Everybody seems to think the NHS is unsustainable, but I doubt there’s any unity behind what might replace it.
I think the rather boring, awful answer is likely more money, but those figures I posted yesterday on the significant lack of capital expenditure versus peer systems points to a grand and systemic misallocation of funds.
I'm no NHS cheerleader. But it does have one undeniable benefit over its counterparts elsewhere, which is that it is cheap. Whether it is good value is more debatable, but my view is that it is (at the risk of falling into the trap of setting the American model up as the only alternative, the American model is awful, awful value for money; incentives are set up to introduce things which patients don't value.)
Is there a way of keeping the value for money while improving the quality? My view is that the way to do so would be to introduce notional charging, similar to the way we pay for prescriptions (I think this may be what the Irish do, but my understanding of this is slight). Free at the point of use isn't, in my view, supportable in the long term without adding increasing levels of tax burden to the working population. I'm very open to changing my mind on this however.
A genuinely interesting question.
I'm not convinced there is much more money to be made available from other sources given recent increases, and I think there may be a crunch coming in the next Government period as a more stable status is sought after Covid can no longer be an excuse for whatever it is wanted to be an excuse. There's Covid money to other priorities, however.
How will it change? Gradually and by marginal gains.
At the margins, some services will be privatised by neglect where there is not an acute requirement. Recent examples imo have eg been dealing with earwax - now done by setups such as Specsavers rather than your local GP practice, and some podiatry type services.
I can't call what will happen on dentistry.
GPs will focus on whatever it is they get paid to do, filtered through a scrummage about productivity / capacity / reward. Services offered via GP surgeries will continue to broaden. Ditto pharmacies, I'd suggest.
I think there are also potential productivity improvements, and significant long term gains to be made by preventative care. I'd say from experience that the NHS is increasingly good at this.
The increased no of part time GPs offers an opportunity for more resource. Ditto the NHS staff count being up by approx 10% since 2019; that must offer opportunities.
Some things the NHS does very well and will - from administrative things like purchase of drugs and research where uniform access to large datasets is a value-creator They will also keep the chronic and the complex. The unified model also avoid getting clogged as the German system did in the Covid vaccine rollout when the medical data was held by different professionals from those who needed to know who to vaccinate.
There are also potential benefits for general health from the Active Travel policies. Even marginal gains - say 10% of travel in London by bicycle - will offer big benefits by moving part of the population away from sedentary lifestyles. London offers a good illustration of how long it takes to get this stuff even somewhat right (my interpretation is 3 generations of infrastructure design so far), and how tough it is to change an embedded culture.
"COVID-19 in China: Current Situation and Downstream effects: 🧵
1/ From the outset, it is very important to recognise that a humanitarian catastrophe is currently unfolding in China. Analysis of this situation is not incompatible with recognising the horror of the situation."
Also: stock up on crucial meds now. Prepare for a new variant. FUCKKKKK
Doesn't do a great deal for the global economic position either, does it?
No. At best we are going to get another bout of fierce downward pressure on the global "recovery"
A worse alternative is that we get globally interrupted supply lines for six months/year... which is ominous (on top of the millions-dead horror in China, of course)
Even worse: a new, nastier variant erupts when 800 million people all get Covid at once
Which is why I don't buy the bioweapon thesis.
It's going to royally fuck China. They covered it up out of embarrassment and because they wanted everyone else to suffer too, not just them; not because it was a sophisticated weapon to just cripple the West.
Yes, I don't believe it was a bioweapon. I DO believeChina was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons. This is all accepted. There is proof
Of course the USA was doing the same. Indeed one of the great ironies of Covid is that it likely came from the lab because the Americans deliberately funded Chinese GOF research in Wuhan. Why? One explanation: partly to get around the ban on GOF in the USA, but also because the Americans wanted an insider in Wuhan, to tell them what the Chinese were doing re bioweapons
I've read quite plausible analyses by sober people that Daszak - head of EcoHeath at WIV - was also working with the CIA, to do this insider stuff. That sounds totally mad - I admit- but it does explain why he has gone completely untouched to date, not even subpoena'd let alone brought to trial
"China was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons."
Without meaning to further your monomaniacal belief, the above could mean two things: 1) They were investigating them as potential weapons to be used against others (and with little other use), or 2) They were investigating them because they were afraid other might weaponise the diseases, and look at what it meant.
The second is a much more interesting one to consider, as it covers both a defence against such weapons, as well as what the weapons might be.
But I reckon it's all tinfoilhattery anyway. As ever, you go for the DRAMATIC!!!!!!!!!
There have been several times in the last ew decades (known thanks to increased surveillance) that there might have been a worldwide pandemic: MERS or H1N1 being examples. We got lucky then. We were unlucky with Covid.
The Chinese were speculating about weaponising coronaviruses as early as 2015. Indeed they wondered if such a bug could cripple foreign health systems!
"Titled, The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons, the paper was written in 2015 by 18 Chinese military scientists and weapons experts. They stated that a family of viruses called coronaviruses could be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed in a way never seen before.” Noteworthily, the cause of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is a coronavirus that first emerged in Wuhan, China, and was named SARS-CoV-2. The document also highlighted how these engineered viruses will lead to a “new era of genetic weapons” and fantasised about a bioweapon attack that could cause the “enemy’s medical system to collapse.”
"This document, along with other intelligence inputs, has prompted US President Joe Biden to direct his Intelligence Community (IC) to investigate and report the origins of the virus in 90 days. While the investigation’s results are awaited, we must look at China’s philosophy and capabilities in the realm of biowarfare as Beijing’s ambitions and aggression grow.""
This paper, as a source, is not disputed, by the way
Have we considered the possibility that Covid is a well-intentioned effort to solve the global warming problem by reducing the world's population by ... I dunno ... maybe 90% or so?
Personally I'd make sure there was a vaccine available for friends and family before releasing it into the wild but ... best-laid plans and all that.
One thing that is hard for non-Americans (and even many Americans) ot understand is that there is no "American model" of health care.
Instead, there are a bunch of different systems, which can be understood historically, but do not together make a single system as, for example, the NHS does.
First, there is private insurance for workers, usually paid by employers, though there are still a few plans run by unions. (This became important during WW II, when wage controls kept employers from competing in the usual way for scarce workers.) The plans vary -- to put it mildly. A few are so generous that the Obama administration wanted to penalize these "Cadillac" plans.
Second, there is the immense Medicare single-payer system for old folks, with its parts A, B, C, and D*.
Third, there are 52 (50 states, Puerto Rico, and DC) Medicaid single-payer systems for poor folks. (Some, of course, are eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid.)
Fourth, there is the Veteran's Adminstration system, which is something like your NHS, in that doctors and nurses are employees of the government,
Fifth, there is the Indian Health Service, where the doctors and nurses are, like the VA and NHS, employees of the government.
Sixth, there are health savings accounts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_savings_account (When governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels set these up for state employees. They have been very popular there, appear to have cut medical expenses, and, if anything, improved outcomes. They might not do as well with a less educated population.)
And, there are other smaller ones.
I say this, not to defend all these systems -- which I don't -- but to ask you to understand the complexity, and perhaps even learn from our mistakes.
(*Full disclosure: I am enrolled in parts A and C of Medicare.)
It seems in America that you should be covered by your parents plan aged 0-18 and then your employer until retirement (but with expensive employee deductions and premiums) and then Medicare.
Medicaid if you're poor throughout, and not working, but I understand that cover is very basic. The other trouble is the "between jobs" piece.
And if you're employer is a cheap bastard and doesn't give you proper cover which is why so many working poor in the US have awful healthcare outcomes.
The US system is a disaster, worse than the NHS, which really goes to show how bad it is. I don't understand the focus on the US when there's so many viable models in Europe which have an element of personal risk liability as well as state subsidy and cover.
Precisely because it's unquestionably worse, so it suits the vested interests to portray the US system as the only alternative.
Rubbish. It is far more mundane. The reason there is so much focus on the American system is it is on telly every day so we are all familiar with it.
It is good to see that bettors are begining to agree with a conclusion that I came to soon after the 2020 election: Trump is unlikely to be elected president in 2024 (or 2028, or . . . ).
It seemed to me then, as it does now, that Republican voters were, slowly, coming to understand that Trump is a loser, and that they are also coming to understand, perhaps more slowly, with the endless scandal stories, that he isn't fit to be president. Combined, those two make it unlikely that he can win the nomination.
And, if he were to win the nomination, he would face stiff odds in any general election. "About a month after launching his 2024 presidential campaign, former President Donald Trump’s standing with voters has hit its lowest point in more than seven years, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday." source: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/14/trump-hits-7-year-low-in-new-national-poll-as-biden-approval-climbs.html
One thing that is hard for non-Americans (and even many Americans) ot understand is that there is no "American model" of health care.
Instead, there are a bunch of different systems, which can be understood historically, but do not together make a single system as, for example, the NHS does.
First, there is private insurance for workers, usually paid by employers, though there are still a few plans run by unions. (This became important during WW II, when wage controls kept employers from competing in the usual way for scarce workers.) The plans vary -- to put it mildly. A few are so generous that the Obama administration wanted to penalize these "Cadillac" plans.
Second, there is the immense Medicare single-payer system for old folks, with its parts A, B, C, and D*.
Third, there are 52 (50 states, Puerto Rico, and DC) Medicaid single-payer systems for poor folks. (Some, of course, are eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid.)
Fourth, there is the Veteran's Adminstration system, which is something like your NHS, in that doctors and nurses are employees of the government,
Fifth, there is the Indian Health Service, where the doctors and nurses are, like the VA and NHS, employees of the government.
Sixth, there are health savings accounts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_savings_account (When governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels set these up for state employees. They have been very popular there, appear to have cut medical expenses, and, if anything, improved outcomes. They might not do as well with a less educated population.)
And, there are other smaller ones.
I say this, not to defend all these systems -- which I don't -- but to ask you to understand the complexity, and perhaps even learn from our mistakes.
(*Full disclosure: I am enrolled in parts A and C of Medicare.)
It seems in America that you should be covered by your parents plan aged 0-18 and then your employer until retirement (but with expensive employee deductions and premiums) and then Medicare.
Medicaid if you're poor throughout, and not working, but I understand that cover is very basic. The other trouble is the "between jobs" piece.
And if you're employer is a cheap bastard and doesn't give you proper cover which is why so many working poor in the US have awful healthcare outcomes.
The US system is a disaster, worse than the NHS, which really goes to show how bad it is. I don't understand the focus on the US when there's so many viable models in Europe which have an element of personal risk liability as well as state subsidy and cover.
Precisely because it's unquestionably worse, so it suits the vested interests to portray the US system as the only alternative.
I don’t know. Back in the 80s and 90s there plenty of “radicals” who promoted a U.S. style system.
A US style system tied to the principle of universal health care is a European style system, so that's a moot point.
Ok whatever.
My point is that nobody sensible now thinks that a pure monolithic NHS makes sense, and everyone is aware that a U.S. style “system” is a disaster too.
I’m not a health economist, but as far as I know people tend to hold up the French system as the best (or least worst, because there doesn’t seem to be a perfect system).
France, Germany and Switzerland are the best, I think.
I think the fixation on UK vs US is not so much political from either side, as a feature of the dialled up volume of the US healthcare debate. The Americans seem to be keenest on this dichotomy: fans of their system hold out the NHS as an example of socialist healthcare, and detractors look longingly at the wonderful NHS where diabetes drugs don't bankrupt you. We get a bit of the same with policing and race relations unfortunately.
We luckily don't have the same problem of ignoring European examples when it comes to transport infrastructure, education (ish) or environmental standards.
I think this is what's always amused me about the British centre-left.
There's a lot of wax lyrical stuff about being European but ultimately we take almost all our cues from the US.
This is not the case in Europe proper - which just shows how different we are.
Wait till you hear about the British centre right, who think it the height of affected poofery to eat moussaka.
It's just fancy shepherd's pie.
If I use British shepherds, it just doesn't taste the same.
"COVID-19 in China: Current Situation and Downstream effects: 🧵
1/ From the outset, it is very important to recognise that a humanitarian catastrophe is currently unfolding in China. Analysis of this situation is not incompatible with recognising the horror of the situation."
Also: stock up on crucial meds now. Prepare for a new variant. FUCKKKKK
Doesn't do a great deal for the global economic position either, does it?
No. At best we are going to get another bout of fierce downward pressure on the global "recovery"
A worse alternative is that we get globally interrupted supply lines for six months/year... which is ominous (on top of the millions-dead horror in China, of course)
Even worse: a new, nastier variant erupts when 800 million people all get Covid at once
Which is why I don't buy the bioweapon thesis.
It's going to royally fuck China. They covered it up out of embarrassment and because they wanted everyone else to suffer too, not just them; not because it was a sophisticated weapon to just cripple the West.
Yes, I don't believe it was a bioweapon. I DO believeChina was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons. This is all accepted. There is proof
Of course the USA was doing the same. Indeed one of the great ironies of Covid is that it likely came from the lab because the Americans deliberately funded Chinese GOF research in Wuhan. Why? One explanation: partly to get around the ban on GOF in the USA, but also because the Americans wanted an insider in Wuhan, to tell them what the Chinese were doing re bioweapons
I've read quite plausible analyses by sober people that Daszak - head of EcoHeath at WIV - was also working with the CIA, to do this insider stuff. That sounds totally mad - I admit- but it does explain why he has gone completely untouched to date, not even subpoena'd let alone brought to trial
"China was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons."
Without meaning to further your monomaniacal belief, the above could mean two things: 1) They were investigating them as potential weapons to be used against others (and with little other use), or 2) They were investigating them because they were afraid other might weaponise the diseases, and look at what it meant.
The second is a much more interesting one to consider, as it covers both a defence against such weapons, as well as what the weapons might be.
But I reckon it's all tinfoilhattery anyway. As ever, you go for the DRAMATIC!!!!!!!!!
There have been several times in the last ew decades (known thanks to increased surveillance) that there might have been a worldwide pandemic: MERS or H1N1 being examples. We got lucky then. We were unlucky with Covid.
The Chinese were speculating about weaponising coronaviruses as early as 2015. Indeed they wondered if such a bug could cripple foreign health systems!
"Titled, The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons, the paper was written in 2015 by 18 Chinese military scientists and weapons experts. They stated that a family of viruses called coronaviruses could be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed in a way never seen before.” Noteworthily, the cause of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is a coronavirus that first emerged in Wuhan, China, and was named SARS-CoV-2. The document also highlighted how these engineered viruses will lead to a “new era of genetic weapons” and fantasised about a bioweapon attack that could cause the “enemy’s medical system to collapse.”
