospitals, body bags filling up trucks, convulsing patients dying in chaos - turn out to be real. For a start, they have been repeated many times outside China. From Ecuador to Iran to Lombardy
And many of these horrific early videos were dismissed as fakes at the time
There is a third option: they have omicron, and it is spreading. They have expended a heck of a lot of effort convincing their population that their response to Covid has been brilliant, and they don't want the story muddied - especially with the Olympics coming up. So they do what oppressive regimes do: overreact to show that they are doing things. WE ARE STRONG!
An interesting question is what the official state media (i.e. virtually all of it) is saying about the situation there.
I suspect we are discovering the answer to the question of how bad is omicron when you haven't been subjected to the previous variants and your vaccines don't protect from it.
And the only places that could answer that sort of questions are the Covid zero places such as China and New Zealand / Australia but even those latter places have vaccines in place.
Jeez. We are discovering the answer to the question of how much an authoritarian government wants to ensure that a global event attended by people from over a hundred countries and covered by the global media goes ahead with as few issues as possible which might derail this, their flagship event, in particular Covid.
I mean that is pretty brutal but that is really "all" there is to it.
I for one am glad that "Topping" off of PB has personally solved a mystery that has much of the world puzzled, including the Chinese themselves
Most shocking to me is that Prince Andrew's attorney wanted the judge to say NY's law giving child sexual abuse victims more time to sue is unconstitutional. This would have blocked access to justice for so many victims. Does the Queen know what her son is attempting to do? https://twitter.com/LisaBloom/status/1478400205179408384
Does it make a difference? US law has apparently decided there are no grounds for action against a single US client of Epstein and Maxwell's anyway
On topic, I would just like to say that I didn't vote for Tony Blair, would never have voted for Tony Blair, can't and couldn't stand the sight of him, opposed most of what he did as Prime Minster, including opposing the Iraq war at the time and thinking it was ridiculous that anyone believed the nonsense justification he provided for it. Yet, I am also absolutely horrified that six hundred thousand people in this country, apparently in all seriousness, believe he shouldn't receive a knighthood.
More mystified that they could be arsed to sign an online petition about it. Looks like virtue signalling is still in fashion, sad to say.
Is it even virtue signalling if you just sign it and don't make a Twitter post pointing out that you signed it? It's not as though all your friends are going down the list at regular intervals and using CTRL-F on your name, so they won't generally know if any particular person signed it or not.
Xian seems to be on everyone's lips but Delta or Omicron they were hard locking the place down ages (weeks?) ago. Because the city is hosting the Winter Olympics so "just in case" China is blitzing it to get Covid cases down because they don't want the global spotlight to show any pox there.
Can we draw any other lessons from it? Nope.
We can't draw any lessons, but we can ask questions
Why are they apparently using flamethrowers to disinfect neighborhoods and bus stops etc?
I find it hard to believe this "malfunctioning foam sprayer" argument. I'm not dismissing it, but how would that work?
Also:
1 We have never seen these malfunctions before
2 There are several videos showing this bizarre "malfunction"
3 And the men using the foam sprayers that instead squirt flame don't look at all surprised. They don't react or back away, and frankly if my foam sprayer suddenly started ejecting napalm I would be a little alarmed, and my body language would show that
Hmmmm
The thing that really gives you a clue something isn't quite right, the story keeps changings. Its a few VHF cases, its a few Delta cases, its the local officials to blame, no its senior officials etc and of course now widespread food shortages. That didn't even happen in Wuhan.
As i said previously, i reckon they have Omicron, with no natural immunity and vaccines don't work, the party are shitting it as there isn't much they can do beyond hope Viagra hard lockdown works.
Yes, that's still my supposition. Tho there is also the chance that
1. They have a coincidental outbreak of VHF or whatever
2. They have a pretty fucking horrible new variant
Something is definitely up
Incidentally, on the veracity of the videos, out of curiosity I spent an hour or two the other day looking at the first videos that came out of Wuhan (you can still find them easily on Twitter)
Some of the most famous ones - bat-eating woman - moped filming bodies in the street - turn out to be fake. The bat was eaten in Indonesia, the bodies were actually rough sleepers in Shenzen
Yet sone of the most notorious ones - corpses piled high in hospitals, body bags filling up trucks, convulsing patients dying in chaos - turn out to be real. For a start, they have been repeated many times outside China. From Ecuador to Iran to Lombardy
And many of these horrific early videos were dismissed as fakes at the time
There is a third option: they have omicron, and it is spreading. They have expended a heck of a lot of effort convincing their population that their response to Covid has been brilliant, and they don't want the story muddied - especially with the Olympics coming up. So they do what oppressive regimes do: overreact to show that they are doing things. WE ARE STRONG!
An interesting question is what the official state media (i.e. virtually all of it) is saying about the situation there.
I suspect we are discovering the answer to the question of how bad is omicron when you haven't been subjected to the previous variants and your vaccines don't protect from it.
And the only places that could answer that sort of questions are the Covid zero places such as China and New Zealand / Australia but even those latter places have vaccines in place.
Jeez. We are discovering the answer to the question of how much an authoritarian government wants to ensure that a global event attended by people from over a hundred countries and covered by the global media goes ahead with as few issues as possible which might derail this, their flagship event, in particular Covid.
I mean that is pretty brutal but that is really "all" there is to it.
I for one am glad that "Topping" off of PB has personally solved a mystery that has much of the world puzzled, including the Chinese themselves
On topic, I would just like to say that I didn't vote for Tony Blair, would never have voted for Tony Blair, can't and couldn't stand the sight of him, opposed most of what he did as Prime Minster, including opposing the Iraq war at the time and thinking it was ridiculous that anyone believed the nonsense justification he provided for it. Yet, I am also absolutely horrified that six hundred thousand people in this country, apparently in all seriousness, believe he shouldn't receive a knighthood.
More mystified that they could be arsed to sign an online petition about it. Looks like virtue signalling is still in fashion, sad to say.
online petitions are always virtue signalling.
Thank goodness we don't have any of that nonsense on PB, eh?
Most shocking to me is that Prince Andrew's attorney wanted the judge to say NY's law giving child sexual abuse victims more time to sue is unconstitutional. This would have blocked access to justice for so many victims. Does the Queen know what her son is attempting to do? https://twitter.com/LisaBloom/status/1478400205179408384
Does it make a difference? US law has apparently decided there are no grounds for action against a single US client of Epstein and Maxwell's anyway
No grounds or not enough evidence for criminal cases.
For most civil cases it seems most victims are trying to put it behind them but I suspect the photos make that rather difficult for Virginia, when it keeps on reappearing.
Either way, their policy of not giving credit was shite and they deserved to be suspended just for that.
Sandpit and I discussed this the other day. My understanding is paid followers these days on twitter isn't much good, you need engagement. What Sandpit observed is they clearly scrape their headlines and within seconds of posting they always get significant engagement in terms of retweets and likes etc. The suspicion being they ran or used a bot network to do headline scraping plus the engagement.
Their incredibly fast rise always had alarm beels ringing for me. Nothing to everywhere in a couple of months. Most start-up brands who die for that, let alone a boring politics focused account managing it.
Is Boris gonna lock us down again, in some form or other, at 5pm?
Quick vote?
My vote is No, he won't. But I'm worried
I think No. I hope No. I am not 100% convinced though. I think he might crumble.
Johnson is no doubt getting a load of pressure from medical professionals on one side and from Tory MPs on the other. Only one of those groups can remove him this week.
I vote No. He would be deposed within 48 hours I think if he announces lockdown tonight. The data just isn't there and the backbench have run out of patience with SAGE and modelling anyway.
I vote No. He would be deposed within 48 hours I think if he announces lockdown tonight. The data just isn't there and the backbench and the public have run out of patience with SAGE and modelling anyway.
FTFY.
Yes, even with the incidentals it doesn't look like we'll reach anything like 3,000 hospitalisations per day which was the best case scenario for Omicron (not including incidentals).
Care to bet on that? I'm pretty confident we will exceed 3k hospitalizations per day as per coronavirus.data.gov £25 - winnings to pb.com?
Precise terms -> according to coronavirus.data.gov.uk, the UK will exceed 3k hospitalizations per day for at least one day before end of March.
I think Max PB was talking about England Hospitalisation.
Then staying under 3,000 sounds quite possible to me.
If you where prepared to limit it to England, use 7 day average and end date of End Of Feb, then I would take that £25 bet (donation to PB)
How about just England as you suggest -> but just a single day over 3,000 hospital admissions? I feel like that's very fair given the original claim. Happy to have end Feb as the date as you suggest.
Deal?
rkrkrk,
Thanks for getting back to me, and appreciated that you have accepted 2 of my 3 caveats, so I'm very tempted, But would you stretch to 2 consecutive days over over 3,000? (I'm trying to avaode a one day spick)
All this Blair stuff is not good for Starmer I thihk, as I was saying earlier. He's been steadily and implicitly building a rehabilitation of Blair-type politics, and then along comes this to reunite Lefties and Tories against the idea of Blair again.
However, I don't think it will be much more than temporary - the government's problems and failings are now just much too familiar in the public's imagination.
Xian seems to be on everyone's lips but Delta or Omicron they were hard locking the place down ages (weeks?) ago. Because the city is hosting the Winter Olympics so "just in case" China is blitzing it to get Covid cases down because they don't want the global spotlight to show any pox there.
Can we draw any other lessons from it? Nope.
We can't draw any lessons, but we can ask questions
Why are they apparently using flamethrowers to disinfect neighborhoods and bus stops etc?
I find it hard to believe this "malfunctioning foam sprayer" argument. I'm not dismissing it, but how would that work?
Also:
1 We have never seen these malfunctions before
2 There are several videos showing this bizarre "malfunction"
3 And the men using the foam sprayers that instead squirt flame don't look at all surprised. They don't react or back away, and frankly if my foam sprayer suddenly started ejecting napalm I would be a little alarmed, and my body language would show that
Hmmmm
The thing that really gives you a clue something isn't quite right, the story keeps changings. Its a few VHF cases, its a few Delta cases, its the local officials to blame, no its senior officials etc and of course now widespread food shortages. That didn't even happen in Wuhan.
As i said previously, i reckon they have Omicron, with no natural immunity and vaccines don't work, the party are shitting it as there isn't much they can do beyond hope Viagra hard lockdown works.
Yes, that's still my supposition. Tho there is also the chance that
1. They have a coincidental outbreak of VHF or whatever
2. They have a pretty fucking horrible new variant
Something is definitely up
Incidentally, on the veracity of the videos, out of curiosity I spent an hour or two the other day looking at the first videos that came out of Wuhan (you can still find them easily on Twitter)
Some of the most famous ones - bat-eating woman - moped filming bodies in the street - turn out to be fake. The bat was eaten in Indonesia, the bodies were actually rough sleepers in Shenzen
Yet sone of the most notorious ones - corpses piled high in hospitals, body bags filling up trucks, convulsing patients dying in chaos - turn out to be real. For a start, they have been repeated many times outside China. From Ecuador to Iran to Lombardy
And many of these horrific early videos were dismissed as fakes at the time
There is a third option: they have omicron, and it is spreading. They have expended a heck of a lot of effort convincing their population that their response to Covid has been brilliant, and they don't want the story muddied - especially with the Olympics coming up. So they do what oppressive regimes do: overreact to show that they are doing things. WE ARE STRONG!
An interesting question is what the official state media (i.e. virtually all of it) is saying about the situation there.
I say in my comment, my FIRST supposition is Omicron
The other two are unlikely, but not impossible
You wrote a short sentence agreeing it might be omicron (without mentioning the word), and then a long spiel about YOUR DRAMATC THEORIES ABOUT HOW WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!! with 'something is definitely up'.
As a professional writerflint knapper, you know what you're doing...
Ironically those most supportive of knighting Blair are LDs, who were probably most opposed to him by 2005, though a plurality of LDs also oppose his knighthood
'We can’t vaccinate the planet every six months', says JCVI chief Fourth Covid jabs should not be offered until there is more evidence, the head of Britain's vaccine body has said - as he warned that giving boosters to people every six months was “not sustainable”.
6 monthly jabs may or may not be the right thing, but his remit is not "THE PLANET". It's the UK. Once again heading outside their remit.
Unless we vaccinate the planet - collectively - then we aren't immune from the next mutation.
That's another covid myth apparently: Myth #1,765 in a regular series...
We should share Covid vaccines with the world, because it is the right thing to do, but not because it will limit of emergence of 'variants' - vaccines don't generate variants but they don't preclude their emergence either - it's all a bit unclear and complicated.
Not just people either, Covid is a general mammalian phenomenon
Nevertheless a world with Covid raging is more likely to throw up things which come and fuck us up than a world with Covid under control. And the quicker we vaccinate the world the quicker we get from that first situation to the second. It's as much a practical imperative as a moral one.
No it isn't necessarily a practical or moral one and probably not a scientific one either. All governments have their first responsibility to their own population. IMHO, the first priority of Western governments is to figure out how to defeat or contain the virus. The strategies that they use will then inform them how they support other governments to do the same.
The virus respects no borders. It's a global pandemic and the best response to it is global. The more inefficient and illogical is the vaccine rollout - eg 5 or 6 jabs in one country and zero in another - the longer the pandemic will last, and the longer it lasts the more the damage will be and the more likely it is that we will be impacted.
The question then is this - to what extent should the normal rules of national centric politics - which you outline - be flexed in order to facilitate the optimum globally efficient solution?
I say the answer to this is "to a very great extent" and I think this is the correct answer. After all, this is a once-a-century emergency with an awful lot at stake. If we can't get our (global) act together for this, at least better than we are atm, when will we ever be able to?
So I am going to ask a question. I don't claim it is a fair question or perhaps even valid but it is the question that any politician has to be able to answer if they wish to accept your view.
How many people should we allow to die in this country, who could otherwise be saved, so that we can save lives of people in Africa, India, Russia or Poland?
As I say I am not saying it is a fair question but it is the question that cannot be dodged by politicians choosing to follow the route of putting global well being ahead of national well being.
And I know the obvious answer to you and probably to me is that in the long term we might actually save more lives here. But that is not certain and you are asking people to accept deaths now for fewer deaths tomorrow. That is a hard, if not impossible, sell for any politician.
I'll avoid the obvious answer and instead acknowledge what you say - that it's hard for any national government not to be driven entirely by high viz short term national interest, eg (for here) what booster strategy gets us out of all restrictions asap this year, end of story.
So, in practice, I guess the best we can hope for is that the global case is pushed by the likes of the WHO and various leading scientists and that it gets at least some traction with decision makers. Ie I feel the dead opposite to those who see that case being made by such people and respond "They should shut up. Not in their brief". I think the more noise is made about this the better.
Imagine we reach end of 2023 and Covid is conquered (for now) in the developed world but still raging most everywhere else. That, given the early brilliance in developing vaccines and treatments, would be such a shame - and furthermore a depressing sign that for all our tech and intelligence and progress we can't meet the big challenges.
The issue is -
- The supply of vaccines is no longer the issue. We are looking at 24 billion doses manufactured by the middle of this year. There are about 8 Billion people on the planet. - So Harry Hair Shirting about not "hoarding" vaccinations doesn't actually make sense. Not doing boosters or vaccinating children in the UK will not materially effect vaccine availability world wide.
There's loads of issues. Affordable Supply + Logistics & Distribution + Population Demand = Vaccination Outcome. There are problems to fix with all the inputs there.
But my strong sense is that the assertion "the domestic vaccine strategy of rich countries and their interaction with the pharmaceutical giants has no impact on the vaccination outcome in the rest of the world" is a self-comforting falsehood.
Sorry but it isn't. What you appear to be advocating is that we reduce our booster campaign even though that will not make any further supply available elsewhere. That is like saying: "there are children starving in the world. Until we can feed them we should starve ours too!"
I'm actually not arguing that we shouldn't complete this booster round. We should. Also continue to make inroads into our vaccine refusers. I was talking about the priorities from now on. Let's not be myopic with those.
But what specifically would us doing no 4th jabs do to help someone is Lesotho get a vaccine dose? Their government are already able to buy them at cost, they've already received millions via COVAX for free yet they've had little to no take up.
You want to blame western countries and companies but the problem is far, far more complicated than your reflex action.
What specific actions would you take to help vaccine take up in the developing world, assume vaccine availability is unlimited and free.
My friends in Malawi say that vaccine take up there is poor. It is worth noting that half the population there is under 20, so in percentage terms they are never going to be as high. Add in endemic HIV, TB, malaria and schistosomiasis and covid doesn't really stand out.