"This document, along with other intelligence inputs, has prompted US President Joe Biden to direct his Intelligence Community (IC) to investigate and report the origins of the virus in 90 days. While the investigation’s results are awaited, we must look at China’s philosophy and capabilities in the realm of biowarfare as Beijing’s ambitions and aggression grow.""
This paper, as a source, is not disputed, by the way
Have we considered the possibility that Covid is a well-intentioned effort to solve the global warming problem by reducing the world's population by ... I dunno ... maybe 90% or so?
Personally I'd make sure there was a vaccine available for friends and family before releasing it into the wild but ... best-laid plans and all that.
Late stage Tom Clancy. When there were signs that he was suffering from the early stages of MAGA syndrome. Years before we realised what that was.
"COVID-19 in China: Current Situation and Downstream effects: 🧵
1/ From the outset, it is very important to recognise that a humanitarian catastrophe is currently unfolding in China. Analysis of this situation is not incompatible with recognising the horror of the situation."
Hypothetically, if HIV guaranteed complete immunity to Covid (including all current variants, and future ones), I'd pick HIV.
I'm not sure he's a loon, at all. He has strident opinions, he also seems notably well informed - this is his job: biorisk
The HIV thing is eccentric but arguable. If you believe Covid will be with us forever and will always mutate, quite possibly into something nastier, then having (now treatable) HIV would be better than getting a lethal and untreatable dose of Covid
He also accused the BBC of suppressing long covid.
He definitely errs on the side of pessimism. But I'd say the spoils of the Covid War - so far - are evenly divided between the pessimists and the optimists. No one has won
eg at the outset the pessimists were right: "Fuck, this is bad, it's coming our way from China and Italy". The optimists - "it's just a flu" - were ludicrously wrong and cost lives and treasure
However last Xmas it was the optimists who were right: "Omicron is mild" - and thank God they prevailed
China? I dunno. But the early signs are grim. Let's hope the intense pain is brief
"As hospitals are full with patients people started getting treatment in their car with Saline bottles outside a Chinese hospital #ChinaCovid #ChinaCovidCases"
If Omicron were mild then China wouldn't have a problem. What saved us was that Omicron evaded vaccine-acquired immunity enough to infect people, but not so much that it made them seriously ill.
It was vaccination that saved us, not any inherent mildness of the variant. And that's why we should not be too concerned about new variants from China. Vaccination is still very likely to protect us against serious illness.
Supply chain disruption, and consequent inflation, isn't going to be much fun though.
No, Omicron was first found to be mild in a substantially unimmunised population in South Africa. The reason being is that it favours the nose and throat rather than the lower respiratory tract, hence higher transmission but less pneumonitis. It may well be similar in vascular effects.
I expect this wave to be severe but short in China, as indeed pandemic waves usually are.
Worth noting that of major affected countries Japan did amongst the best, despite an aged population. Minimal deaths, minimal mandatory lockdowns, minimal educational disruption. The voluntary mask wearing and politeness culture was probably a big part of that.
"COVID-19 in China: Current Situation and Downstream effects: 🧵
1/ From the outset, it is very important to recognise that a humanitarian catastrophe is currently unfolding in China. Analysis of this situation is not incompatible with recognising the horror of the situation."
Also: stock up on crucial meds now. Prepare for a new variant. FUCKKKKK
Doesn't do a great deal for the global economic position either, does it?
No. At best we are going to get another bout of fierce downward pressure on the global "recovery"
A worse alternative is that we get globally interrupted supply lines for six months/year... which is ominous (on top of the millions-dead horror in China, of course)
Even worse: a new, nastier variant erupts when 800 million people all get Covid at once
Which is why I don't buy the bioweapon thesis.
It's going to royally fuck China. They covered it up out of embarrassment and because they wanted everyone else to suffer too, not just them; not because it was a sophisticated weapon to just cripple the West.
Yes, I don't believe it was a bioweapon. I DO believeChina was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons. This is all accepted. There is proof
Of course the USA was doing the same. Indeed one of the great ironies of Covid is that it likely came from the lab because the Americans deliberately funded Chinese GOF research in Wuhan. Why? One explanation: partly to get around the ban on GOF in the USA, but also because the Americans wanted an insider in Wuhan, to tell them what the Chinese were doing re bioweapons
I've read quite plausible analyses by sober people that Daszak - head of EcoHeath at WIV - was also working with the CIA, to do this insider stuff. That sounds totally mad - I admit- but it does explain why he has gone completely untouched to date, not even subpoena'd let alone brought to trial
"China was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons."
Without meaning to further your monomaniacal belief, the above could mean two things: 1) They were investigating them as potential weapons to be used against others (and with little other use), or 2) They were investigating them because they were afraid other might weaponise the diseases, and look at what it meant.
The second is a much more interesting one to consider, as it covers both a defence against such weapons, as well as what the weapons might be.
But I reckon it's all tinfoilhattery anyway. As ever, you go for the DRAMATIC!!!!!!!!!
There have been several times in the last ew decades (known thanks to increased surveillance) that there might have been a worldwide pandemic: MERS or H1N1 being examples. We got lucky then. We were unlucky with Covid.
On a balance of probabilities, the virus came from the Wuhan lab - the location of the outbreak, the still lack of any tracing back to a credible source zero and, maybe most of all, the reactions of Western Governments to shutting down the world, which suggests they knew - or feared - this could potentially be very dangerous because it had man-made properties.
It's as much tinfoil-hattery to shout out we shouldn't investigate the possibility it came from a lab as to shout out it 100% did. Same sort of irrationality, same sort of maniacal obsession not to question.
The trouble with pointing to the initial, panicked reaction of the Chinese government as evidence of a lab-leaked bioweapon, is that three years on, the Chinese government had not changed its Covid policies despite now knowing exactly where things stand.
Everybody seems to think the NHS is unsustainable, but I doubt there’s any unity behind what might replace it.
I think the rather boring, awful answer is likely more money, but those figures I posted yesterday on the significant lack of capital expenditure versus peer systems points to a grand and systemic misallocation of funds.
I'm no NHS cheerleader. But it does have one undeniable benefit over its counterparts elsewhere, which is that it is cheap. Whether it is good value is more debatable, but my view is that it is (at the risk of falling into the trap of setting the American model up as the only alternative, the American model is awful, awful value for money; incentives are set up to introduce things which patients don't value.)
Is there a way of keeping the value for money while improving the quality? My view is that the way to do so would be to introduce notional charging, similar to the way we pay for prescriptions (I think this may be what the Irish do, but my understanding of this is slight). Free at the point of use isn't, in my view, supportable in the long term without adding increasing levels of tax burden to the working population. I'm very open to changing my mind on this however.
A genuinely interesting question.
I'm not convinced there is much more money to be made available from other sources given recent increases, and I think there may be a crunch coming in the next Government period as a more stable status is sought after Covid can no longer be an excuse for whatever it is wanted to be an excuse. There's Covid money to other priorities, however.
How will it change? Gradually and by marginal gains.
At the margins, some services will be privatised by neglect where there is not an acute requirement. Recent examples imo have eg been dealing with earwax - now done by setups such as Specsavers rather than your local GP practice, and some podiatry type services.
I can't call what will happen on dentistry.
GPs will focus on whatever it is they get paid to do, filtered through a scrummage about productivity / capacity / reward. Services offered via GP surgeries will continue to broaden. Ditto pharmacies, I'd suggest.
I think there are also potential productivity improvements, and significant long term gains to be made by preventative care. I'd say from experience that the NHS is increasingly good at this.
The increased no of part time GPs offers an opportunity for more resource. Ditto the NHS staff count being up by approx 10% since 2019; that must offer opportunities.
Some things the NHS does very well and will - from administrative things like purchase of drugs and research where uniform access to large datasets is a value-creator They will also keep the chronic and the complex. The unified model also avoid getting clogged as the German system did in the Covid vaccine rollout when the medical data was held by different professionals from those who needed to know who to vaccinate.
There are also potential benefits for general health from the Active Travel policies. Even marginal gains - say 10% of travel in London by bicycle - will offer big benefits by moving part of the population away from sedentary lifestyles. London offers a good illustration of how long it takes to get this stuff even somewhat right (my interpretation is 3 generations of infrastructure design so far), and how tough it is to change an embedded culture.
Typoes:
Some things the NHS does very well and will continue to do so - eg administrative things like purchase of drugs and research where uniform access to large datasets is a value-creator.
It is good to see that bettors are begining to agree with a conclusion that I came to soon after the 2020 election: Trump is unlikely to be elected president in 2024 (or 2028, or . . . ).
It seemed to me then, as it does now, that Republican voters were, slowly, coming to understand that Trump is a loser, and that they are also coming to understand, perhaps more slowly, with the endless scandal stories, that he isn't fit to be president. Combined, those two make it unlikely that he can win the nomination.
What happens in the USA if a potential Presidential candidate is facing the criminal charges that seem to be being lined up for Mr Trump?
It is good to see that bettors are begining to agree with a conclusion that I came to soon after the 2020 election: Trump is unlikely to be elected president in 2024 (or 2028, or . . . ).
It seemed to me then, as it does now, that Republican voters were, slowly, coming to understand that Trump is a loser, and that they are also coming to understand, perhaps more slowly, with the endless scandal stories, that he isn't fit to be president. Combined, those two make it unlikely that he can win the nomination.
And, if he were to win the nomination, he would face stiff odds in any general election. "About a month after launching his 2024 presidential campaign, former President Donald Trump’s standing with voters has hit its lowest point in more than seven years, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday." source: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/14/trump-hits-7-year-low-in-new-national-poll-as-biden-approval-climbs.html
More a glacial realisation than just slow.
I try to put myself in their shoes, not very effectively I admit, and even seeing him (somehow) as a symbol of the things I would like, I'd get frustrated at him being constantly distracted by his own self imposed problems. Even if I thought the deep state was behind the attacks on Trump at least with a new candidate it'd take awhile before they got into a similar position.
"COVID-19 in China: Current Situation and Downstream effects: 🧵
1/ From the outset, it is very important to recognise that a humanitarian catastrophe is currently unfolding in China. Analysis of this situation is not incompatible with recognising the horror of the situation."
Hypothetically, if HIV guaranteed complete immunity to Covid (including all current variants, and future ones), I'd pick HIV.
I'm not sure he's a loon, at all. He has strident opinions, he also seems notably well informed - this is his job: biorisk
The HIV thing is eccentric but arguable. If you believe Covid will be with us forever and will always mutate, quite possibly into something nastier, then having (now treatable) HIV would be better than getting a lethal and untreatable dose of Covid
He also accused the BBC of suppressing long covid.
He definitely errs on the side of pessimism. But I'd say the spoils of the Covid War - so far - are evenly divided between the pessimists and the optimists. No one has won
eg at the outset the pessimists were right: "Fuck, this is bad, it's coming our way from China and Italy". The optimists - "it's just a flu" - were ludicrously wrong and cost lives and treasure
However last Xmas it was the optimists who were right: "Omicron is mild" - and thank God they prevailed
China? I dunno. But the early signs are grim. Let's hope the intense pain is brief
"As hospitals are full with patients people started getting treatment in their car with Saline bottles outside a Chinese hospital #ChinaCovid #ChinaCovidCases"
If Omicron were mild then China wouldn't have a problem. What saved us was that Omicron evaded vaccine-acquired immunity enough to infect people, but not so much that it made them seriously ill.
It was vaccination that saved us, not any inherent mildness of the variant. And that's why we should not be too concerned about new variants from China. Vaccination is still very likely to protect us against serious illness.
Supply chain disruption, and consequent inflation, isn't going to be much fun though.
No, Omicron was first found to be mild in a substantially unimmunised population in South Africa. The reason being is that it favours the nose and throat rather than the lower respiratory tract, hence higher transmission but less pneumonitis. It may well be similar in vascular effects.
I expect this wave to be severe but short in China, as indeed pandemic waves usually are.
Worth noting that of major affected countries Japan did amongst the best, despite an aged population. Minimal deaths, minimal mandatory lockdowns, minimal educational disruption. The voluntary mask wearing and politeness culture was probably a big part of that.
I would not be in the least bit surprised if genetics turned out to be a significant factor in how generalised populations withstood the epidemic. It may take some years to discern that definitively, though,
"COVID-19 in China: Current Situation and Downstream effects: 🧵
1/ From the outset, it is very important to recognise that a humanitarian catastrophe is currently unfolding in China. Analysis of this situation is not incompatible with recognising the horror of the situation."
Also: stock up on crucial meds now. Prepare for a new variant. FUCKKKKK
Doesn't do a great deal for the global economic position either, does it?
No. At best we are going to get another bout of fierce downward pressure on the global "recovery"
A worse alternative is that we get globally interrupted supply lines for six months/year... which is ominous (on top of the millions-dead horror in China, of course)
Even worse: a new, nastier variant erupts when 800 million people all get Covid at once
Which is why I don't buy the bioweapon thesis.
It's going to royally fuck China. They covered it up out of embarrassment and because they wanted everyone else to suffer too, not just them; not because it was a sophisticated weapon to just cripple the West.
Yes, I don't believe it was a bioweapon. I DO believeChina was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons. This is all accepted. There is proof
Of course the USA was doing the same. Indeed one of the great ironies of Covid is that it likely came from the lab because the Americans deliberately funded Chinese GOF research in Wuhan. Why? One explanation: partly to get around the ban on GOF in the USA, but also because the Americans wanted an insider in Wuhan, to tell them what the Chinese were doing re bioweapons
I've read quite plausible analyses by sober people that Daszak - head of EcoHeath at WIV - was also working with the CIA, to do this insider stuff. That sounds totally mad - I admit- but it does explain why he has gone completely untouched to date, not even subpoena'd let alone brought to trial
"China was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons."
Without meaning to further your monomaniacal belief, the above could mean two things: 1) They were investigating them as potential weapons to be used against others (and with little other use), or 2) They were investigating them because they were afraid other might weaponise the diseases, and look at what it meant.
The second is a much more interesting one to consider, as it covers both a defence against such weapons, as well as what the weapons might be.
But I reckon it's all tinfoilhattery anyway. As ever, you go for the DRAMATIC!!!!!!!!!
There have been several times in the last ew decades (known thanks to increased surveillance) that there might have been a worldwide pandemic: MERS or H1N1 being examples. We got lucky then. We were unlucky with Covid.
The Chinese were speculating about weaponising coronaviruses as early as 2015. Indeed they wondered if such a bug could cripple foreign health systems!
"Titled, The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons, the paper was written in 2015 by 18 Chinese military scientists and weapons experts. They stated that a family of viruses called coronaviruses could be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed in a way never seen before.” Noteworthily, the cause of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is a coronavirus that first emerged in Wuhan, China, and was named SARS-CoV-2. The document also highlighted how these engineered viruses will lead to a “new era of genetic weapons” and fantasised about a bioweapon attack that could cause the “enemy’s medical system to collapse.”