Xian seems to be on everyone's lips but Delta or Omicron they were hard locking the place down ages (weeks?) ago. Because the city is hosting the Winter Olympics so "just in case" China is blitzing it to get Covid cases down because they don't want the global spotlight to show any pox there.
Can we draw any other lessons from it? Nope.
We can't draw any lessons, but we can ask questions
Why are they apparently using flamethrowers to disinfect neighborhoods and bus stops etc?
I find it hard to believe this "malfunctioning foam sprayer" argument. I'm not dismissing it, but how would that work?
Also:
1 We have never seen these malfunctions before
2 There are several videos showing this bizarre "malfunction"
3 And the men using the foam sprayers that instead squirt flame don't look at all surprised. They don't react or back away, and frankly if my foam sprayer suddenly started ejecting napalm I would be a little alarmed, and my body language would show that
Hmmmm
The thing that really gives you a clue something isn't quite right, the story keeps changings. Its a few VHF cases, its a few Delta cases, its the local officials to blame, no its senior officials etc and of course now widespread food shortages. That didn't even happen in Wuhan.
As i said previously, i reckon they have Omicron, with no natural immunity and vaccines don't work, the party are shitting it as there isn't much they can do beyond hope Viagra hard lockdown works.
Yes, that's still my supposition. Tho there is also the chance that
1. They have a coincidental outbreak of VHF or whatever
2. They have a pretty fucking horrible new variant
Something is definitely up
Incidentally, on the veracity of the videos, out of curiosity I spent an hour or two the other day looking at the first videos that came out of Wuhan (you can still find them easily on Twitter)
Some of the most famous ones - bat-eating woman - moped filming bodies in the street - turn out to be fake. The bat was eaten in Indonesia, the bodies were actually rough sleepers in Shenzen
Yet sone of the most notorious ones - corpses piled high in hospitals, body bags filling up trucks, convulsing patients dying in chaos - turn out to be real. For a start, they have been repeated many times outside China. From Ecuador to Iran to Lombardy
And many of these horrific early videos were dismissed as fakes at the time
There is a third option: they have omicron, and it is spreading. They have expended a heck of a lot of effort convincing their population that their response to Covid has been brilliant, and they don't want the story muddied - especially with the Olympics coming up. So they do what oppressive regimes do: overreact to show that they are doing things. WE ARE STRONG!
An interesting question is what the official state media (i.e. virtually all of it) is saying about the situation there.
I suspect we are discovering the answer to the question of how bad is omicron when you haven't been subjected to the previous variants and your vaccines don't protect from it.
And the only places that could answer that sort of questions are the Covid zero places such as China and New Zealand / Australia but even those latter places have vaccines in place.
Jeez. We are discovering the answer to the question of how much an authoritarian government wants to ensure that a global event attended by people from over a hundred countries and covered by the global media goes ahead with as few issues as possible which might derail this, their flagship event, in particular Covid.
I mean that is pretty brutal but that is really "all" there is to it.
I for one am glad that "Topping" off of PB has personally solved a mystery that has much of the world puzzled, including the Chinese themselves
There's none so blind as those that will not see.
You're projecting again. Quite chronically
Whining about "projection" every time you are outfoxed on an internet chatroom says a bit more about you than about your interlocutor.
On topic, I would just like to say that I didn't vote for Tony Blair, would never have voted for Tony Blair, can't and couldn't stand the sight of him, opposed most of what he did as Prime Minster, including opposing the Iraq war at the time and thinking it was ridiculous that anyone believed the nonsense justification he provided for it. Yet, I am also absolutely horrified that six hundred thousand people in this country, apparently in all seriousness, believe he shouldn't receive a knighthood.
More mystified that they could be arsed to sign an online petition about it. Looks like virtue signalling is still in fashion, sad to say.
Is it even virtue signalling if you just sign it and don't make a Twitter post pointing out that you signed it? It's not as though all your friends are going down the list at regular intervals and using CTRL-F on your name, so they won't generally know if any particular person signed it or not.
'We can’t vaccinate the planet every six months', says JCVI chief Fourth Covid jabs should not be offered until there is more evidence, the head of Britain's vaccine body has said - as he warned that giving boosters to people every six months was “not sustainable”.
6 monthly jabs may or may not be the right thing, but his remit is not "THE PLANET". It's the UK. Once again heading outside their remit.
Unless we vaccinate the planet - collectively - then we aren't immune from the next mutation.
That's another covid myth apparently: Myth #1,765 in a regular series...
We should share Covid vaccines with the world, because it is the right thing to do, but not because it will limit of emergence of 'variants' - vaccines don't generate variants but they don't preclude their emergence either - it's all a bit unclear and complicated.
Not just people either, Covid is a general mammalian phenomenon
Nevertheless a world with Covid raging is more likely to throw up things which come and fuck us up than a world with Covid under control. And the quicker we vaccinate the world the quicker we get from that first situation to the second. It's as much a practical imperative as a moral one.
No it isn't necessarily a practical or moral one and probably not a scientific one either. All governments have their first responsibility to their own population. IMHO, the first priority of Western governments is to figure out how to defeat or contain the virus. The strategies that they use will then inform them how they support other governments to do the same.
The virus respects no borders. It's a global pandemic and the best response to it is global. The more inefficient and illogical is the vaccine rollout - eg 5 or 6 jabs in one country and zero in another - the longer the pandemic will last, and the longer it lasts the more the damage will be and the more likely it is that we will be impacted.
The question then is this - to what extent should the normal rules of national centric politics - which you outline - be flexed in order to facilitate the optimum globally efficient solution?
I say the answer to this is "to a very great extent" and I think this is the correct answer. After all, this is a once-a-century emergency with an awful lot at stake. If we can't get our (global) act together for this, at least better than we are atm, when will we ever be able to?
So I am going to ask a question. I don't claim it is a fair question or perhaps even valid but it is the question that any politician has to be able to answer if they wish to accept your view.
How many people should we allow to die in this country, who could otherwise be saved, so that we can save lives of people in Africa, India, Russia or Poland?
As I say I am not saying it is a fair question but it is the question that cannot be dodged by politicians choosing to follow the route of putting global well being ahead of national well being.
And I know the obvious answer to you and probably to me is that in the long term we might actually save more lives here. But that is not certain and you are asking people to accept deaths now for fewer deaths tomorrow. That is a hard, if not impossible, sell for any politician.
I'll avoid the obvious answer and instead acknowledge what you say - that it's hard for any national government not to be driven entirely by high viz short term national interest, eg (for here) what booster strategy gets us out of all restrictions asap this year, end of story.
So, in practice, I guess the best we can hope for is that the global case is pushed by the likes of the WHO and various leading scientists and that it gets at least some traction with decision makers. Ie I feel the dead opposite to those who see that case being made by such people and respond "They should shut up. Not in their brief". I think the more noise is made about this the better.
Imagine we reach end of 2023 and Covid is conquered (for now) in the developed world but still raging most everywhere else. That, given the early brilliance in developing vaccines and treatments, would be such a shame - and furthermore a depressing sign that for all our tech and intelligence and progress we can't meet the big challenges.
The issue is -
- The supply of vaccines is no longer the issue. We are looking at 24 billion doses manufactured by the middle of this year. There are about 8 Billion people on the planet. - So Harry Hair Shirting about not "hoarding" vaccinations doesn't actually make sense. Not doing boosters or vaccinating children in the UK will not materially effect vaccine availability world wide.
There's loads of issues. Affordable Supply + Logistics & Distribution + Population Demand = Vaccination Outcome. There are problems to fix with all the inputs there.
But my strong sense is that the assertion "the domestic vaccine strategy of rich countries and their interaction with the pharmaceutical giants has no impact on the vaccination outcome in the rest of the world" is a self-comforting falsehood.
Sorry but it isn't. What you appear to be advocating is that we reduce our booster campaign even though that will not make any further supply available elsewhere. That is like saying: "there are children starving in the world. Until we can feed them we should starve ours too!"
I'm actually not arguing that we shouldn't complete this booster round. We should. Also continue to make inroads into our vaccine refusers. I was talking about the priorities from now on. Let's not be myopic with those.
But what specifically would us doing no 4th jabs do to help someone is Lesotho get a vaccine dose? Their government are already able to buy them at cost, they've already received millions via COVAX for free yet they've had little to no take up.