"This document, along with other intelligence inputs, has prompted US President Joe Biden to direct his Intelligence Community (IC) to investigate and report the origins of the virus in 90 days. While the investigation’s results are awaited, we must look at China’s philosophy and capabilities in the realm of biowarfare as Beijing’s ambitions and aggression grow.""
This paper, as a source, is not disputed, by the way
Have we considered the possibility that Covid is a well-intentioned effort to solve the global warming problem by reducing the world's population by ... I dunno ... maybe 90% or so?
Personally I'd make sure there was a vaccine available for friends and family before releasing it into the wild but ... best-laid plans and all that.
Put another tinfoil hat on:
The Republican House Committee report on Covid Origins is dynamite. Why are people ignoring it?
I hope PB will forgive me from quoting at length:
"AMMS’ 2015 Book on Weaponizing Artificially Engineered Chimeric Coronaviruses
[AMMS is the Bioweapon division of the Chinese military]
The declassified Updated Assessment [Biden's official report] also failed to address the AMMS’ publicly stated interest in the development of engineered coronaviruses for biological weapons purposes. In 2015, the official publishing house of the AMMS released a book titled The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Artificial Humanized Viruses as Genetic Weapons.
The book was produced and edited using 18 experts, 16 of whom were officers at AMMS or other PLA research centers. Indeed, one of the editors not only works for the Fifth Institute but also has a long history of collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, having coauthored 12 scientific papers...
The book described the PLA researchers’ broader belief that other nations are developing chimeric coronaviruses to use as genetic weapons.
The authors described how to create weaponized chimeric SARS coronaviruses, the potentially broader scope for their use compared to traditional bioweapons, and the benefits of being able to plausibly deny that such chimeric coronaviruses were artificially created rather than naturally occurring...
The authors described the experimental techniques virologists could use to create weaponized chimeric coronaviruses:
1. Apply the latest genetic modification technology to induce a recombination between an animal virus and a human virus,,, until the point that the virus can directly attack humans.
2. Take an animal pathogen (at present this is mostly viruses) and use various methods and channels to attack animals with cellular receptors that are very similar to humans, and conduct various kinds of passaging many times until the pathogen ultimately adapts to transmit among the intended group of animals...
3. Combine the two methods described above. The authors noted that these techniques could also be used in benign research, such that the research is inherently dual-use and it would thus be difficult for others to distinguish between efforts for defensive and offensive purposes.
The authors also argued that the potential scope for the use of weaponized chimeric coronaviruses would be much broader than the traditional wartime uses of bioweapons.
They also note such weapons could strain the victim countries’ healthcare systems, potentially “causing the enemy’s medical system to collapse.”"
If the Chinese really did develop this as a weapon, and leaked it accidentally, then my sympathies for their upcoming Covid Horror are *somewhat restrained*
"COVID-19 in China: Current Situation and Downstream effects: 🧵
1/ From the outset, it is very important to recognise that a humanitarian catastrophe is currently unfolding in China. Analysis of this situation is not incompatible with recognising the horror of the situation."
Also: stock up on crucial meds now. Prepare for a new variant. FUCKKKKK
Doesn't do a great deal for the global economic position either, does it?
No. At best we are going to get another bout of fierce downward pressure on the global "recovery"
A worse alternative is that we get globally interrupted supply lines for six months/year... which is ominous (on top of the millions-dead horror in China, of course)
Even worse: a new, nastier variant erupts when 800 million people all get Covid at once
A lot of variants arise in immune compromised people. Significantly for a variant to succeed it has to out compete existing variants, or re infect those with immunity. There are limited numbers of successful mutations. It’s possible that a new super mutant is out there in the possible space. But we’ve been going three years now and we are where we are. The tragedy in China is that they tried so long to eliminate covid, and they can’t. Nor could Nicola have done in Scotland.
The problem is that a Swiss system would only work here if implemented by Labour.
The Tories will just be bought and paid for by the American companies who want their system here.
Only Labour can reform the NHS. And fix it.
They were making good progress on every measure until they were voted out. Shortest waiting times in history, highest rate of satisfaction ever. Cancer guarantee.
Get the Tories out.
The whole Swiss healthcare system is privatised and for profit, from insurers all the way down to immunisation providers for children. The reform would require junking the whole system, privatising healthcare entirely and making purchasing health insurance mandatory the same as car insurance.
Neither party is going to do that.
Even mentioning this by a Labour leader would cause a massive rift, and either he would be thrown out immediately or the party would split and he would be left in a tiny rump. Electoral and political suicide on a Trussian scale.
Maybe this is Keir Starmer's 4D chess move. He can say to Labour Remainers: "We can't rejoin the EU, yet, but we can adopt a European health system."
"COVID-19 in China: Current Situation and Downstream effects: 🧵
1/ From the outset, it is very important to recognise that a humanitarian catastrophe is currently unfolding in China. Analysis of this situation is not incompatible with recognising the horror of the situation."
Also: stock up on crucial meds now. Prepare for a new variant. FUCKKKKK
Doesn't do a great deal for the global economic position either, does it?
No. At best we are going to get another bout of fierce downward pressure on the global "recovery"
A worse alternative is that we get globally interrupted supply lines for six months/year... which is ominous (on top of the millions-dead horror in China, of course)
Even worse: a new, nastier variant erupts when 800 million people all get Covid at once
Which is why I don't buy the bioweapon thesis.
It's going to royally fuck China. They covered it up out of embarrassment and because they wanted everyone else to suffer too, not just them; not because it was a sophisticated weapon to just cripple the West.
Yes, I don't believe it was a bioweapon. I DO believeChina was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons. This is all accepted. There is proof
Of course the USA was doing the same. Indeed one of the great ironies of Covid is that it likely came from the lab because the Americans deliberately funded Chinese GOF research in Wuhan. Why? One explanation: partly to get around the ban on GOF in the USA, but also because the Americans wanted an insider in Wuhan, to tell them what the Chinese were doing re bioweapons
I've read quite plausible analyses by sober people that Daszak - head of EcoHeath at WIV - was also working with the CIA, to do this insider stuff. That sounds totally mad - I admit- but it does explain why he has gone completely untouched to date, not even subpoena'd let alone brought to trial
"China was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons."
Without meaning to further your monomaniacal belief, the above could mean two things: 1) They were investigating them as potential weapons to be used against others (and with little other use), or 2) They were investigating them because they were afraid other might weaponise the diseases, and look at what it meant.
The second is a much more interesting one to consider, as it covers both a defence against such weapons, as well as what the weapons might be.
But I reckon it's all tinfoilhattery anyway. As ever, you go for the DRAMATIC!!!!!!!!!
There have been several times in the last ew decades (known thanks to increased surveillance) that there might have been a worldwide pandemic: MERS or H1N1 being examples. We got lucky then. We were unlucky with Covid.
On a balance of probabilities, the virus came from the Wuhan lab - the location of the outbreak, the still lack of any tracing back to a credible source zero and, maybe most of all, the reactions of Western Governments to shutting down the world, which suggests they knew - or feared - this could potentially be very dangerous because it had man-made properties.
It's as much tinfoil-hattery to shout out we shouldn't investigate the possibility it came from a lab as to shout out it 100% did. Same sort of irrationality, same sort of maniacal obsession not to question.
The trouble with pointing to the initial, panicked reaction of the Chinese government as evidence of a lab-leaked bioweapon, is that three years on, the Chinese government had not changed its Covid policies despite now knowing exactly where things stand.
I was thinking more about the reaction of Western Governments. They didn't close down things when we had SARS, MERS etc. Their speed of reaction suggests they had fears that this disease could have been a bio-weapon and / or potentially disastrous consequences. Closing down whole economies in capitalist societies like the US / U.K. is not taken lightly.
China's reaction seems logical if we look at it from a political control standpoint - Government initially fearful of the consequences but then needs to maintain initial measures to prove that it was "right". Changing course would be an admission they got it wrong.
The problem is that a Swiss system would only work here if implemented by Labour.
The Tories will just be bought and paid for by the American companies who want their system here.
Only Labour can reform the NHS. And fix it.
They were making good progress on every measure until they were voted out. Shortest waiting times in history, highest rate of satisfaction ever. Cancer guarantee.
Get the Tories out.
Labour had 13 years to reform the NHS. And did not do so, beyond fiddling around the edges.
What makes you think Labour would be willing to take on the unions and other vested interests that would be required to reform the NHS?
Throwing more money at the problem is *not* a solution on its own.
No, but it is a part of the solution. This is what the King's Fund found in their literature review (including other countries) and expert interviews:
MattW said: "There are also potential benefits for general health from the Active Travel policies. Even marginal gains - say 10% of travel in London by bicycle - will offer big benefits by moving part of the population away from sedentary lifestyles."
I have long believed that the best single thing the US could do for our health is encourage exercise. How best to do that would vary from place to place. I think, for example, that in some high-crime inner city areas, the people might benefit from escorted walks and bicycle rides.
(There is an intriguing clue as to what helps health here: "The Hispanic paradox is an epidemiological finding that Hispanic Americans tend to have health outcomes that "paradoxically" are comparable to, or in some cases better than, those of their U.S. non-Hispanic White counterparts, even though Hispanics have lower average income and education. Low socioeconomic status is almost universally associated with worse population health and higher death rates everywhere in the world.[2] The paradox usually refers in particular to low mortality among Hispanics in the United States relative to non-Hispanic Whites.[3][4][5][6][7][8] According to the Center for Disease Control's 2015 Vital Signs report, Hispanics in the United States had a 24% lower risk of mortality, as well as lower risk for nine of the fifteen leading causes of death as compared to Whites." source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic_paradox
In my opinion, these better health outcomes are the result of stronger families and communities -- but I will admit that I don't see any simple way for the government to help with either.)
"COVID-19 in China: Current Situation and Downstream effects: 🧵
1/ From the outset, it is very important to recognise that a humanitarian catastrophe is currently unfolding in China. Analysis of this situation is not incompatible with recognising the horror of the situation."
Also: stock up on crucial meds now. Prepare for a new variant. FUCKKKKK
Doesn't do a great deal for the global economic position either, does it?
No. At best we are going to get another bout of fierce downward pressure on the global "recovery"
A worse alternative is that we get globally interrupted supply lines for six months/year... which is ominous (on top of the millions-dead horror in China, of course)
Even worse: a new, nastier variant erupts when 800 million people all get Covid at once
Which is why I don't buy the bioweapon thesis.
It's going to royally fuck China. They covered it up out of embarrassment and because they wanted everyone else to suffer too, not just them; not because it was a sophisticated weapon to just cripple the West.
Yes, I don't believe it was a bioweapon. I DO believeChina was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons. This is all accepted. There is proof
Of course the USA was doing the same. Indeed one of the great ironies of Covid is that it likely came from the lab because the Americans deliberately funded Chinese GOF research in Wuhan. Why? One explanation: partly to get around the ban on GOF in the USA, but also because the Americans wanted an insider in Wuhan, to tell them what the Chinese were doing re bioweapons
I've read quite plausible analyses by sober people that Daszak - head of EcoHeath at WIV - was also working with the CIA, to do this insider stuff. That sounds totally mad - I admit- but it does explain why he has gone completely untouched to date, not even subpoena'd let alone brought to trial
"China was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons."
Without meaning to further your monomaniacal belief, the above could mean two things: 1) They were investigating them as potential weapons to be used against others (and with little other use), or 2) They were investigating them because they were afraid other might weaponise the diseases, and look at what it meant.
The second is a much more interesting one to consider, as it covers both a defence against such weapons, as well as what the weapons might be.
But I reckon it's all tinfoilhattery anyway. As ever, you go for the DRAMATIC!!!!!!!!!
There have been several times in the last ew decades (known thanks to increased surveillance) that there might have been a worldwide pandemic: MERS or H1N1 being examples. We got lucky then. We were unlucky with Covid.
On a balance of probabilities, the virus came from the Wuhan lab - the location of the outbreak, the still lack of any tracing back to a credible source zero and, maybe most of all, the reactions of Western Governments to shutting down the world, which suggests they knew - or feared - this could potentially be very dangerous because it had man-made properties.
It's as much tinfoil-hattery to shout out we shouldn't investigate the possibility it came from a lab as to shout out it 100% did. Same sort of irrationality, same sort of maniacal obsession not to question.
The trouble with pointing to the initial, panicked reaction of the Chinese government as evidence of a lab-leaked bioweapon, is that three years on, the Chinese government had not changed its Covid policies despite now knowing exactly where things stand.
I was thinking more about the reaction of Western Governments. They didn't close down things when we had SARS, MERS etc. Their speed of reaction suggests they had fears that this disease could have been a bio-weapon and / or potentially disastrous consequences. Closing down whole economies in capitalist societies like the US / U.K. is not taken lightly.
China's reaction seems logical if we look at it from a political control standpoint - Government initially fearful of the consequences but then needs to maintain initial measures to prove that it was "right". Changing course would be an admission they got it wrong.
The two biggest factors were the precedent of China's policy and the panic after the health system got overwhelmed in Lombardy.
"COVID-19 in China: Current Situation and Downstream effects: 🧵
1/ From the outset, it is very important to recognise that a humanitarian catastrophe is currently unfolding in China. Analysis of this situation is not incompatible with recognising the horror of the situation."
Hypothetically, if HIV guaranteed complete immunity to Covid (including all current variants, and future ones), I'd pick HIV.
I'm not sure he's a loon, at all. He has strident opinions, he also seems notably well informed - this is his job: biorisk
The HIV thing is eccentric but arguable. If you believe Covid will be with us forever and will always mutate, quite possibly into something nastier, then having (now treatable) HIV would be better than getting a lethal and untreatable dose of Covid
There’s no evidence that an untreatable disease of covid exists, especially in people who have had vaccination and the disease itself. Don’t get sucked in.
Btw if the American healthcare system is so disastrous, how come almost every advance in the field comes from the United States?
I'm not sure I entirely see the connection. The USA is a very rich place, and the thing people usually call disastrous about its healthcare is not necessarily the quality of it.
The problem is that a Swiss system would only work here if implemented by Labour.
The Tories will just be bought and paid for by the American companies who want their system here.
Only Labour can reform the NHS. And fix it.
They were making good progress on every measure until they were voted out. Shortest waiting times in history, highest rate of satisfaction ever. Cancer guarantee.
Get the Tories out.
Labour had 13 years to reform the NHS. And did not do so, beyond fiddling around the edges.
What makes you think Labour would be willing to take on the unions and other vested interests that would be required to reform the NHS?
Throwing more money at the problem is *not* a solution on its own.