You want to blame western countries and companies but the problem is far, far more complicated than your reflex action.
What specific actions would you take to help vaccine take up in the developing world, assume vaccine availability is unlimited and free.
It's a complicated process - but it's pretty obvious that there are supply problems. For one thing, doses were significantly delayed when India stopped exporting.
Africa has administered 63% of vaccines received and received 450m doses, obviously insufficient for 1.2bn people. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/56100076
For my two pennth, the best meal I have ever had was at a restaurant that doesn't even have a michelin star. It wasn't cheap, but it certainly isn't the most expensive meal I have had.
Most of my best meals have been at non-Michelin places
Random top ten (I could choose eighty more)
Eating at Marco Pierre White's very first place, in south London (forget where) - before he had a star, wow
A crab and asparagus dish in a restaurant made from a garage outside Chiang Mai, Thailand
A beef massaman curry on a beach in Ko Tao, also Thailand
Eating at the first Barrafina off the Strand
Osyters and foie gras and gingerbread in some brilliant old school brasserie in Nantes, France
Dinner by Heston (that has a star or two)
A steak at G W Bush's favourite steak restaurant in Austin Texas
Another steak at Cabana Las Lilas in Buenos Aires
Tiny gnocchi in a private restaurant on a private vineyard on the island of Pantelleria, Italy
Some sardines, recently, in a scruffy cafe above a fish market in Sagres, Portugal
How much of this is about company, location, mood, weather, post-coital bliss - rather than food? At least half of it
I am not sure where to even begin with best food, overall.
For steak, I do. The Tasting Room in Frederick MD does a filet mignon that is the best I have had anywhere, including the best that Buenos Aires or Texas has to offer.
For Indian food, sorry to say that my best experience has been neither in India nor in the UK, but in downtown Washington DC. Rasika (chef was in London prior to moving to the US). Their palak chaat is the most delicious single Indian dish I have ever eaten. For Northern Indian, Bukhara in New York used to be the place.
For the most inventive, surprising and incredible meal I've ever eaten, Contra in lower Manhattan wins: https://contra.nyc It has one star.
For the single ingredient of a dish, Brian Voltaggio at Volt (now sadly gone) outdid everything else I have ever experienced. He does molecular cuisine, which is not my favorite style. But he made 'caviar' out of virgin olive oil. It was the most intensely pleasurable tasting experience of my life to date.
I realize this is a very US-centric list. I have had many spectacular meals in France, Italy, the UK, and Switzerland. But none of them truly stand out from the rest.
I must be incredibly unlucky because 98% of my eating experiences in America are mediocre or worse. And I have been there a LOT, and all over, and in all kinds of joints, from top NYC starred places to innovative California pop-ups to famous BBQ shacks in the Deep South
The one exception is Louisiana especially New Orleans. The food there is consistently great, and they don't do the off-puttingly enormous servings you commonly get in the USA. How can such a rich country still believe "great food = tons of food"?
I think we forget how much better food in the UK has got. Because not many pubs can survive as shitty boozers and huge competition in the restaurant sector, "bog standard" offers across the board have got a hell of a lot better in the past 20-30 years. Sure we still have cheap and crap, but that £10 for a main range has got infinity better in lots of places, and many more people are willing to pay for really good stuff (I presume tv chefs lot has helped this).
Its not that long ago that the Olympic Breakfast at a Little Chef was what people did...now they queue for the overpriced but still better offering from the likes of the Breakfast Club.
The US its seems to be cheap and shit, middle price range, eat your weight in meat...then the small niche high end.
WE DEMAND JUBILEE PANCAKES.
(Which used to be 99p)
Used to be the one of the highlight of my family holidays to Cornwall as a kid....stopping off at a Little Chef for jubilee pancakes.
Now I imagine the kids of today in Cornwall are having organic fresh hand crafted crepes with matcha ice cream...
I'm not sure things have changed that much. When we go to Cornwall we usually have a few meals at the cafe on the cliff top above Treganhawke that does all day breakfasts. Plus a few cream teas, fish and chips and ice creams. The fanciest food is usually consumed at the Eden Project.
I go to Cornwall all the time and all my extended family live there. You're really not trying very hard. There is fine food in every major town. You can get excellent Indian and Thai everywhere, for a start
This wasn't intended as a criticism. I live in London so don't go to Cornwall for interesting world cuisine, but things like cream teas and fish and chips on the beach are things we can't get at home and are handy on walks or days on the beach which is what we tend to be doing. We usually go self catering and cook dinner at the chalet anyway, it's more relaxing than eating out with kids. And we don't really visit the major towns either - we always stay in the SE corner so the only close town is across the Tamar in Plymouth which is not especially nice (it is the city of many of my forebears, so I am well disposed to it but it is not an attractive place).
Fair enough
I know I am in a TINY minority here, but I love Plymouth. It is an extraordinary city. Extraordinarily hideous in places, but extraordinarily beautiful and historic in others. An amazing topography. Also some good places to eat!
I have a Plymouth Fine Dining story. On a business trip, having dinner in Spoons. Pissed up blokes a few tables away obviously on a session. Another guy comes in and comes over to tell his friends about his crabbing adventures!
Yep, you guessed it. Pulls an Asda bag onto the table and removes from it a large crab which proceeds to protest with claws towards crabbing gentleman. At which point bar maiden demands that he leave and take his crab with him.
On topic, I would just like to say that I didn't vote for Tony Blair, would never have voted for Tony Blair, can't and couldn't stand the sight of him, opposed most of what he did as Prime Minster, including opposing the Iraq war at the time and thinking it was ridiculous that anyone believed the nonsense justification he provided for it. Yet, I am also absolutely horrified that six hundred thousand people in this country, apparently in all seriousness, believe he shouldn't receive a knighthood.
More mystified that they could be arsed to sign an online petition about it. Looks like virtue signalling is still in fashion, sad to say.
online petitions are always virtue signalling.
Thank goodness we don't have any of that nonsense on PB, eh?
No we have lawyers who post on tweets without noticing there are subclauses hidden away further in the contract that completely invalidate the clause
'We can’t vaccinate the planet every six months', says JCVI chief Fourth Covid jabs should not be offered until there is more evidence, the head of Britain's vaccine body has said - as he warned that giving boosters to people every six months was “not sustainable”.
6 monthly jabs may or may not be the right thing, but his remit is not "THE PLANET". It's the UK. Once again heading outside their remit.
Unless we vaccinate the planet - collectively - then we aren't immune from the next mutation.
That's another covid myth apparently: Myth #1,765 in a regular series...
We should share Covid vaccines with the world, because it is the right thing to do, but not because it will limit of emergence of 'variants' - vaccines don't generate variants but they don't preclude their emergence either - it's all a bit unclear and complicated.
Not just people either, Covid is a general mammalian phenomenon
Nevertheless a world with Covid raging is more likely to throw up things which come and fuck us up than a world with Covid under control. And the quicker we vaccinate the world the quicker we get from that first situation to the second. It's as much a practical imperative as a moral one.
No it isn't necessarily a practical or moral one and probably not a scientific one either. All governments have their first responsibility to their own population. IMHO, the first priority of Western governments is to figure out how to defeat or contain the virus. The strategies that they use will then inform them how they support other governments to do the same.
The virus respects no borders. It's a global pandemic and the best response to it is global. The more inefficient and illogical is the vaccine rollout - eg 5 or 6 jabs in one country and zero in another - the longer the pandemic will last, and the longer it lasts the more the damage will be and the more likely it is that we will be impacted.
The question then is this - to what extent should the normal rules of national centric politics - which you outline - be flexed in order to facilitate the optimum globally efficient solution?
I say the answer to this is "to a very great extent" and I think this is the correct answer. After all, this is a once-a-century emergency with an awful lot at stake. If we can't get our (global) act together for this, at least better than we are atm, when will we ever be able to?
So I am going to ask a question. I don't claim it is a fair question or perhaps even valid but it is the question that any politician has to be able to answer if they wish to accept your view.
How many people should we allow to die in this country, who could otherwise be saved, so that we can save lives of people in Africa, India, Russia or Poland?
As I say I am not saying it is a fair question but it is the question that cannot be dodged by politicians choosing to follow the route of putting global well being ahead of national well being.
And I know the obvious answer to you and probably to me is that in the long term we might actually save more lives here. But that is not certain and you are asking people to accept deaths now for fewer deaths tomorrow. That is a hard, if not impossible, sell for any politician.
I'll avoid the obvious answer and instead acknowledge what you say - that it's hard for any national government not to be driven entirely by high viz short term national interest, eg (for here) what booster strategy gets us out of all restrictions asap this year, end of story.
So, in practice, I guess the best we can hope for is that the global case is pushed by the likes of the WHO and various leading scientists and that it gets at least some traction with decision makers. Ie I feel the dead opposite to those who see that case being made by such people and respond "They should shut up. Not in their brief". I think the more noise is made about this the better.
Imagine we reach end of 2023 and Covid is conquered (for now) in the developed world but still raging most everywhere else. That, given the early brilliance in developing vaccines and treatments, would be such a shame - and furthermore a depressing sign that for all our tech and intelligence and progress we can't meet the big challenges.
The issue is -
- The supply of vaccines is no longer the issue. We are looking at 24 billion doses manufactured by the middle of this year. There are about 8 Billion people on the planet. - So Harry Hair Shirting about not "hoarding" vaccinations doesn't actually make sense. Not doing boosters or vaccinating children in the UK will not materially effect vaccine availability world wide.
There's loads of issues. Affordable Supply + Logistics & Distribution + Population Demand = Vaccination Outcome. There are problems to fix with all the inputs there.
But my strong sense is that the assertion "the domestic vaccine strategy of rich countries and their interaction with the pharmaceutical giants has no impact on the vaccination outcome in the rest of the world" is a self-comforting falsehood.
Sorry but it isn't. What you appear to be advocating is that we reduce our booster campaign even though that will not make any further supply available elsewhere. That is like saying: "there are children starving in the world. Until we can feed them we should starve ours too!"
I'm actually not arguing that we shouldn't complete this booster round. We should. Also continue to make inroads into our vaccine refusers. I was talking about the priorities from now on. Let's not be myopic with those.
But what specifically would us doing no 4th jabs do to help someone is Lesotho get a vaccine dose? Their government are already able to buy them at cost, they've already received millions via COVAX for free yet they've had little to no take up.
You want to blame western countries and companies but the problem is far, far more complicated than your reflex action.
What specific actions would you take to help vaccine take up in the developing world, assume vaccine availability is unlimited and free.
My friends in Malawi say that vaccine take up there is poor. It is worth noting that half the population there is under 20, so in percentage terms they are never going to be as high. Add in endemic HIV, TB, malaria and schistosomiasis and covid doesn't really stand out.
Yes, and the delivery and supply of vaccines isn't the problem. The UK doing 4th, 5th or 6th doses will make precisely zero difference to someone in Malawi or a similar country getting their first dose of vaccine. There's so many things that can be fixed wrt rolling out COVID vaccines in the developing world, the first issue is recognising what the problems are and banging on about western nations hoarding vaccines will help no one, not here or the developing world.
Most shocking to me is that Prince Andrew's attorney wanted the judge to say NY's law giving child sexual abuse victims more time to sue is unconstitutional. This would have blocked access to justice for so many victims. Does the Queen know what her son is attempting to do? https://twitter.com/LisaBloom/status/1478400205179408384
A reminder, Brenda is paying for The Duke of York's legal bills.
For my two pennth, the best meal I have ever had was at a restaurant that doesn't even have a michelin star. It wasn't cheap, but it certainly isn't the most expensive meal I have had.
Most of my best meals have been at non-Michelin places
Random top ten (I could choose eighty more)
Eating at Marco Pierre White's very first place, in south London (forget where) - before he had a star, wow
A crab and asparagus dish in a restaurant made from a garage outside Chiang Mai, Thailand
A beef massaman curry on a beach in Ko Tao, also Thailand
Eating at the first Barrafina off the Strand
Osyters and foie gras and gingerbread in some brilliant old school brasserie in Nantes, France
Dinner by Heston (that has a star or two)
A steak at G W Bush's favourite steak restaurant in Austin Texas
Another steak at Cabana Las Lilas in Buenos Aires
Tiny gnocchi in a private restaurant on a private vineyard on the island of Pantelleria, Italy
Some sardines, recently, in a scruffy cafe above a fish market in Sagres, Portugal
How much of this is about company, location, mood, weather, post-coital bliss - rather than food? At least half of it
I am not sure where to even begin with best food, overall.
For steak, I do. The Tasting Room in Frederick MD does a filet mignon that is the best I have had anywhere, including the best that Buenos Aires or Texas has to offer.
For Indian food, sorry to say that my best experience has been neither in India nor in the UK, but in downtown Washington DC. Rasika (chef was in London prior to moving to the US). Their palak chaat is the most delicious single Indian dish I have ever eaten. For Northern Indian, Bukhara in New York used to be the place.
For the most inventive, surprising and incredible meal I've ever eaten, Contra in lower Manhattan wins: https://contra.nyc It has one star.
For the single ingredient of a dish, Brian Voltaggio at Volt (now sadly gone) outdid everything else I have ever experienced. He does molecular cuisine, which is not my favorite style. But he made 'caviar' out of virgin olive oil. It was the most intensely pleasurable tasting experience of my life to date.
I realize this is a very US-centric list. I have had many spectacular meals in France, Italy, the UK, and Switzerland. But none of them truly stand out from the rest.
I must be incredibly unlucky because 98% of my eating experiences in America are mediocre or worse. And I have been there a LOT, and all over, and in all kinds of joints, from top NYC starred places to innovative California pop-ups to famous BBQ shacks in the Deep South
The one exception is Louisiana especially New Orleans. The food there is consistently great, and they don't do the off-puttingly enormous servings you commonly get in the USA. How can such a rich country still believe "great food = tons of food"?
I think we forget how much better food in the UK has got. Because not many pubs can survive as shitty boozers and huge competition in the restaurant sector, "bog standard" offers across the board have got a hell of a lot better in the past 20-30 years. Sure we still have cheap and crap, but that £10 for a main range has got infinity better in lots of places, and many more people are willing to pay for really good stuff (I presume tv chefs lot has helped this).
Its not that long ago that the Olympic Breakfast at a Little Chef was what people did...now they queue for the overpriced but still better offering from the likes of the Breakfast Club.
The US its seems to be cheap and shit, middle price range, eat your weight in meat...then the small niche high end.
WE DEMAND JUBILEE PANCAKES.
(Which used to be 99p)
Used to be the one of the highlight of my family holidays to Cornwall as a kid....stopping off at a Little Chef for jubilee pancakes.
Now I imagine the kids of today in Cornwall are having organic fresh hand crafted crepes with matcha ice cream...
I'm not sure things have changed that much. When we go to Cornwall we usually have a few meals at the cafe on the cliff top above Treganhawke that does all day breakfasts. Plus a few cream teas, fish and chips and ice creams. The fanciest food is usually consumed at the Eden Project.
I go to Cornwall all the time and all my extended family live there. You're really not trying very hard. There is fine food in every major town. You can get excellent Indian and Thai everywhere, for a start
This wasn't intended as a criticism. I live in London so don't go to Cornwall for interesting world cuisine, but things like cream teas and fish and chips on the beach are things we can't get at home and are handy on walks or days on the beach which is what we tend to be doing. We usually go self catering and cook dinner at the chalet anyway, it's more relaxing than eating out with kids. And we don't really visit the major towns either - we always stay in the SE corner so the only close town is across the Tamar in Plymouth which is not especially nice (it is the city of many of my forebears, so I am well disposed to it but it is not an attractive place).
Fair enough
I know I am in a TINY minority here, but I love Plymouth. It is an extraordinary city. Extraordinarily hideous in places, but extraordinarily beautiful and historic in others. An amazing topography. Also some good places to eat!
I have a Plymouth Fine Dining story. On a business trip, having dinner in Spoons. Pissed up blokes a few tables away obviously on a session. Another guy comes in and comes over to tell his friends about his crabbing adventures!
Yep, you guessed it. Pulls an Asda bag onto the table and removes from it a large crab which proceeds to protest with claws towards crabbing gentleman. At which point bar maiden demands that he leave and take his crab with him.
Xian seems to be on everyone's lips but Delta or Omicron they were hard locking the place down ages (weeks?) ago. Because the city is hosting the Winter Olympics so "just in case" China is blitzing it to get Covid cases down because they don't want the global spotlight to show any pox there.