No, but it is a part of the solution. This is what the King's Fund found in their literature review (including other countries) and expert interviews:
Good positive management and support of staff, and clear targets are other elements.
I did say "on its own".
But what you say is also only a (small) part of it. Sadly, the NHS needs a massive restructuring: and in my inexpert view, GP services and care are the areas that are gumming up the system. If Labour really want to 'fix' the NHS, they ned to keep the core 'free at the point of use' concept and work out what best matches that. What we have at the moment does not - yet it is the Labour supporters who are most aghast at any fundamental change.
Hence we will only get fiddling around at the edges, and more money thrown at the problem. You will earn more lucre, but we'll be back at the same position in a few years.
"COVID-19 in China: Current Situation and Downstream effects: 🧵
1/ From the outset, it is very important to recognise that a humanitarian catastrophe is currently unfolding in China. Analysis of this situation is not incompatible with recognising the horror of the situation."
Also: stock up on crucial meds now. Prepare for a new variant. FUCKKKKK
Doesn't do a great deal for the global economic position either, does it?
No. At best we are going to get another bout of fierce downward pressure on the global "recovery"
A worse alternative is that we get globally interrupted supply lines for six months/year... which is ominous (on top of the millions-dead horror in China, of course)
Even worse: a new, nastier variant erupts when 800 million people all get Covid at once
Which is why I don't buy the bioweapon thesis.
It's going to royally fuck China. They covered it up out of embarrassment and because they wanted everyone else to suffer too, not just them; not because it was a sophisticated weapon to just cripple the West.
Yes, I don't believe it was a bioweapon. I DO believeChina was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons. This is all accepted. There is proof
Of course the USA was doing the same. Indeed one of the great ironies of Covid is that it likely came from the lab because the Americans deliberately funded Chinese GOF research in Wuhan. Why? One explanation: partly to get around the ban on GOF in the USA, but also because the Americans wanted an insider in Wuhan, to tell them what the Chinese were doing re bioweapons
I've read quite plausible analyses by sober people that Daszak - head of EcoHeath at WIV - was also working with the CIA, to do this insider stuff. That sounds totally mad - I admit- but it does explain why he has gone completely untouched to date, not even subpoena'd let alone brought to trial
"China was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons."
Without meaning to further your monomaniacal belief, the above could mean two things: 1) They were investigating them as potential weapons to be used against others (and with little other use), or 2) They were investigating them because they were afraid other might weaponise the diseases, and look at what it meant.
The second is a much more interesting one to consider, as it covers both a defence against such weapons, as well as what the weapons might be.
But I reckon it's all tinfoilhattery anyway. As ever, you go for the DRAMATIC!!!!!!!!!
There have been several times in the last ew decades (known thanks to increased surveillance) that there might have been a worldwide pandemic: MERS or H1N1 being examples. We got lucky then. We were unlucky with Covid.
On a balance of probabilities, the virus came from the Wuhan lab - the location of the outbreak, the still lack of any tracing back to a credible source zero and, maybe most of all, the reactions of Western Governments to shutting down the world, which suggests they knew - or feared - this could potentially be very dangerous because it had man-made properties.
It's as much tinfoil-hattery to shout out we shouldn't investigate the possibility it came from a lab as to shout out it 100% did. Same sort of irrationality, same sort of maniacal obsession not to question.
The trouble with pointing to the initial, panicked reaction of the Chinese government as evidence of a lab-leaked bioweapon, is that three years on, the Chinese government had not changed its Covid policies despite now knowing exactly where things stand.
I was thinking more about the reaction of Western Governments. They didn't close down things when we had SARS, MERS etc. Their speed of reaction suggests they had fears that this disease could have been a bio-weapon and / or potentially disastrous consequences. Closing down whole economies in capitalist societies like the US / U.K. is not taken lightly.
China's reaction seems logical if we look at it from a political control standpoint - Government initially fearful of the consequences but then needs to maintain initial measures to prove that it was "right". Changing course would be an admission they got it wrong.
Er, we KNOW this is true because we have now - thanks to Freedom of Information - seen the urgent early Covid emails between Fauci, Collins, et al and our own Jeremy Farrar, Patrick Vallance, where they express grave concern ("we need to involve CIA and MI5") and also discuss how the virus looks "engineered", "unnatural", "tailored for humans"
They even speculate as to how likely they think lab leak is, with most saying "probably came from a lab"
Laughably, Jeremy Farrar, the head of Wellcome, gave his estimation of the chances of lab leak as 50%, and yet just ten days later he co-signed a fraudulent letter to the Lancet, where he claimed lab leak was a racist "conspiracy theory". Strange that he didn't tell us that it was a "racist conspiracy theory" he himself believed was 50% likely ten days before
Farrar is now head boffin of WHO. He has been rewarded for loyalty to Beijing
"COVID-19 in China: Current Situation and Downstream effects: 🧵
1/ From the outset, it is very important to recognise that a humanitarian catastrophe is currently unfolding in China. Analysis of this situation is not incompatible with recognising the horror of the situation."
Also: stock up on crucial meds now. Prepare for a new variant. FUCKKKKK
Doesn't do a great deal for the global economic position either, does it?
No. At best we are going to get another bout of fierce downward pressure on the global "recovery"
A worse alternative is that we get globally interrupted supply lines for six months/year... which is ominous (on top of the millions-dead horror in China, of course)
Even worse: a new, nastier variant erupts when 800 million people all get Covid at once
Which is why I don't buy the bioweapon thesis.
It's going to royally fuck China. They covered it up out of embarrassment and because they wanted everyone else to suffer too, not just them; not because it was a sophisticated weapon to just cripple the West.
Yes, I don't believe it was a bioweapon. I DO believeChina was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons. This is all accepted. There is proof
Of course the USA was doing the same. Indeed one of the great ironies of Covid is that it likely came from the lab because the Americans deliberately funded Chinese GOF research in Wuhan. Why? One explanation: partly to get around the ban on GOF in the USA, but also because the Americans wanted an insider in Wuhan, to tell them what the Chinese were doing re bioweapons
I've read quite plausible analyses by sober people that Daszak - head of EcoHeath at WIV - was also working with the CIA, to do this insider stuff. That sounds totally mad - I admit- but it does explain why he has gone completely untouched to date, not even subpoena'd let alone brought to trial
"China was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons."
Without meaning to further your monomaniacal belief, the above could mean two things: 1) They were investigating them as potential weapons to be used against others (and with little other use), or 2) They were investigating them because they were afraid other might weaponise the diseases, and look at what it meant.
The second is a much more interesting one to consider, as it covers both a defence against such weapons, as well as what the weapons might be.
But I reckon it's all tinfoilhattery anyway. As ever, you go for the DRAMATIC!!!!!!!!!
There have been several times in the last ew decades (known thanks to increased surveillance) that there might have been a worldwide pandemic: MERS or H1N1 being examples. We got lucky then. We were unlucky with Covid.
On a balance of probabilities, the virus came from the Wuhan lab - the location of the outbreak, the still lack of any tracing back to a credible source zero and, maybe most of all, the reactions of Western Governments to shutting down the world, which suggests they knew - or feared - this could potentially be very dangerous because it had man-made properties.
It's as much tinfoil-hattery to shout out we shouldn't investigate the possibility it came from a lab as to shout out it 100% did. Same sort of irrationality, same sort of maniacal obsession not to question.
I have no certainty where it originated, and sadly, due to China's actions in the early days, we probably never will (there is a chance the central Chinese government never will, either). But the most DRAMATIC thing is that it was manmade and released from the lab, which is why Leon obsesses with the possibility over all others.
"the reactions of Western Governments to shutting down the world, which suggests they knew - or feared - this could potentially be very dangerous because it had man-made properties."
This is the sort of thing that makes me thing you are sitting in your underpants wearing a tinfoil hat. The lockdowns in the west came (with hindsight) late, and as a result of what we were seeing in the countries that got it earlier, such as Italy. What is your evidence that we knew it had 'man-made properties' before early March 2020?
I haven't got any evidence which is why I said 'balance of probabilities'. And I'm sorry to disappoint you but I'm not sitting in my underpants with a tin foil hat.
However, I will note how you have slightly twisted the argument. What I mentioned that Western governments reactions were very different to what they had practiced before, and also would have not have been taken lightly if this was thought of as 'just another virus'. There is something that obviously triggered governments to text they did and it wasn't people being admitted to hospital (we didn't lock down the country over Monkeypox, for example). You don't lock down whole economies in a capitalist system for nothing.
As I said originally, it's as much tinfoil-hattish to try to avoid questions as it is to believe in the theory 100%. Are you sure you are not in your armchair with a pair of M&S Y-fronts and some Sainsbury's kitchen foil stick to your head?
"COVID-19 in China: Current Situation and Downstream effects: 🧵
1/ From the outset, it is very important to recognise that a humanitarian catastrophe is currently unfolding in China. Analysis of this situation is not incompatible with recognising the horror of the situation."
Hypothetically, if HIV guaranteed complete immunity to Covid (including all current variants, and future ones), I'd pick HIV.
I'm not sure he's a loon, at all. He has strident opinions, he also seems notably well informed - this is his job: biorisk
The HIV thing is eccentric but arguable. If you believe Covid will be with us forever and will always mutate, quite possibly into something nastier, then having (now treatable) HIV would be better than getting a lethal and untreatable dose of Covid
There’s no evidence that an untreatable disease of covid exists, especially in people who have had vaccination and the disease itself. Don’t get sucked in.
Oh do fuck off. You're the one who said "if it came from the lab, that's a shame, but PEOPLE MAKE MISTAKES!"
"COVID-19 in China: Current Situation and Downstream effects: 🧵
1/ From the outset, it is very important to recognise that a humanitarian catastrophe is currently unfolding in China. Analysis of this situation is not incompatible with recognising the horror of the situation."
Also: stock up on crucial meds now. Prepare for a new variant. FUCKKKKK
Doesn't do a great deal for the global economic position either, does it?
No. At best we are going to get another bout of fierce downward pressure on the global "recovery"
A worse alternative is that we get globally interrupted supply lines for six months/year... which is ominous (on top of the millions-dead horror in China, of course)
Even worse: a new, nastier variant erupts when 800 million people all get Covid at once
Which is why I don't buy the bioweapon thesis.
It's going to royally fuck China. They covered it up out of embarrassment and because they wanted everyone else to suffer too, not just them; not because it was a sophisticated weapon to just cripple the West.
Yes, I don't believe it was a bioweapon. I DO believeChina was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons. This is all accepted. There is proof
Of course the USA was doing the same. Indeed one of the great ironies of Covid is that it likely came from the lab because the Americans deliberately funded Chinese GOF research in Wuhan. Why? One explanation: partly to get around the ban on GOF in the USA, but also because the Americans wanted an insider in Wuhan, to tell them what the Chinese were doing re bioweapons
I've read quite plausible analyses by sober people that Daszak - head of EcoHeath at WIV - was also working with the CIA, to do this insider stuff. That sounds totally mad - I admit- but it does explain why he has gone completely untouched to date, not even subpoena'd let alone brought to trial
"China was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons."
Without meaning to further your monomaniacal belief, the above could mean two things: 1) They were investigating them as potential weapons to be used against others (and with little other use), or 2) They were investigating them because they were afraid other might weaponise the diseases, and look at what it meant.
The second is a much more interesting one to consider, as it covers both a defence against such weapons, as well as what the weapons might be.
But I reckon it's all tinfoilhattery anyway. As ever, you go for the DRAMATIC!!!!!!!!!
There have been several times in the last ew decades (known thanks to increased surveillance) that there might have been a worldwide pandemic: MERS or H1N1 being examples. We got lucky then. We were unlucky with Covid.
On a balance of probabilities, the virus came from the Wuhan lab - the location of the outbreak, the still lack of any tracing back to a credible source zero and, maybe most of all, the reactions of Western Governments to shutting down the world, which suggests they knew - or feared - this could potentially be very dangerous because it had man-made properties.
It's as much tinfoil-hattery to shout out we shouldn't investigate the possibility it came from a lab as to shout out it 100% did. Same sort of irrationality, same sort of maniacal obsession not to question.
The trouble with pointing to the initial, panicked reaction of the Chinese government as evidence of a lab-leaked bioweapon, is that three years on, the Chinese government had not changed its Covid policies despite now knowing exactly where things stand.
I was thinking more about the reaction of Western Governments. They didn't close down things when we had SARS, MERS etc. Their speed of reaction suggests they had fears that this disease could have been a bio-weapon and / or potentially disastrous consequences. Closing down whole economies in capitalist societies like the US / U.K. is not taken lightly.
China's reaction seems logical if we look at it from a political control standpoint - Government initially fearful of the consequences but then needs to maintain initial measures to prove that it was "right". Changing course would be an admission they got it wrong.
The two biggest factors were the precedent of China's policy and the panic after the health system got overwhelmed in Lombardy.
It's a bit dramatic to close down whole economies on the basis of what happens in one region of Italy. There has been no example of that ever happening before.
"COVID-19 in China: Current Situation and Downstream effects: 🧵
1/ From the outset, it is very important to recognise that a humanitarian catastrophe is currently unfolding in China. Analysis of this situation is not incompatible with recognising the horror of the situation."
Also: stock up on crucial meds now. Prepare for a new variant. FUCKKKKK
Doesn't do a great deal for the global economic position either, does it?
No. At best we are going to get another bout of fierce downward pressure on the global "recovery"
A worse alternative is that we get globally interrupted supply lines for six months/year... which is ominous (on top of the millions-dead horror in China, of course)
Even worse: a new, nastier variant erupts when 800 million people all get Covid at once
Which is why I don't buy the bioweapon thesis.
It's going to royally fuck China. They covered it up out of embarrassment and because they wanted everyone else to suffer too, not just them; not because it was a sophisticated weapon to just cripple the West.
Yes, I don't believe it was a bioweapon. I DO believeChina was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons. This is all accepted. There is proof
Of course the USA was doing the same. Indeed one of the great ironies of Covid is that it likely came from the lab because the Americans deliberately funded Chinese GOF research in Wuhan. Why? One explanation: partly to get around the ban on GOF in the USA, but also because the Americans wanted an insider in Wuhan, to tell them what the Chinese were doing re bioweapons
I've read quite plausible analyses by sober people that Daszak - head of EcoHeath at WIV - was also working with the CIA, to do this insider stuff. That sounds totally mad - I admit- but it does explain why he has gone completely untouched to date, not even subpoena'd let alone brought to trial
"China was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons."
Without meaning to further your monomaniacal belief, the above could mean two things: 1) They were investigating them as potential weapons to be used against others (and with little other use), or 2) They were investigating them because they were afraid other might weaponise the diseases, and look at what it meant.