Can we draw any other lessons from it? Nope.
We can't draw any lessons, but we can ask questions
Why are they apparently using flamethrowers to disinfect neighborhoods and bus stops etc?
I find it hard to believe this "malfunctioning foam sprayer" argument. I'm not dismissing it, but how would that work?
Also:
1 We have never seen these malfunctions before
2 There are several videos showing this bizarre "malfunction"
3 And the men using the foam sprayers that instead squirt flame don't look at all surprised. They don't react or back away, and frankly if my foam sprayer suddenly started ejecting napalm I would be a little alarmed, and my body language would show that
Hmmmm
The thing that really gives you a clue something isn't quite right, the story keeps changings. Its a few VHF cases, its a few Delta cases, its the local officials to blame, no its senior officials etc and of course now widespread food shortages. That didn't even happen in Wuhan.
As i said previously, i reckon they have Omicron, with no natural immunity and vaccines don't work, the party are shitting it as there isn't much they can do beyond hope Viagra hard lockdown works.
Yes, that's still my supposition. Tho there is also the chance that
1. They have a coincidental outbreak of VHF or whatever
2. They have a pretty fucking horrible new variant
Something is definitely up
Incidentally, on the veracity of the videos, out of curiosity I spent an hour or two the other day looking at the first videos that came out of Wuhan (you can still find them easily on Twitter)
Some of the most famous ones - bat-eating woman - moped filming bodies in the street - turn out to be fake. The bat was eaten in Indonesia, the bodies were actually rough sleepers in Shenzen
Yet sone of the most notorious ones - corpses piled high in hospitals, body bags filling up trucks, convulsing patients dying in chaos - turn out to be real. For a start, they have been repeated many times outside China. From Ecuador to Iran to Lombardy
And many of these horrific early videos were dismissed as fakes at the time
There is a third option: they have omicron, and it is spreading. They have expended a heck of a lot of effort convincing their population that their response to Covid has been brilliant, and they don't want the story muddied - especially with the Olympics coming up. So they do what oppressive regimes do: overreact to show that they are doing things. WE ARE STRONG!
An interesting question is what the official state media (i.e. virtually all of it) is saying about the situation there.
I suspect we are discovering the answer to the question of how bad is omicron when you haven't been subjected to the previous variants and your vaccines don't protect from it.
And the only places that could answer that sort of questions are the Covid zero places such as China and New Zealand / Australia but even those latter places have vaccines in place.
Jeez. We are discovering the answer to the question of how much an authoritarian government wants to ensure that a global event attended by people from over a hundred countries and covered by the global media goes ahead with as few issues as possible which might derail this, their flagship event, in particular Covid.
I mean that is pretty brutal but that is really "all" there is to it.
I for one am glad that "Topping" off of PB has personally solved a mystery that has much of the world puzzled, including the Chinese themselves
There's none so blind as those that will not see.
You're projecting again. Quite chronically
Whining about "projection" every time you are outfoxed on an internet chatroom says a bit more about you than about your interlocutor.
'We can’t vaccinate the planet every six months', says JCVI chief Fourth Covid jabs should not be offered until there is more evidence, the head of Britain's vaccine body has said - as he warned that giving boosters to people every six months was “not sustainable”.
6 monthly jabs may or may not be the right thing, but his remit is not "THE PLANET". It's the UK. Once again heading outside their remit.
Unless we vaccinate the planet - collectively - then we aren't immune from the next mutation.
That's another covid myth apparently: Myth #1,765 in a regular series...
We should share Covid vaccines with the world, because it is the right thing to do, but not because it will limit of emergence of 'variants' - vaccines don't generate variants but they don't preclude their emergence either - it's all a bit unclear and complicated.
Not just people either, Covid is a general mammalian phenomenon
Nevertheless a world with Covid raging is more likely to throw up things which come and fuck us up than a world with Covid under control. And the quicker we vaccinate the world the quicker we get from that first situation to the second. It's as much a practical imperative as a moral one.
No it isn't necessarily a practical or moral one and probably not a scientific one either. All governments have their first responsibility to their own population. IMHO, the first priority of Western governments is to figure out how to defeat or contain the virus. The strategies that they use will then inform them how they support other governments to do the same.
The virus respects no borders. It's a global pandemic and the best response to it is global. The more inefficient and illogical is the vaccine rollout - eg 5 or 6 jabs in one country and zero in another - the longer the pandemic will last, and the longer it lasts the more the damage will be and the more likely it is that we will be impacted.
The question then is this - to what extent should the normal rules of national centric politics - which you outline - be flexed in order to facilitate the optimum globally efficient solution?
I say the answer to this is "to a very great extent" and I think this is the correct answer. After all, this is a once-a-century emergency with an awful lot at stake. If we can't get our (global) act together for this, at least better than we are atm, when will we ever be able to?
So I am going to ask a question. I don't claim it is a fair question or perhaps even valid but it is the question that any politician has to be able to answer if they wish to accept your view.
How many people should we allow to die in this country, who could otherwise be saved, so that we can save lives of people in Africa, India, Russia or Poland?
As I say I am not saying it is a fair question but it is the question that cannot be dodged by politicians choosing to follow the route of putting global well being ahead of national well being.
And I know the obvious answer to you and probably to me is that in the long term we might actually save more lives here. But that is not certain and you are asking people to accept deaths now for fewer deaths tomorrow. That is a hard, if not impossible, sell for any politician.
I'll avoid the obvious answer and instead acknowledge what you say - that it's hard for any national government not to be driven entirely by high viz short term national interest, eg (for here) what booster strategy gets us out of all restrictions asap this year, end of story.
So, in practice, I guess the best we can hope for is that the global case is pushed by the likes of the WHO and various leading scientists and that it gets at least some traction with decision makers. Ie I feel the dead opposite to those who see that case being made by such people and respond "They should shut up. Not in their brief". I think the more noise is made about this the better.
Imagine we reach end of 2023 and Covid is conquered (for now) in the developed world but still raging most everywhere else. That, given the early brilliance in developing vaccines and treatments, would be such a shame - and furthermore a depressing sign that for all our tech and intelligence and progress we can't meet the big challenges.
The issue is -
- The supply of vaccines is no longer the issue. We are looking at 24 billion doses manufactured by the middle of this year. There are about 8 Billion people on the planet. - So Harry Hair Shirting about not "hoarding" vaccinations doesn't actually make sense. Not doing boosters or vaccinating children in the UK will not materially effect vaccine availability world wide.
There's loads of issues. Affordable Supply + Logistics & Distribution + Population Demand = Vaccination Outcome. There are problems to fix with all the inputs there.
But my strong sense is that the assertion "the domestic vaccine strategy of rich countries and their interaction with the pharmaceutical giants has no impact on the vaccination outcome in the rest of the world" is a self-comforting falsehood.
Sorry but it isn't. What you appear to be advocating is that we reduce our booster campaign even though that will not make any further supply available elsewhere. That is like saying: "there are children starving in the world. Until we can feed them we should starve ours too!"
I'm actually not arguing that we shouldn't complete this booster round. We should. Also continue to make inroads into our vaccine refusers. I was talking about the priorities from now on. Let's not be myopic with those.
But what specifically would us doing no 4th jabs do to help someone is Lesotho get a vaccine dose? Their government are already able to buy them at cost, they've already received millions via COVAX for free yet they've had little to no take up.
You want to blame western countries and companies but the problem is far, far more complicated than your reflex action.
What specific actions would you take to help vaccine take up in the developing world, assume vaccine availability is unlimited and free.
It's a complicated process - but it's pretty obvious that there are supply problems. For one thing, doses were significantly delayed when India stopped exporting.
Africa has administered 63% of vaccines received and received 450m doses, obviously insufficient for 1.2bn people. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/56100076
so there are still 170m or so doses in the supply channel - that doesn't sound like a supply issue at Indian's end.
"Not that I haven’t very much enjoyed the recent articles by gentlemen of a certain age who have FINALLY found a woman they care about in the long-running Epstein story. Unsurprisingly, perhaps – it’s the Queen! Here at last is a lady tangentially connected to the grimness whose honour and dignity actually matters, as opposed to those of the other ladies involved, whose tribulations they have at no point been interested in writing about.
Even Ghislaine Maxwell has elicited more sympathy in some quarters than the actual victims of Epstein. And, indeed, the victims of Maxwell herself."
Xian seems to be on everyone's lips but Delta or Omicron they were hard locking the place down ages (weeks?) ago. Because the city is hosting the Winter Olympics so "just in case" China is blitzing it to get Covid cases down because they don't want the global spotlight to show any pox there.
Can we draw any other lessons from it? Nope.
We can't draw any lessons, but we can ask questions
Why are they apparently using flamethrowers to disinfect neighborhoods and bus stops etc?
I find it hard to believe this "malfunctioning foam sprayer" argument. I'm not dismissing it, but how would that work?
Also:
1 We have never seen these malfunctions before
2 There are several videos showing this bizarre "malfunction"
3 And the men using the foam sprayers that instead squirt flame don't look at all surprised. They don't react or back away, and frankly if my foam sprayer suddenly started ejecting napalm I would be a little alarmed, and my body language would show that
Hmmmm
The thing that really gives you a clue something isn't quite right, the story keeps changings. Its a few VHF cases, its a few Delta cases, its the local officials to blame, no its senior officials etc and of course now widespread food shortages. That didn't even happen in Wuhan.
As i said previously, i reckon they have Omicron, with no natural immunity and vaccines don't work, the party are shitting it as there isn't much they can do beyond hope Viagra hard lockdown works.
Yes, that's still my supposition. Tho there is also the chance that
1. They have a coincidental outbreak of VHF or whatever
2. They have a pretty fucking horrible new variant
Something is definitely up
Incidentally, on the veracity of the videos, out of curiosity I spent an hour or two the other day looking at the first videos that came out of Wuhan (you can still find them easily on Twitter)
Some of the most famous ones - bat-eating woman - moped filming bodies in the street - turn out to be fake. The bat was eaten in Indonesia, the bodies were actually rough sleepers in Shenzen
Yet sone of the most notorious ones - corpses piled high in hospitals, body bags filling up trucks, convulsing patients dying in chaos - turn out to be real. For a start, they have been repeated many times outside China. From Ecuador to Iran to Lombardy
And many of these horrific early videos were dismissed as fakes at the time
There is a third option: they have omicron, and it is spreading. They have expended a heck of a lot of effort convincing their population that their response to Covid has been brilliant, and they don't want the story muddied - especially with the Olympics coming up. So they do what oppressive regimes do: overreact to show that they are doing things. WE ARE STRONG!
An interesting question is what the official state media (i.e. virtually all of it) is saying about the situation there.
I say in my comment, my FIRST supposition is Omicron
The other two are unlikely, but not impossible
You wrote a short sentence agreeing it might be omicron (without mentioning the word), and then a long spiel about YOUR DRAMATC THEORIES ABOUT HOW WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!! with 'something is definitely up'.
As a professional writerflint knapper, you know what you're doing...
Sigh. Go back and read the entire thread. It was a series of remarks
Xian seems to be on everyone's lips but Delta or Omicron they were hard locking the place down ages (weeks?) ago. Because the city is hosting the Winter Olympics so "just in case" China is blitzing it to get Covid cases down because they don't want the global spotlight to show any pox there.
Can we draw any other lessons from it? Nope.
We can't draw any lessons, but we can ask questions
Why are they apparently using flamethrowers to disinfect neighborhoods and bus stops etc?
I find it hard to believe this "malfunctioning foam sprayer" argument. I'm not dismissing it, but how would that work?
Also:
1 We have never seen these malfunctions before
2 There are several videos showing this bizarre "malfunction"
3 And the men using the foam sprayers that instead squirt flame don't look at all surprised. They don't react or back away, and frankly if my foam sprayer suddenly started ejecting napalm I would be a little alarmed, and my body language would show that
Hmmmm
The thing that really gives you a clue something isn't quite right, the story keeps changings. Its a few VHF cases, its a few Delta cases, its the local officials to blame, no its senior officials etc and of course now widespread food shortages. That didn't even happen in Wuhan.
As i said previously, i reckon they have Omicron, with no natural immunity and vaccines don't work, the party are shitting it as there isn't much they can do beyond hope Viagra hard lockdown works.
Yes, that's still my supposition. Tho there is also the chance that
1. They have a coincidental outbreak of VHF or whatever
2. They have a pretty fucking horrible new variant
Something is definitely up
Incidentally, on the veracity of the videos, out of curiosity I spent an hour or two the other day looking at the first videos that came out of Wuhan (you can still find them easily on Twitter)
Some of the most famous ones - bat-eating woman - moped filming bodies in the street - turn out to be fake. The bat was eaten in Indonesia, the bodies were actually rough sleepers in Shenzen
Yet sone of the most notorious ones - corpses piled high in hospitals, body bags filling up trucks, convulsing patients dying in chaos - turn out to be real. For a start, they have been repeated many times outside China. From Ecuador to Iran to Lombardy
And many of these horrific early videos were dismissed as fakes at the time
There is a third option: they have omicron, and it is spreading. They have expended a heck of a lot of effort convincing their population that their response to Covid has been brilliant, and they don't want the story muddied - especially with the Olympics coming up. So they do what oppressive regimes do: overreact to show that they are doing things. WE ARE STRONG!
An interesting question is what the official state media (i.e. virtually all of it) is saying about the situation there.
I suspect we are discovering the answer to the question of how bad is omicron when you haven't been subjected to the previous variants and your vaccines don't protect from it.
And the only places that could answer that sort of questions are the Covid zero places such as China and New Zealand / Australia but even those latter places have vaccines in place.
Jeez. We are discovering the answer to the question of how much an authoritarian government wants to ensure that a global event attended by people from over a hundred countries and covered by the global media goes ahead with as few issues as possible which might derail this, their flagship event, in particular Covid.
I mean that is pretty brutal but that is really "all" there is to it.
I for one am glad that "Topping" off of PB has personally solved a mystery that has much of the world puzzled, including the Chinese themselves
There's none so blind as those that will not see.
You're projecting again. Quite chronically
Whining about "projection" every time you are outfoxed on an internet chatroom says a bit more about you than about your interlocutor.
Is Boris gonna lock us down again, in some form or other, at 5pm?
Quick vote?
My vote is No, he won't. But I'm worried
I think No. I hope No. I am not 100% convinced though. I think he might crumble.
Johnson is no doubt getting a load of pressure from medical professionals on one side and from Tory MPs on the other. Only one of those groups can remove him this week.
I vote No. He would be deposed within 48 hours I think if he announces lockdown tonight. The data just isn't there and the backbench have run out of patience with SAGE and modelling anyway.
I vote No. He would be deposed within 48 hours I think if he announces lockdown tonight. The data just isn't there and the backbench and the public have run out of patience with SAGE and modelling anyway.
FTFY.
Yes, even with the incidentals it doesn't look like we'll reach anything like 3,000 hospitalisations per day which was the best case scenario for Omicron (not including incidentals).
Care to bet on that? I'm pretty confident we will exceed 3k hospitalizations per day as per coronavirus.data.gov £25 - winnings to pb.com?
Precise terms -> according to coronavirus.data.gov.uk, the UK will exceed 3k hospitalizations per day for at least one day before end of March.
I think Max PB was talking about England Hospitalisation.
Then staying under 3,000 sounds quite possible to me.
If you where prepared to limit it to England, use 7 day average and end date of End Of Feb, then I would take that £25 bet (donation to PB)
How about just England as you suggest -> but just a single day over 3,000 hospital admissions? I feel like that's very fair given the original claim. Happy to have end Feb as the date as you suggest.
Deal?
rkrkrk,
Thanks for getting back to me, and appreciated that you have accepted 2 of my 3 caveats, so I'm very tempted, But would you stretch to 2 consecutive days over over 3,000? (I'm trying to avaode a one day spick)
Deal?
Done! If England hospitalization exceed 3k for 2 consecutive days by Feb 28th (inclusive), you can pay £25 to pb.com. If not, I will.
Comments
@RobDotHutton
·
3m
Quoting Boris Johnson's old columns back to him is so cruel it should be covered by the Geneva Conventions.
but it is funny...
昨天在小红书上发帖被删帖胎死腹中的那位博主，在微博上发言了！#陕西 #西安 #Xian #疫情 #COVID19 #Omicron #封城 #韭菜
就在西安高新医院门口，孕妇大出血都不让进医院救治！Pouting face
Yesterday, the dead blogger who posted a post on Xiaohongshu who was deleted has spoken on Weibo! #陕西 #西安 #Xian #疫情 #COVID19 #Omicron #封城 #韭菜
At the gate of Xi'an High-tech Hospital, pregnant women with severe bleeding were not allowed to enter the hospital for treatment!