The second is a much more interesting one to consider, as it covers both a defence against such weapons, as well as what the weapons might be.
But I reckon it's all tinfoilhattery anyway. As ever, you go for the DRAMATIC!!!!!!!!!
There have been several times in the last ew decades (known thanks to increased surveillance) that there might have been a worldwide pandemic: MERS or H1N1 being examples. We got lucky then. We were unlucky with Covid.
On a balance of probabilities, the virus came from the Wuhan lab - the location of the outbreak, the still lack of any tracing back to a credible source zero and, maybe most of all, the reactions of Western Governments to shutting down the world, which suggests they knew - or feared - this could potentially be very dangerous because it had man-made properties.
It's as much tinfoil-hattery to shout out we shouldn't investigate the possibility it came from a lab as to shout out it 100% did. Same sort of irrationality, same sort of maniacal obsession not to question.
I have no certainty where it originated, and sadly, due to China's actions in the early days, we probably never will (there is a chance the central Chinese government never will, either). But the most DRAMATIC thing is that it was manmade and released from the lab, which is why Leon obsesses with the possibility over all others.
"the reactions of Western Governments to shutting down the world, which suggests they knew - or feared - this could potentially be very dangerous because it had man-made properties."
This is the sort of thing that makes me thing you are sitting in your underpants wearing a tinfoil hat. The lockdowns in the west came (with hindsight) late, and as a result of what we were seeing in the countries that got it earlier, such as Italy. What is your evidence that we knew it had 'man-made properties' before early March 2020?
I haven't got any evidence which is why I said 'balance of probabilities'. And I'm sorry to disappoint you but I'm not sitting in my underpants with a tin foil hat.
However, I will note how you have slightly twisted the argument. What I mentioned that Western governments reactions were very different to what they had practiced before, and also would have not have been taken lightly if this was thought of as 'just another virus'. There is something that obviously triggered governments to text they did and it wasn't people being admitted to hospital (we didn't lock down the country over Monkeypox, for example). You don't lock down whole economies in a capitalist system for nothing.
As I said originally, it's as much tinfoil-hattish to try to avoid questions as it is to believe in the theory 100%. Are you sure you are not in your armchair with a pair of M&S Y-fronts and some Sainsbury's kitchen foil stick to your head?
What are you talking about?? We have plentiful evidence that western governments strongly suspected it was man made. They discussed it. In the FOIA'd emails
"In Sir Jeremy's initial email, he revealed his and other experts' main suspicions centred around Covid's unique furin cleavage site — the part of the spike protein which makes it so efficient at infecting human cells. This is an email FROM Jeremy Farrar
"The email, sent on February 2 when the first Covid death outside of China was confirmed, continued: '[Professor Farzan] is bothered by the furin site and has a hard time [to] explain that as an event outside the lab, though there are possible ways in nature but highly unlikely.
'I think this becomes a question of how do you put all this together, whether you believe in this series of coincidences, what you know of the lab in Wuhan, how much could be in nature — accidental release or natural event? I am 70:30 or 60:40.'
Sir Jeremy later downgraded his estimate 50:50 in further emails just days later on February 4."
This is Feb 2020. They think lab leak is likely. Do you think they didn't tell western governments?
The more PB debates this topic the more I realise most of you have no fucking clue what you are talking about. You simply haven't looked at the evidence
Btw if the American healthcare system is so disastrous, how come almost every advance in the field comes from the United States?
Probably because they have a combination of most of the best research Universities in the world, which also attract many of the best researchers from around the world, with a huge Pharma and Medical industry which sees value in funding the research to increase their profits.
If you are a specialist in cancer drugs you can get whisked off to MIT or similar with a healthy grant and unlimited funding - not a hard calculation personally or professionally.
"COVID-19 in China: Current Situation and Downstream effects: 🧵
1/ From the outset, it is very important to recognise that a humanitarian catastrophe is currently unfolding in China. Analysis of this situation is not incompatible with recognising the horror of the situation."
Also: stock up on crucial meds now. Prepare for a new variant. FUCKKKKK
Doesn't do a great deal for the global economic position either, does it?
No. At best we are going to get another bout of fierce downward pressure on the global "recovery"
A worse alternative is that we get globally interrupted supply lines for six months/year... which is ominous (on top of the millions-dead horror in China, of course)
Even worse: a new, nastier variant erupts when 800 million people all get Covid at once
Which is why I don't buy the bioweapon thesis.
It's going to royally fuck China. They covered it up out of embarrassment and because they wanted everyone else to suffer too, not just them; not because it was a sophisticated weapon to just cripple the West.
Yes, I don't believe it was a bioweapon. I DO believeChina was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons. This is all accepted. There is proof
Of course the USA was doing the same. Indeed one of the great ironies of Covid is that it likely came from the lab because the Americans deliberately funded Chinese GOF research in Wuhan. Why? One explanation: partly to get around the ban on GOF in the USA, but also because the Americans wanted an insider in Wuhan, to tell them what the Chinese were doing re bioweapons
I've read quite plausible analyses by sober people that Daszak - head of EcoHeath at WIV - was also working with the CIA, to do this insider stuff. That sounds totally mad - I admit- but it does explain why he has gone completely untouched to date, not even subpoena'd let alone brought to trial
"China was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons."
Without meaning to further your monomaniacal belief, the above could mean two things: 1) They were investigating them as potential weapons to be used against others (and with little other use), or 2) They were investigating them because they were afraid other might weaponise the diseases, and look at what it meant.
The second is a much more interesting one to consider, as it covers both a defence against such weapons, as well as what the weapons might be.
But I reckon it's all tinfoilhattery anyway. As ever, you go for the DRAMATIC!!!!!!!!!
There have been several times in the last ew decades (known thanks to increased surveillance) that there might have been a worldwide pandemic: MERS or H1N1 being examples. We got lucky then. We were unlucky with Covid.
On a balance of probabilities, the virus came from the Wuhan lab - the location of the outbreak, the still lack of any tracing back to a credible source zero and, maybe most of all, the reactions of Western Governments to shutting down the world, which suggests they knew - or feared - this could potentially be very dangerous because it had man-made properties.
It's as much tinfoil-hattery to shout out we shouldn't investigate the possibility it came from a lab as to shout out it 100% did. Same sort of irrationality, same sort of maniacal obsession not to question.
The trouble with pointing to the initial, panicked reaction of the Chinese government as evidence of a lab-leaked bioweapon, is that three years on, the Chinese government had not changed its Covid policies despite now knowing exactly where things stand.
I was thinking more about the reaction of Western Governments. They didn't close down things when we had SARS, MERS etc. Their speed of reaction suggests they had fears that this disease could have been a bio-weapon and / or potentially disastrous consequences. Closing down whole economies in capitalist societies like the US / U.K. is not taken lightly.
China's reaction seems logical if we look at it from a political control standpoint - Government initially fearful of the consequences but then needs to maintain initial measures to prove that it was "right". Changing course would be an admission they got it wrong.
Britain locked down late compared with Europe, let alone the Far East. And we did react to SARS and even to animal diseases like foot and mouth, BSE and bird flu. We should not read too much into these things.
I reckon there is now a serious chance we will end up concluding this not only came from the lab (already highly probable) but that the virus was engineered, AND it was engineered in tandem with the desires of Chinese bioweapons researchers, looking into dangerous "chimeric coronaviruses" able to "cripple enemy health systems"
That's quite a long way from "a pangolin pissed on a fruitbat in a curry"
Btw if the American healthcare system is so disastrous, how come almost every advance in the field comes from the United States?
Probably because they have a combination of most of the best research Universities in the world, which also attract many of the best researchers from around the world, with a huge Pharma and Medical industry which sees value in funding the research to increase their profits.
If you are a specialist in cancer drugs you can get whisked off to MIT or similar with a healthy grant and unlimited funding - not a hard calculation personally or professionally.
Yes, it is swings and roundabouts. The American system is horrendously expensive but all that money sloshing around pays for the most research and advanced treatments.
One thing that is hard for non-Americans (and even many Americans) ot understand is that there is no "American model" of health care.
Instead, there are a bunch of different systems, which can be understood historically, but do not together make a single system as, for example, the NHS does.
First, there is private insurance for workers, usually paid by employers, though there are still a few plans run by unions. (This became important during WW II, when wage controls kept employers from competing in the usual way for scarce workers.) The plans vary -- to put it mildly. A few are so generous that the Obama administration wanted to penalize these "Cadillac" plans.
Second, there is the immense Medicare single-payer system for old folks, with its parts A, B, C, and D*.
Third, there are 52 (50 states, Puerto Rico, and DC) Medicaid single-payer systems for poor folks. (Some, of course, are eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid.)
Fourth, there is the Veteran's Adminstration system, which is something like your NHS, in that doctors and nurses are employees of the government,
Fifth, there is the Indian Health Service, where the doctors and nurses are, like the VA and NHS, employees of the government.
Sixth, there are health savings accounts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_savings_account (When governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels set these up for state employees. They have been very popular there, appear to have cut medical expenses, and, if anything, improved outcomes. They might not do as well with a less educated population.)
And, there are other smaller ones.
I say this, not to defend all these systems -- which I don't -- but to ask you to understand the complexity, and perhaps even learn from our mistakes.
(*Full disclosure: I am enrolled in parts A and C of Medicare.)
It seems in America that you should be covered by your parents plan aged 0-18 and then your employer until retirement (but with expensive employee deductions and premiums) and then Medicare.
Medicaid if you're poor throughout, and not working, but I understand that cover is very basic. The other trouble is the "between jobs" piece.
And if you're employer is a cheap bastard and doesn't give you proper cover which is why so many working poor in the US have awful healthcare outcomes.
The US system is a disaster, worse than the NHS, which really goes to show how bad it is. I don't understand the focus on the US when there's so many viable models in Europe which have an element of personal risk liability as well as state subsidy and cover.
Precisely because it's unquestionably worse, so it suits the vested interests to portray the US system as the only alternative.
I don’t know. Back in the 80s and 90s there plenty of “radicals” who promoted a U.S. style system.
A US style system tied to the principle of universal health care is a European style system, so that's a moot point.
Ok whatever.
My point is that nobody sensible now thinks that a pure monolithic NHS makes sense, and everyone is aware that a U.S. style “system” is a disaster too.
I’m not a health economist, but as far as I know people tend to hold up the French system as the best (or least worst, because there doesn’t seem to be a perfect system).
France, Germany and Switzerland are the best, I think.
I think the fixation on UK vs US is not so much political from either side, as a feature of the dialled up volume of the US healthcare debate. The Americans seem to be keenest on this dichotomy: fans of their system hold out the NHS as an example of socialist healthcare, and detractors look longingly at the wonderful NHS where diabetes drugs don't bankrupt you. We get a bit of the same with policing and race relations unfortunately.
We luckily don't have the same problem of ignoring European examples when it comes to transport infrastructure, education (ish) or environmental standards.
I think this is what's always amused me about the British centre-left.
There's a lot of wax lyrical stuff about being European but ultimately we take almost all our cues from the US.
This is not the case in Europe proper - which just shows how different we are.
Wait till you hear about the British centre right, who think it the height of affected poofery to eat moussaka.
I reckon there is now a serious chance we will end up concluding this not only came from the lab (already highly probable) but that the virus was engineered, AND it was engineered in tandem with the desires of Chinese bioweapons researchers, looking into dangerous "chimeric coronaviruses" able to "cripple enemy health systems"
That's quite a long way from "a pangolin pissed on a fruitbat in a curry"
You left out that it was paid for by America. And you might even be right.
The problem is that a Swiss system would only work here if implemented by Labour.
The Tories will just be bought and paid for by the American companies who want their system here.
Only Labour can reform the NHS. And fix it.
They were making good progress on every measure until they were voted out. Shortest waiting times in history, highest rate of satisfaction ever. Cancer guarantee.
Get the Tories out.
Such pointless partisanship insults the intelligence of everyone here.
You can post from a centre-left perspective, for sure, but please post constructive contributions not football team chants please.
Btw if the American healthcare system is so disastrous, how come almost every advance in the field comes from the United States?
Probably because they have a combination of most of the best research Universities in the world, which also attract many of the best researchers from around the world, with a huge Pharma and Medical industry which sees value in funding the research to increase their profits.
If you are a specialist in cancer drugs you can get whisked off to MIT or similar with a healthy grant and unlimited funding - not a hard calculation personally or professionally.
Yes, it is swings and roundabouts. The American system is horrendously expensive but all that money sloshing around pays for the most research and advanced treatments.
It is quite patchy though, so for example US maternal and infant mortality are substantially higher than other OECD countries.
"COVID-19 in China: Current Situation and Downstream effects: 🧵
1/ From the outset, it is very important to recognise that a humanitarian catastrophe is currently unfolding in China. Analysis of this situation is not incompatible with recognising the horror of the situation."
Also: stock up on crucial meds now. Prepare for a new variant. FUCKKKKK
Doesn't do a great deal for the global economic position either, does it?
No. At best we are going to get another bout of fierce downward pressure on the global "recovery"
A worse alternative is that we get globally interrupted supply lines for six months/year... which is ominous (on top of the millions-dead horror in China, of course)
Even worse: a new, nastier variant erupts when 800 million people all get Covid at once
Which is why I don't buy the bioweapon thesis.
It's going to royally fuck China. They covered it up out of embarrassment and because they wanted everyone else to suffer too, not just them; not because it was a sophisticated weapon to just cripple the West.
Yes, I don't believe it was a bioweapon. I DO believeChina was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons. This is all accepted. There is proof
Of course the USA was doing the same. Indeed one of the great ironies of Covid is that it likely came from the lab because the Americans deliberately funded Chinese GOF research in Wuhan. Why? One explanation: partly to get around the ban on GOF in the USA, but also because the Americans wanted an insider in Wuhan, to tell them what the Chinese were doing re bioweapons
I've read quite plausible analyses by sober people that Daszak - head of EcoHeath at WIV - was also working with the CIA, to do this insider stuff. That sounds totally mad - I admit- but it does explain why he has gone completely untouched to date, not even subpoena'd let alone brought to trial
"China was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons."
Without meaning to further your monomaniacal belief, the above could mean two things: 1) They were investigating them as potential weapons to be used against others (and with little other use), or 2) They were investigating them because they were afraid other might weaponise the diseases, and look at what it meant.
The second is a much more interesting one to consider, as it covers both a defence against such weapons, as well as what the weapons might be.
But I reckon it's all tinfoilhattery anyway. As ever, you go for the DRAMATIC!!!!!!!!!
There have been several times in the last ew decades (known thanks to increased surveillance) that there might have been a worldwide pandemic: MERS or H1N1 being examples. We got lucky then. We were unlucky with Covid.
On a balance of probabilities, the virus came from the Wuhan lab - the location of the outbreak, the still lack of any tracing back to a credible source zero and, maybe most of all, the reactions of Western Governments to shutting down the world, which suggests they knew - or feared - this could potentially be very dangerous because it had man-made properties.
It's as much tinfoil-hattery to shout out we shouldn't investigate the possibility it came from a lab as to shout out it 100% did. Same sort of irrationality, same sort of maniacal obsession not to question.
The trouble with pointing to the initial, panicked reaction of the Chinese government as evidence of a lab-leaked bioweapon, is that three years on, the Chinese government had not changed its Covid policies despite now knowing exactly where things stand.
I was thinking more about the reaction of Western Governments. They didn't close down things when we had SARS, MERS etc. Their speed of reaction suggests they had fears that this disease could have been a bio-weapon and / or potentially disastrous consequences. Closing down whole economies in capitalist societies like the US / U.K. is not taken lightly.
China's reaction seems logical if we look at it from a political control standpoint - Government initially fearful of the consequences but then needs to maintain initial measures to prove that it was "right". Changing course would be an admission they got it wrong.
Re SARS and MERS western governments didn’t need to shutdown because they didn’t need to. Both were contained at source. MERS has a very nasty fatality rate, IIRC.
The problem is that a Swiss system would only work here if implemented by Labour.
The Tories will just be bought and paid for by the American companies who want their system here.
Only Labour can reform the NHS. And fix it.
They were making good progress on every measure until they were voted out. Shortest waiting times in history, highest rate of satisfaction ever. Cancer guarantee.
Get the Tories out.
Labour had 13 years to reform the NHS. And did not do so, beyond fiddling around the edges.
What makes you think Labour would be willing to take on the unions and other vested interests that would be required to reform the NHS?
Throwing more money at the problem is *not* a solution on its own.
"Fiddling around the edges"? Excuse my hollow laugh.
New Labour's embracing of PFI was as outrageous a system as anything the Tories have done in their tenure since.
And is still a financial disaster zone.
There is nothing wrong with PFI as a concept - indeed, many PFI projects have been successful. The problem is that many other PFI projects were disastrously defined at contract definition. And we hear about the failures.
I am wary about PFI being used for complex-to-run projects such as hospitals. I am much happier with using them for things such as roads. PFI (and related concepts) are a tool in the toolbox. You use the tool for the right job. New Labour often used them as a spanner to knock in a nail.
New Labour used spanners to negotiate them. They couldn't have been seen coming more if they were dressed head to foot in dayglo and illuminated by a bank of super troupers.....
"COVID-19 in China: Current Situation and Downstream effects: 🧵
1/ From the outset, it is very important to recognise that a humanitarian catastrophe is currently unfolding in China. Analysis of this situation is not incompatible with recognising the horror of the situation."
Also: stock up on crucial meds now. Prepare for a new variant. FUCKKKKK
Doesn't do a great deal for the global economic position either, does it?
No. At best we are going to get another bout of fierce downward pressure on the global "recovery"
A worse alternative is that we get globally interrupted supply lines for six months/year... which is ominous (on top of the millions-dead horror in China, of course)
Even worse: a new, nastier variant erupts when 800 million people all get Covid at once
Which is why I don't buy the bioweapon thesis.
It's going to royally fuck China. They covered it up out of embarrassment and because they wanted everyone else to suffer too, not just them; not because it was a sophisticated weapon to just cripple the West.
Yes, I don't believe it was a bioweapon. I DO believeChina was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons. This is all accepted. There is proof
Of course the USA was doing the same. Indeed one of the great ironies of Covid is that it likely came from the lab because the Americans deliberately funded Chinese GOF research in Wuhan. Why? One explanation: partly to get around the ban on GOF in the USA, but also because the Americans wanted an insider in Wuhan, to tell them what the Chinese were doing re bioweapons
I've read quite plausible analyses by sober people that Daszak - head of EcoHeath at WIV - was also working with the CIA, to do this insider stuff. That sounds totally mad - I admit- but it does explain why he has gone completely untouched to date, not even subpoena'd let alone brought to trial
"China was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons."
Without meaning to further your monomaniacal belief, the above could mean two things: 1) They were investigating them as potential weapons to be used against others (and with little other use), or 2) They were investigating them because they were afraid other might weaponise the diseases, and look at what it meant.
The second is a much more interesting one to consider, as it covers both a defence against such weapons, as well as what the weapons might be.
But I reckon it's all tinfoilhattery anyway. As ever, you go for the DRAMATIC!!!!!!!!!
There have been several times in the last ew decades (known thanks to increased surveillance) that there might have been a worldwide pandemic: MERS or H1N1 being examples. We got lucky then. We were unlucky with Covid.
On a balance of probabilities, the virus came from the Wuhan lab - the location of the outbreak, the still lack of any tracing back to a credible source zero and, maybe most of all, the reactions of Western Governments to shutting down the world, which suggests they knew - or feared - this could potentially be very dangerous because it had man-made properties.
It's as much tinfoil-hattery to shout out we shouldn't investigate the possibility it came from a lab as to shout out it 100% did. Same sort of irrationality, same sort of maniacal obsession not to question.
I have no certainty where it originated, and sadly, due to China's actions in the early days, we probably never will (there is a chance the central Chinese government never will, either). But the most DRAMATIC thing is that it was manmade and released from the lab, which is why Leon obsesses with the possibility over all others.
"the reactions of Western Governments to shutting down the world, which suggests they knew - or feared - this could potentially be very dangerous because it had man-made properties."
This is the sort of thing that makes me thing you are sitting in your underpants wearing a tinfoil hat. The lockdowns in the west came (with hindsight) late, and as a result of what we were seeing in the countries that got it earlier, such as Italy. What is your evidence that we knew it had 'man-made properties' before early March 2020?
I haven't got any evidence which is why I said 'balance of probabilities'. And I'm sorry to disappoint you but I'm not sitting in my underpants with a tin foil hat.
However, I will note how you have slightly twisted the argument. What I mentioned that Western governments reactions were very different to what they had practiced before, and also would have not have been taken lightly if this was thought of as 'just another virus'. There is something that obviously triggered governments to text they did and it wasn't people being admitted to hospital (we didn't lock down the country over Monkeypox, for example). You don't lock down whole economies in a capitalist system for nothing.
As I said originally, it's as much tinfoil-hattish to try to avoid questions as it is to believe in the theory 100%. Are you sure you are not in your armchair with a pair of M&S Y-fronts and some Sainsbury's kitchen foil stick to your head?
Of course it was a different reaction, and not seen as 'just another virus' - at least too late . But Monkeypox was nowhere near as infectious as Covid was seen as being in early March 2020. Our evidence from China was uncertain due to their crass secrecy, but what we were seeing in Italy and elsewhere was frightening. This was not quite like anything we had experienced in the modern medical age, and it was hospitalising alarming numbers.
I don't 'avoid' the question. I just laugh at those who continue to ask the questions like a petulant three year old child when we answer 'we don't know!', as if their questions hold a hidden truth and they know the certain answer.
I am perfectly willing to accept that it mat have been a bioengineered virus released deliberately from a lab. I am perfectly willing to accept it might be totally natural in origin (*), or the myriad of scenarios in between. What amuses me are those who *only* go on about the former and tis ilk, because it fits in with their biases or because it is more dramatic. We simply don't know, and continually going on about *one* potential cause is utterly stupid. Unless they have other reasons for doing so.
We will probably never learn the true cause. But in a way its is irrelevant: China deserves censure for the secrecy early on in the outbreak, in January to March 2020. Their decision to try to hide the issue did much to accelerate the pandemic. And people wanting to 'blame' someone would be on much firmer ground with that.
Regardless of its origins, China could have made rational decisions that delayed the disease's spread. They did not do so for political reasons, and they are damned for that.
"COVID-19 in China: Current Situation and Downstream effects: 🧵
1/ From the outset, it is very important to recognise that a humanitarian catastrophe is currently unfolding in China. Analysis of this situation is not incompatible with recognising the horror of the situation."
Also: stock up on crucial meds now. Prepare for a new variant. FUCKKKKK
Doesn't do a great deal for the global economic position either, does it?
No. At best we are going to get another bout of fierce downward pressure on the global "recovery"
A worse alternative is that we get globally interrupted supply lines for six months/year... which is ominous (on top of the millions-dead horror in China, of course)
Even worse: a new, nastier variant erupts when 800 million people all get Covid at once
Which is why I don't buy the bioweapon thesis.
It's going to royally fuck China. They covered it up out of embarrassment and because they wanted everyone else to suffer too, not just them; not because it was a sophisticated weapon to just cripple the West.
Yes, I don't believe it was a bioweapon. I DO believeChina was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons. This is all accepted. There is proof
Of course the USA was doing the same. Indeed one of the great ironies of Covid is that it likely came from the lab because the Americans deliberately funded Chinese GOF research in Wuhan. Why? One explanation: partly to get around the ban on GOF in the USA, but also because the Americans wanted an insider in Wuhan, to tell them what the Chinese were doing re bioweapons
I've read quite plausible analyses by sober people that Daszak - head of EcoHeath at WIV - was also working with the CIA, to do this insider stuff. That sounds totally mad - I admit- but it does explain why he has gone completely untouched to date, not even subpoena'd let alone brought to trial
"China was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons."
Without meaning to further your monomaniacal belief, the above could mean two things: 1) They were investigating them as potential weapons to be used against others (and with little other use), or 2) They were investigating them because they were afraid other might weaponise the diseases, and look at what it meant.
The second is a much more interesting one to consider, as it covers both a defence against such weapons, as well as what the weapons might be.
But I reckon it's all tinfoilhattery anyway. As ever, you go for the DRAMATIC!!!!!!!!!
There have been several times in the last ew decades (known thanks to increased surveillance) that there might have been a worldwide pandemic: MERS or H1N1 being examples. We got lucky then. We were unlucky with Covid.
On a balance of probabilities, the virus came from the Wuhan lab - the location of the outbreak, the still lack of any tracing back to a credible source zero and, maybe most of all, the reactions of Western Governments to shutting down the world, which suggests they knew - or feared - this could potentially be very dangerous because it had man-made properties.
It's as much tinfoil-hattery to shout out we shouldn't investigate the possibility it came from a lab as to shout out it 100% did. Same sort of irrationality, same sort of maniacal obsession not to question.
The trouble with pointing to the initial, panicked reaction of the Chinese government as evidence of a lab-leaked bioweapon, is that three years on, the Chinese government had not changed its Covid policies despite now knowing exactly where things stand.
I was thinking more about the reaction of Western Governments. They didn't close down things when we had SARS, MERS etc. Their speed of reaction suggests they had fears that this disease could have been a bio-weapon and / or potentially disastrous consequences. Closing down whole economies in capitalist societies like the US / U.K. is not taken lightly.
China's reaction seems logical if we look at it from a political control standpoint - Government initially fearful of the consequences but then needs to maintain initial measures to prove that it was "right". Changing course would be an admission they got it wrong.
Britain locked down late compared with Europe, let alone the Far East. And we did react to SARS and even to animal diseases like foot and mouth, BSE and bird flu. We should not read too much into these things.
The "way we reacted" to Covid is probably the weakest strand of evidence for Lab Leak. I've no idea why it is being touted
The best evidence is that this nasty apparently engineered novel bat coronavirus with alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site appeared 300 yards from the only lab in the world which was deliberately altering novel bat coronaviruses at the Furin Cleavage Site so as to make them nastier
It's like someone in Russia being a hit with a 3 metre wide French custard tart apparently fired from a 2nd hand Belgian euphonium and then you discover that 2 minutes walk away is the only factory in the world adapting 2nd hand Belgian euophoniums so they can fire enormous French custard tarts
OK it is possible that the custard tart thrower came back from France with his tart and on the way in Antwerp someone dropped it on a brass band and it got shaped like a euphonium....
Or the origin of the mischief is the fucking factory. Visible from the scene of the crime
One thing that is hard for non-Americans (and even many Americans) ot understand is that there is no "American model" of health care.
Instead, there are a bunch of different systems, which can be understood historically, but do not together make a single system as, for example, the NHS does.
First, there is private insurance for workers, usually paid by employers, though there are still a few plans run by unions. (This became important during WW II, when wage controls kept employers from competing in the usual way for scarce workers.) The plans vary -- to put it mildly. A few are so generous that the Obama administration wanted to penalize these "Cadillac" plans.
Second, there is the immense Medicare single-payer system for old folks, with its parts A, B, C, and D*.
Third, there are 52 (50 states, Puerto Rico, and DC) Medicaid single-payer systems for poor folks. (Some, of course, are eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid.)
Fourth, there is the Veteran's Adminstration system, which is something like your NHS, in that doctors and nurses are employees of the government,
Fifth, there is the Indian Health Service, where the doctors and nurses are, like the VA and NHS, employees of the government.
Sixth, there are health savings accounts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_savings_account (When governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels set these up for state employees. They have been very popular there, appear to have cut medical expenses, and, if anything, improved outcomes. They might not do as well with a less educated population.)
And, there are other smaller ones.
I say this, not to defend all these systems -- which I don't -- but to ask you to understand the complexity, and perhaps even learn from our mistakes.
(*Full disclosure: I am enrolled in parts A and C of Medicare.)
It seems in America that you should be covered by your parents plan aged 0-18 and then your employer until retirement (but with expensive employee deductions and premiums) and then Medicare.
Medicaid if you're poor throughout, and not working, but I understand that cover is very basic. The other trouble is the "between jobs" piece.
And if you're employer is a cheap bastard and doesn't give you proper cover which is why so many working poor in the US have awful healthcare outcomes.
The US system is a disaster, worse than the NHS, which really goes to show how bad it is. I don't understand the focus on the US when there's so many viable models in Europe which have an element of personal risk liability as well as state subsidy and cover.
Precisely because it's unquestionably worse, so it suits the vested interests to portray the US system as the only alternative.
I don’t know. Back in the 80s and 90s there plenty of “radicals” who promoted a U.S. style system.
A US style system tied to the principle of universal health care is a European style system, so that's a moot point.
Ok whatever.
My point is that nobody sensible now thinks that a pure monolithic NHS makes sense, and everyone is aware that a U.S. style “system” is a disaster too.
I’m not a health economist, but as far as I know people tend to hold up the French system as the best (or least worst, because there doesn’t seem to be a perfect system).
France, Germany and Switzerland are the best, I think.
I think the fixation on UK vs US is not so much political from either side, as a feature of the dialled up volume of the US healthcare debate. The Americans seem to be keenest on this dichotomy: fans of their system hold out the NHS as an example of socialist healthcare, and detractors look longingly at the wonderful NHS where diabetes drugs don't bankrupt you. We get a bit of the same with policing and race relations unfortunately.