WARNING: NSFW AND MIGHT BE FAKE (BUT LOOKS REAL)
https://twitter.com/TragedyInChina1/status/1478321126761631745?s=20
As for your last sentence I'm afraid that's Reactionary Reductive speak - I'll file along with things like "if you worry about the global poor so much why don't you go and be a missionary in Africa?" Or of course the iconic "if you're so keen on a wealth tax what's stopping you sending a cheque to hmrc?"
It's a bulging file but there's room.
The question the Government has to answer is how do they introduce stability into the consumer market while keeping price increases at manageable levels. 1 small local restaurant told me their gas costs have gone from £150 to £1600 a month
Conservatives are party of Flat Taxes on fuel.
Hold on. Is this a COVID national address or Boris talking policy to his own party National Address? 🤔
Do we have the latest on Angela's locks as yet?
(Happy New Year, by the way)
We are passengers. We don't 'ride the bus'.
Most shocking to me is that Prince Andrew's attorney wanted the judge to say NY's law giving child sexual abuse victims more time to sue is unconstitutional.
This would have blocked access to justice for so many victims.
Does the Queen know what her son is attempting to do?
https://twitter.com/LisaBloom/status/1478400205179408384
Why are they apparently using flamethrowers to disinfect neighborhoods and bus stops etc?
I find it hard to believe this "malfunctioning foam sprayer" argument. I'm not dismissing it, but how would that work?
Also:
1 We have never seen these malfunctions before
2 There are several videos showing this bizarre "malfunction"
3 And the men using the foam sprayers that instead squirt flame don't look at all surprised. They don't react or back away, and frankly if my foam sprayer suddenly started ejecting napalm I would be a little alarmed, and my body language would show that
Hmmmm
I was actually streaming something on cable the other day and he popped up – was very hard to switch him off then so had to fish around for the fast forward button.
The point is that not doing boosters and child vaccinations in the UK will not, of itself, effect the actual number of people getting vaccinated in poor countries.
The supply bit of the equation is not the problem. The other bits are. So do the other bits.
It would mean admitting her guilt and full disclosure, of course, since the SDNY prosecutors do not do deals easily.
As i said previously, i reckon they have Omicron, with no natural immunity and vaccines don't work, the party are shitting it as there isn't much they can do beyond hope Viagra hard lockdown works.
He gets to Xi'an from about 3 minutes (tho the riots in Holland are also pretty compelling viewing in a bad way)
https://rumble.com/vrv3jd-xi-hiding-new-emerging-variant-xian-variant.html
What is undeniably true - too many videos to fake - is that the CCP is decamping THOUSANDS of people out of the city in the middle of the night
"You don't want to be dragged through a court in one of the most questionable legal systems in the world, therefore you must be guilty."
Nah.
Affordable Supply + Logistics & Distribution + Population Demand = Vaccination Outcome
Now
Supply and price isn't a problem - it's coming from Indian in insane amounts.
Logistics & Distribution is an age old third world problem not easily fixed.
Population Demand - is another age old third world problem not easily fixed when China has spent a year selling their vaccine by discrediting the Western ones.
So the problem we have left are the impossible to fix ones otherwise Africa wouldn't have half the issues it has.
Usually when major powers stumble like this it's the prelude for a bit of "military therapy". Let's hope not.
Unlikely
Every time Labour (a Democratic Socialist Party) have a Democratic Socialist as leader, the Centrists leave
SDP/Change UK then soon realize there is no way to success as a Centrist Party unless its Labour and give up
But he is going to look more and more ogre than sexy baldy. Not that is a reason to get rid of him. The fact he has more hair than economic plan is reason to get rid.
The Falklands put a stop to all that, ofcourse.
It seems very unlikely China would be the source of a new immune-escaping variant anyway given the population is quite immune naive so still susceptible to Delta as well as Omicron.
Because he is a liar. A malicious, racist, fuckwit liar. On nearly every subject he touches.
1. They have a coincidental outbreak of VHF or whatever
2. They have a pretty fucking horrible new variant
Something is definitely up
Incidentally, on the veracity of the videos, out of curiosity I spent an hour or two the other day looking at the first videos that came out of Wuhan (you can still find them easily on Twitter)
Some of the most famous ones - bat-eating woman - moped filming bodies in the street - turn out to be fake. The bat was eaten in Indonesia, the bodies were actually rough sleepers in Shenzen
Yet sone of the most notorious ones - corpses piled high in hospitals, body bags filling up trucks, convulsing patients dying in chaos - turn out to be real. For a start, they have been repeated many times outside China. From Ecuador to Iran to Lombardy
And many of these horrific early videos were dismissed as fakes at the time
Robert Lacey: I see no role in royal life for Andrew in the near future or the intermediate future.
How much future does Lacey think he has?
UK will fare worst this financial disaster year than peers because of Brexit, and Boris public response to this will keep the Tories out of power for a generation. Boris is now a danger to the publics trust in Brexit.
I feel like that's very fair given the original claim. Happy to have end Feb as the date as you suggest.
Deal?
An interesting question is what the official state media (i.e. virtually all of it) is saying about the situation there.
You want to blame western countries and companies but the problem is far, far more complicated than your reflex action.
What specific actions would you take to help vaccine take up in the developing world, assume vaccine availability is unlimited and free.
And the only places that could answer that sort of questions are the Covid zero places such as China and New Zealand / Australia but even those latter places have vaccines in place.
I mean that is pretty brutal but that is really "all" there is to it.
The other two are unlikely, but not impossible
https://pressgazette.co.uk/why-twitter-has-suspended-news-aggregator-politiocs-for-all/
Not according to todays YG
📊 Do you approve or disapprove of Tony Blair being given a knighthood?
✅ Approve: 14%
❌ Disapprove: 63%
Net rating of -49
Via
@YouGov
, 4 Jan 2022
Either way, their policy of not giving credit was shite and they deserved to be suspended just for that.
For most civil cases it seems most victims are trying to put it behind them but I suspect the photos make that rather difficult for Virginia, when it keeps on reappearing.
Their incredibly fast rise always had alarm beels ringing for me. Nothing to everywhere in a couple of months. Most start-up brands who die for that, let alone a boring politics focused account managing it.
What changed recently is they are now a business.
Thanks for getting back to me, and appreciated that you have accepted 2 of my 3 caveats, so I'm very tempted, But would you stretch to 2 consecutive days over over 3,000? (I'm trying to avaode a one day spick)
Deal?
However, I don't think it will be much more than temporary - the government's problems and failings are now just much too familiar in the public's imagination.
As a professional writerflint knapper, you know what you're doing...
How he has fallen, from being loved by everyone in 1997, to loved by nobody in 2022!
https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1478382951851249677?s=20
Ironically those most supportive of knighting Blair are LDs, who were probably most opposed to him by 2005, though a plurality of LDs also oppose his knighthood
Africa has administered 63% of vaccines received and received 450m doses, obviously insufficient for 1.2bn people.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/56100076
Yep, you guessed it. Pulls an Asda bag onto the table and removes from it a large crab which proceeds to protest with claws towards crabbing gentleman. At which point bar maiden demands that he leave and take his crab with him.
Now ... USA legal system and defamation.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/epstein-virginia-giuffre-rina-oh-lawsuit-b1948384.html
($10m says the New York Post a couple of months later)
https://nypost.com/2022/01/03/jeffrey-epstein-ex-rina-oh-suing-virginia-giuffre-who-named-her-as-a-recruiter/
Marina Hyde in the Graun:
"Not that I haven’t very much enjoyed the recent articles by gentlemen of a certain age who have FINALLY found a woman they care about in the long-running Epstein story. Unsurprisingly, perhaps – it’s the Queen! Here at last is a lady tangentially connected to the grimness whose honour and dignity actually matters, as opposed to those of the other ladies involved, whose tribulations they have at no point been interested in writing about.
Even Ghislaine Maxwell has elicited more sympathy in some quarters than the actual victims of Epstein. And, indeed, the victims of Maxwell herself."
If England hospitalization exceed 3k for 2 consecutive days by Feb 28th (inclusive), you can pay £25 to pb.com.
If not, I will.