We luckily don't have the same problem of ignoring European examples when it comes to transport infrastructure, education (ish) or environmental standards.
I think this is what's always amused me about the British centre-left.
There's a lot of wax lyrical stuff about being European but ultimately we take almost all our cues from the US.
This is not the case in Europe proper - which just shows how different we are.
Wait till you hear about the British centre right, who think it the height of affected poofery to eat moussaka.
The UK left and right generally take their terms of reference on:
- Healthcare - Policing and race relations - Gender and LGBT rights - Abortion - Foreign policy - Monetary policy
from the US.
And their terms of reference on:
- Infrastructure and transport - Financial regulation - Food and farming - Migration - Education - Taxation
from Europe.
Don't agree on financial regulation or taxation. Otherwise not a bad list.
"COVID-19 in China: Current Situation and Downstream effects: 🧵
1/ From the outset, it is very important to recognise that a humanitarian catastrophe is currently unfolding in China. Analysis of this situation is not incompatible with recognising the horror of the situation."
Also: stock up on crucial meds now. Prepare for a new variant. FUCKKKKK
Doesn't do a great deal for the global economic position either, does it?
No. At best we are going to get another bout of fierce downward pressure on the global "recovery"
A worse alternative is that we get globally interrupted supply lines for six months/year... which is ominous (on top of the millions-dead horror in China, of course)
Even worse: a new, nastier variant erupts when 800 million people all get Covid at once
Which is why I don't buy the bioweapon thesis.
It's going to royally fuck China. They covered it up out of embarrassment and because they wanted everyone else to suffer too, not just them; not because it was a sophisticated weapon to just cripple the West.
Yes, I don't believe it was a bioweapon. I DO believeChina was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons. This is all accepted. There is proof
Of course the USA was doing the same. Indeed one of the great ironies of Covid is that it likely came from the lab because the Americans deliberately funded Chinese GOF research in Wuhan. Why? One explanation: partly to get around the ban on GOF in the USA, but also because the Americans wanted an insider in Wuhan, to tell them what the Chinese were doing re bioweapons
I've read quite plausible analyses by sober people that Daszak - head of EcoHeath at WIV - was also working with the CIA, to do this insider stuff. That sounds totally mad - I admit- but it does explain why he has gone completely untouched to date, not even subpoena'd let alone brought to trial
"China was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons."
Without meaning to further your monomaniacal belief, the above could mean two things: 1) They were investigating them as potential weapons to be used against others (and with little other use), or 2) They were investigating them because they were afraid other might weaponise the diseases, and look at what it meant.
The second is a much more interesting one to consider, as it covers both a defence against such weapons, as well as what the weapons might be.
But I reckon it's all tinfoilhattery anyway. As ever, you go for the DRAMATIC!!!!!!!!!
There have been several times in the last ew decades (known thanks to increased surveillance) that there might have been a worldwide pandemic: MERS or H1N1 being examples. We got lucky then. We were unlucky with Covid.
On a balance of probabilities, the virus came from the Wuhan lab - the location of the outbreak, the still lack of any tracing back to a credible source zero and, maybe most of all, the reactions of Western Governments to shutting down the world, which suggests they knew - or feared - this could potentially be very dangerous because it had man-made properties.
It's as much tinfoil-hattery to shout out we shouldn't investigate the possibility it came from a lab as to shout out it 100% did. Same sort of irrationality, same sort of maniacal obsession not to question.
I have no certainty where it originated, and sadly, due to China's actions in the early days, we probably never will (there is a chance the central Chinese government never will, either). But the most DRAMATIC thing is that it was manmade and released from the lab, which is why Leon obsesses with the possibility over all others.
"the reactions of Western Governments to shutting down the world, which suggests they knew - or feared - this could potentially be very dangerous because it had man-made properties."
This is the sort of thing that makes me thing you are sitting in your underpants wearing a tinfoil hat. The lockdowns in the west came (with hindsight) late, and as a result of what we were seeing in the countries that got it earlier, such as Italy. What is your evidence that we knew it had 'man-made properties' before early March 2020?
I haven't got any evidence which is why I said 'balance of probabilities'. And I'm sorry to disappoint you but I'm not sitting in my underpants with a tin foil hat.
However, I will note how you have slightly twisted the argument. What I mentioned that Western governments reactions were very different to what they had practiced before, and also would have not have been taken lightly if this was thought of as 'just another virus'. There is something that obviously triggered governments to text they did and it wasn't people being admitted to hospital (we didn't lock down the country over Monkeypox, for example). You don't lock down whole economies in a capitalist system for nothing.
As I said originally, it's as much tinfoil-hattish to try to avoid questions as it is to believe in the theory 100%. Are you sure you are not in your armchair with a pair of M&S Y-fronts and some Sainsbury's kitchen foil stick to your head?
Of course it was a different reaction, and not seen as 'just another virus' - at least too late . But Monkeypox was nowhere near as infectious as Covid was seen as being in early March 2020. Our evidence from China was uncertain due to their crass secrecy, but what we were seeing in Italy and elsewhere was frightening. This was not quite like anything we had experienced in the modern medical age, and it was hospitalising alarming numbers.
I don't 'avoid' the question. I just laugh at those who continue to ask the questions like a petulant three year old child when we answer 'we don't know!', as if their questions hold a hidden truth and they know the certain answer.
I am perfectly willing to accept that it mat have been a bioengineered virus released deliberately from a lab. I am perfectly willing to accept it might be totally natural in origin (*), or the myriad of scenarios in between. What amuses me are those who *only* go on about the former and tis ilk, because it fits in with their biases or because it is more dramatic. We simply don't know, and continually going on about *one* potential cause is utterly stupid. Unless they have other reasons for doing so.
We will probably never learn the true cause. But in a way its is irrelevant: China deserves censure for the secrecy early on in the outbreak, in January to March 2020. Their decision to try to hide the issue did much to accelerate the pandemic. And people wanting to 'blame' someone would be on much firmer ground with that.
Regardless of its origins, China could have made rational decisions that delayed the disease's spread. They did not do so for political reasons, and they are damned for that.
(*) That is the way I currently lean.
I know you're not the smartest donkey in the stable, but before embarrassing yourself further, you should try and read the evidence - you do have basic literacy, even if you lack any deductive reasoning
"COVID-19 in China: Current Situation and Downstream effects: 🧵
1/ From the outset, it is very important to recognise that a humanitarian catastrophe is currently unfolding in China. Analysis of this situation is not incompatible with recognising the horror of the situation."
Hypothetically, if HIV guaranteed complete immunity to Covid (including all current variants, and future ones), I'd pick HIV.
I'm not sure he's a loon, at all. He has strident opinions, he also seems notably well informed - this is his job: biorisk
The HIV thing is eccentric but arguable. If you believe Covid will be with us forever and will always mutate, quite possibly into something nastier, then having (now treatable) HIV would be better than getting a lethal and untreatable dose of Covid
There’s no evidence that an untreatable disease of covid exists, especially in people who have had vaccination and the disease itself. Don’t get sucked in.
Oh do fuck off. You're the one who said "if it came from the lab, that's a shame, but PEOPLE MAKE MISTAKES!"
LOL
No need to be rude. The point is how it came from the lab, if that’s what happened. I have asked you before if you think it is man made, or a release by accident of a natural virus. If it’s a lab leak, my money is on the latter. You seem unable to accept that pandemics can arise naturally, as they have done repeatedly through human history. I believe you are off travelling soon? Hopefully do your mental state some good. You say that your stay, sorry Eadrics stay, in Wales was thanks for a tip off about what was coming. I think you do this a lot - but a bit like the fake mediums casting round for names. You are pushing the China/doom/new variant meme right now. Maybe you will be right, and in eight weeks time we’re locked down again. But I doubt it.
I reckon there's far too much doom-mongering about the concept of the NHS on here. Despite the nay-sayers, the NHS underwent serious improvements from 1997-2010, despite us having an ageing population etc. back then. On most metrics, especially waiting times, the service got significantly better. It deteriorated from 2010, roughly (can't imagine why), and obviously Covid has presented huge challenges. But there's nothing to stop it improving again, with an appropriate strategy for staffing, and much more focus on prevention.
"COVID-19 in China: Current Situation and Downstream effects: 🧵
1/ From the outset, it is very important to recognise that a humanitarian catastrophe is currently unfolding in China. Analysis of this situation is not incompatible with recognising the horror of the situation."
Also: stock up on crucial meds now. Prepare for a new variant. FUCKKKKK
Doesn't do a great deal for the global economic position either, does it?
No. At best we are going to get another bout of fierce downward pressure on the global "recovery"
A worse alternative is that we get globally interrupted supply lines for six months/year... which is ominous (on top of the millions-dead horror in China, of course)
Even worse: a new, nastier variant erupts when 800 million people all get Covid at once
Which is why I don't buy the bioweapon thesis.
It's going to royally fuck China. They covered it up out of embarrassment and because they wanted everyone else to suffer too, not just them; not because it was a sophisticated weapon to just cripple the West.
Yes, I don't believe it was a bioweapon. I DO believeChina was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons. This is all accepted. There is proof
Of course the USA was doing the same. Indeed one of the great ironies of Covid is that it likely came from the lab because the Americans deliberately funded Chinese GOF research in Wuhan. Why? One explanation: partly to get around the ban on GOF in the USA, but also because the Americans wanted an insider in Wuhan, to tell them what the Chinese were doing re bioweapons
I've read quite plausible analyses by sober people that Daszak - head of EcoHeath at WIV - was also working with the CIA, to do this insider stuff. That sounds totally mad - I admit- but it does explain why he has gone completely untouched to date, not even subpoena'd let alone brought to trial
"China was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons."
Without meaning to further your monomaniacal belief, the above could mean two things: 1) They were investigating them as potential weapons to be used against others (and with little other use), or 2) They were investigating them because they were afraid other might weaponise the diseases, and look at what it meant.
The second is a much more interesting one to consider, as it covers both a defence against such weapons, as well as what the weapons might be.
But I reckon it's all tinfoilhattery anyway. As ever, you go for the DRAMATIC!!!!!!!!!
There have been several times in the last ew decades (known thanks to increased surveillance) that there might have been a worldwide pandemic: MERS or H1N1 being examples. We got lucky then. We were unlucky with Covid.
On a balance of probabilities, the virus came from the Wuhan lab - the location of the outbreak, the still lack of any tracing back to a credible source zero and, maybe most of all, the reactions of Western Governments to shutting down the world, which suggests they knew - or feared - this could potentially be very dangerous because it had man-made properties.
It's as much tinfoil-hattery to shout out we shouldn't investigate the possibility it came from a lab as to shout out it 100% did. Same sort of irrationality, same sort of maniacal obsession not to question.
The trouble with pointing to the initial, panicked reaction of the Chinese government as evidence of a lab-leaked bioweapon, is that three years on, the Chinese government had not changed its Covid policies despite now knowing exactly where things stand.
I was thinking more about the reaction of Western Governments. They didn't close down things when we had SARS, MERS etc. Their speed of reaction suggests they had fears that this disease could have been a bio-weapon and / or potentially disastrous consequences. Closing down whole economies in capitalist societies like the US / U.K. is not taken lightly.
China's reaction seems logical if we look at it from a political control standpoint - Government initially fearful of the consequences but then needs to maintain initial measures to prove that it was "right". Changing course would be an admission they got it wrong.
The two biggest factors were the precedent of China's policy and the panic after the health system got overwhelmed in Lombardy.
It's a bit dramatic to close down whole economies on the basis of what happens in one region of Italy. There has been no example of that ever happening before.
Extrapolation. What would have happened in the U.K. in March 2020 if we hadn’t locked down?
"COVID-19 in China: Current Situation and Downstream effects: 🧵
1/ From the outset, it is very important to recognise that a humanitarian catastrophe is currently unfolding in China. Analysis of this situation is not incompatible with recognising the horror of the situation."
Also: stock up on crucial meds now. Prepare for a new variant. FUCKKKKK
Doesn't do a great deal for the global economic position either, does it?
No. At best we are going to get another bout of fierce downward pressure on the global "recovery"
A worse alternative is that we get globally interrupted supply lines for six months/year... which is ominous (on top of the millions-dead horror in China, of course)
Even worse: a new, nastier variant erupts when 800 million people all get Covid at once
Which is why I don't buy the bioweapon thesis.
It's going to royally fuck China. They covered it up out of embarrassment and because they wanted everyone else to suffer too, not just them; not because it was a sophisticated weapon to just cripple the West.
Yes, I don't believe it was a bioweapon. I DO believeChina was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons. This is all accepted. There is proof
Of course the USA was doing the same. Indeed one of the great ironies of Covid is that it likely came from the lab because the Americans deliberately funded Chinese GOF research in Wuhan. Why? One explanation: partly to get around the ban on GOF in the USA, but also because the Americans wanted an insider in Wuhan, to tell them what the Chinese were doing re bioweapons
I've read quite plausible analyses by sober people that Daszak - head of EcoHeath at WIV - was also working with the CIA, to do this insider stuff. That sounds totally mad - I admit- but it does explain why he has gone completely untouched to date, not even subpoena'd let alone brought to trial
"China was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons."
Without meaning to further your monomaniacal belief, the above could mean two things: 1) They were investigating them as potential weapons to be used against others (and with little other use), or 2) They were investigating them because they were afraid other might weaponise the diseases, and look at what it meant.
The second is a much more interesting one to consider, as it covers both a defence against such weapons, as well as what the weapons might be.
But I reckon it's all tinfoilhattery anyway. As ever, you go for the DRAMATIC!!!!!!!!!
There have been several times in the last ew decades (known thanks to increased surveillance) that there might have been a worldwide pandemic: MERS or H1N1 being examples. We got lucky then. We were unlucky with Covid.
On a balance of probabilities, the virus came from the Wuhan lab - the location of the outbreak, the still lack of any tracing back to a credible source zero and, maybe most of all, the reactions of Western Governments to shutting down the world, which suggests they knew - or feared - this could potentially be very dangerous because it had man-made properties.
It's as much tinfoil-hattery to shout out we shouldn't investigate the possibility it came from a lab as to shout out it 100% did. Same sort of irrationality, same sort of maniacal obsession not to question.
I have no certainty where it originated, and sadly, due to China's actions in the early days, we probably never will (there is a chance the central Chinese government never will, either). But the most DRAMATIC thing is that it was manmade and released from the lab, which is why Leon obsesses with the possibility over all others.
"the reactions of Western Governments to shutting down the world, which suggests they knew - or feared - this could potentially be very dangerous because it had man-made properties."
This is the sort of thing that makes me thing you are sitting in your underpants wearing a tinfoil hat. The lockdowns in the west came (with hindsight) late, and as a result of what we were seeing in the countries that got it earlier, such as Italy. What is your evidence that we knew it had 'man-made properties' before early March 2020?
I haven't got any evidence which is why I said 'balance of probabilities'. And I'm sorry to disappoint you but I'm not sitting in my underpants with a tin foil hat.
However, I will note how you have slightly twisted the argument. What I mentioned that Western governments reactions were very different to what they had practiced before, and also would have not have been taken lightly if this was thought of as 'just another virus'. There is something that obviously triggered governments to text they did and it wasn't people being admitted to hospital (we didn't lock down the country over Monkeypox, for example). You don't lock down whole economies in a capitalist system for nothing.
As I said originally, it's as much tinfoil-hattish to try to avoid questions as it is to believe in the theory 100%. Are you sure you are not in your armchair with a pair of M&S Y-fronts and some Sainsbury's kitchen foil stick to your head?
Of course it was a different reaction, and not seen as 'just another virus' - at least too late . But Monkeypox was nowhere near as infectious as Covid was seen as being in early March 2020. Our evidence from China was uncertain due to their crass secrecy, but what we were seeing in Italy and elsewhere was frightening. This was not quite like anything we had experienced in the modern medical age, and it was hospitalising alarming numbers.
I don't 'avoid' the question. I just laugh at those who continue to ask the questions like a petulant three year old child when we answer 'we don't know!', as if their questions hold a hidden truth and they know the certain answer.
I am perfectly willing to accept that it mat have been a bioengineered virus released deliberately from a lab. I am perfectly willing to accept it might be totally natural in origin (*), or the myriad of scenarios in between. What amuses me are those who *only* go on about the former and tis ilk, because it fits in with their biases or because it is more dramatic. We simply don't know, and continually going on about *one* potential cause is utterly stupid. Unless they have other reasons for doing so.
We will probably never learn the true cause. But in a way its is irrelevant: China deserves censure for the secrecy early on in the outbreak, in January to March 2020. Their decision to try to hide the issue did much to accelerate the pandemic. And people wanting to 'blame' someone would be on much firmer ground with that.
Regardless of its origins, China could have made rational decisions that delayed the disease's spread. They did not do so for political reasons, and they are damned for that.
(*) That is the way I currently lean.
I know you're not the smartest donkey in the stable, but before embarrassing yourself further, you should try and read the evidence - you do have basic literacy, even if you lack any deductive reasoning
"You're not the smartest donkey in the stable"
Coming from you, that's quite funny. I'm unsure you would recognise 'evidence' if it wiped its damp knickers in your face.
"COVID-19 in China: Current Situation and Downstream effects: 🧵
1/ From the outset, it is very important to recognise that a humanitarian catastrophe is currently unfolding in China. Analysis of this situation is not incompatible with recognising the horror of the situation."
Hypothetically, if HIV guaranteed complete immunity to Covid (including all current variants, and future ones), I'd pick HIV.
I'm not sure he's a loon, at all. He has strident opinions, he also seems notably well informed - this is his job: biorisk
The HIV thing is eccentric but arguable. If you believe Covid will be with us forever and will always mutate, quite possibly into something nastier, then having (now treatable) HIV would be better than getting a lethal and untreatable dose of Covid
There’s no evidence that an untreatable disease of covid exists, especially in people who have had vaccination and the disease itself. Don’t get sucked in.
Oh do fuck off. You're the one who said "if it came from the lab, that's a shame, but PEOPLE MAKE MISTAKES!"
LOL
No need to be rude. The point is how it came from the lab, if that’s what happened. I have asked you before if you think it is man made, or a release by accident of a natural virus. If it’s a lab leak, my money is on the latter. You seem unable to accept that pandemics can arise naturally, as they have done repeatedly through human history. I believe you are off travelling soon? Hopefully do your mental state some good. You say that your stay, sorry Eadrics stay, in Wales was thanks for a tip off about what was coming. I think you do this a lot - but a bit like the fake mediums casting round for names. You are pushing the China/doom/new variant meme right now. Maybe you will be right, and in eight weeks time we’re locked down again. But I doubt it.
I'm perfectly fine, Mr "20 million died but that's OK because people make mistakes"" Dude
You are physically incapable of accepting this probably came from the lab, even though you pretend to have shifted away from wet market/zoonosis to a "neutral position". Deep down you fundamentally and emotionally reject the lab leak hypothesis - because you are a scientist and it troubles you existentially that your friends and colleagues might have done this
Ergo, your opinion on all this is frankly worthless?
On other topics I am sure you are much more fun, I just can't remember any examples of that
One thing that is hard for non-Americans (and even many Americans) ot understand is that there is no "American model" of health care.
Instead, there are a bunch of different systems, which can be understood historically, but do not together make a single system as, for example, the NHS does.
First, there is private insurance for workers, usually paid by employers, though there are still a few plans run by unions. (This became important during WW II, when wage controls kept employers from competing in the usual way for scarce workers.) The plans vary -- to put it mildly. A few are so generous that the Obama administration wanted to penalize these "Cadillac" plans.
Second, there is the immense Medicare single-payer system for old folks, with its parts A, B, C, and D*.
Third, there are 52 (50 states, Puerto Rico, and DC) Medicaid single-payer systems for poor folks. (Some, of course, are eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid.)
Fourth, there is the Veteran's Adminstration system, which is something like your NHS, in that doctors and nurses are employees of the government,
Fifth, there is the Indian Health Service, where the doctors and nurses are, like the VA and NHS, employees of the government.
Sixth, there are health savings accounts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_savings_account (When governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels set these up for state employees. They have been very popular there, appear to have cut medical expenses, and, if anything, improved outcomes. They might not do as well with a less educated population.)
And, there are other smaller ones.
I say this, not to defend all these systems -- which I don't -- but to ask you to understand the complexity, and perhaps even learn from our mistakes.
(*Full disclosure: I am enrolled in parts A and C of Medicare.)
It seems in America that you should be covered by your parents plan aged 0-18 and then your employer until retirement (but with expensive employee deductions and premiums) and then Medicare.
Medicaid if you're poor throughout, and not working, but I understand that cover is very basic. The other trouble is the "between jobs" piece.
And if you're employer is a cheap bastard and doesn't give you proper cover which is why so many working poor in the US have awful healthcare outcomes.
The US system is a disaster, worse than the NHS, which really goes to show how bad it is. I don't understand the focus on the US when there's so many viable models in Europe which have an element of personal risk liability as well as state subsidy and cover.
Precisely because it's unquestionably worse, so it suits the vested interests to portray the US system as the only alternative.
I don’t know. Back in the 80s and 90s there plenty of “radicals” who promoted a U.S. style system.
A US style system tied to the principle of universal health care is a European style system, so that's a moot point.
Ok whatever.
My point is that nobody sensible now thinks that a pure monolithic NHS makes sense, and everyone is aware that a U.S. style “system” is a disaster too.
I’m not a health economist, but as far as I know people tend to hold up the French system as the best (or least worst, because there doesn’t seem to be a perfect system).
France, Germany and Switzerland are the best, I think.
I think the fixation on UK vs US is not so much political from either side, as a feature of the dialled up volume of the US healthcare debate. The Americans seem to be keenest on this dichotomy: fans of their system hold out the NHS as an example of socialist healthcare, and detractors look longingly at the wonderful NHS where diabetes drugs don't bankrupt you. We get a bit of the same with policing and race relations unfortunately.
We luckily don't have the same problem of ignoring European examples when it comes to transport infrastructure, education (ish) or environmental standards.
I think this is what's always amused me about the British centre-left.
There's a lot of wax lyrical stuff about being European but ultimately we take almost all our cues from the US.
This is not the case in Europe proper - which just shows how different we are.
Wait till you hear about the British centre right, who think it the height of affected poofery to eat moussaka.
The UK left and right generally take their terms of reference on:
- Healthcare - Policing and race relations - Gender and LGBT rights - Abortion - Foreign policy - Monetary policy
from the US.
And their terms of reference on:
- Infrastructure and transport - Financial regulation - Food and farming - Migration - Education - Taxation
from Europe.
Don't agree on financial regulation or taxation. Otherwise not a bad list.
We're split both ways basically.
Certainly on the big taxes our set up is so different to the US that it’s hard to compare. We have VAT for a start, and employee/employer social security. They have state taxes and property tax is a much bigger and more controversial issue than council tax / local taxes are in most of Europe. Our corporate tax frames of reference are very European too: interest restrictions, patent boxes, none of those nonsense things like BEAT or subpart-F.
FS regulation - on reflection I think our frame of reference is largely domestic rather than either. Given we wrote the EU regs it’s us who influence them rather than vice versa. We don’t lock financial criminals up for decades like the US do either.
I reckon there's far too much doom-mongering about the concept of the NHS on here. Despite the nay-sayers, the NHS underwent serious improvements from 1997-2010, despite us having an ageing population etc. back then. On most metrics, especially waiting times, the service got significantly better. It deteriorated from 2010, roughly (can't imagine why), and obviously Covid has presented huge challenges. But there's nothing to stop it improving again, with an appropriate strategy for staffing, and much more focus on prevention.
In practice it is not easy to change the health industry and infrastructure of a country as big as ours. Indeed one of the biggest problems for the founders of the NHS was that a lot of the estate they inherited was antiquated and unsuited.
Private health care (whether self or insurance funded) has a lot of inefficiencies too. In particular it cherry picks the most straightforward elective surgery, and leaves the complicated, long term and logistically difficult to the NHS.
Apart from anything else, both parties need to be honest that there is no simple or easy fix for the NHS. We need substantially more physical and personnel capacity, both in terms of numbers and suitability to the modern age. We really do need 40 new hospitals!
"COVID-19 in China: Current Situation and Downstream effects: 🧵
1/ From the outset, it is very important to recognise that a humanitarian catastrophe is currently unfolding in China. Analysis of this situation is not incompatible with recognising the horror of the situation."
Hypothetically, if HIV guaranteed complete immunity to Covid (including all current variants, and future ones), I'd pick HIV.
I'm not sure he's a loon, at all. He has strident opinions, he also seems notably well informed - this is his job: biorisk
The HIV thing is eccentric but arguable. If you believe Covid will be with us forever and will always mutate, quite possibly into something nastier, then having (now treatable) HIV would be better than getting a lethal and untreatable dose of Covid
There’s no evidence that an untreatable disease of covid exists, especially in people who have had vaccination and the disease itself. Don’t get sucked in.
Oh do fuck off. You're the one who said "if it came from the lab, that's a shame, but PEOPLE MAKE MISTAKES!"
LOL
No need to be rude. The point is how it came from the lab, if that’s what happened. I have asked you before if you think it is man made, or a release by accident of a natural virus. If it’s a lab leak, my money is on the latter. You seem unable to accept that pandemics can arise naturally, as they have done repeatedly through human history. I believe you are off travelling soon? Hopefully do your mental state some good. You say that your stay, sorry Eadrics stay, in Wales was thanks for a tip off about what was coming. I think you do this a lot - but a bit like the fake mediums casting round for names. You are pushing the China/doom/new variant meme right now. Maybe you will be right, and in eight weeks time we’re locked down again. But I doubt it.
I'm perfectly fine, Mr "20 million died but that's OK because people make mistakes"" Dude
You are physically incapable of accepting this probably came from the lab, even though you pretend to have shifted away from wet market/zoonosis to a "neutral position". Deep down you fundamentally and emotionally reject the lab leak hypothesis - because you are a scientist and it troubles you existentially that your friends and colleagues might have done this
Ergo, your opinion on all this is frankly worthless?
On other topics I am sure you are much more fun, I just can't remember any examples of that
You don’t sound fine. I am happy to accept the lab leak hypotheses. I also think it’s likely natural in origin. Found in a bat in a cave, brought back to Wuhan, accidentally released. I think you have decided that what happened is scientists paid by Fauci, changed the original virus by inserting a furin cleavage abiliy, and it’s this that escaped. Hence you want to put Fauci on trial. Maybe you are right. But it’s definitely possible to have been natural in origin. As I keep saying, see Spanish Flu, SARS, MERS, the Black Death.
Like two of four of the cold coronaviruses. Like MERS.
So literally half of human-affecting coronaviruses prior to SARS-CoV-2.
I wonder which lab leaked OC43 in the 1880s.
No doubt Leon will leap in and insult me and others whilst screaming "DRAMA! BRACE! EVUL!"
Accepting anything that might imply lab leak regardless of content or origin with total credulity and lack of anything resembling critical thought whilst discounting any evidence against it as fatally biased and dishonest will inevitably lead you to one conclusion.
I've seen scientists online refuse to even discuss it any more due to the level of vitriol and abuse hurled at them if they don't subscribe to the lab leakers beliefs. I can empathise. I'm quitting discussing it here. Leon doesn't want to believe or listen to anything that might shake his over-excited and dramatic conviction in his simple answer with goodies and baddies, one that makes for such a good story and drama.
And he'll inevitably post rapidly, repetitively, and abusively on this yet again, so there's no point even looking in here again tonight, I reckon.
Leon, you're going to come up with something either patronising or abusive or irrelevant, so there's no point in reading it. It's just tedious now.
Like two of four of the cold coronaviruses. Like MERS.
So literally half of human-affecting coronaviruses prior to SARS-CoV-2.
I wonder which lab leaked OC43 in the 1880s.
No doubt Leon will leap in and insult me and others whilst screaming "DRAMA! BRACE! EVUL!"
Accepting anything that might imply lab leak regardless of content or origin with total credulity and lack of anything resembling critical thought whilst discounting any evidence against it as fatally biased and dishonest will inevitably lead you to one conclusion.
I've seen scientists online refuse to even discuss it any more due to the level of vitriol and abuse hurled at them if they don't subscribe to the lab leakers beliefs. I can empathise. I'm quitting discussing it here. Leon doesn't want to believe or listen to anything that might shake his over-excited and dramatic conviction in his simple answer with goodies and baddies, one that makes for such a good story and drama.
And he'll inevitably post rapidly, repetitively, and abusively on this yet again, so there's no point even looking in here again tonight, I reckon.
Leon, you're going to come up with something either patronising or abusive or irrelevant, so there's no point in reading it. It's just tedious now.
Thanks for posting this. I think there is little point debating with him any more. He speaks with the shallow knowledge of someone who gets his science from Twitter.
I reckon there's far too much doom-mongering about the concept of the NHS on here. Despite the nay-sayers, the NHS underwent serious improvements from 1997-2010, despite us having an ageing population etc. back then. On most metrics, especially waiting times, the service got significantly better. It deteriorated from 2010, roughly (can't imagine why), and obviously Covid has presented huge challenges. But there's nothing to stop it improving again, with an appropriate strategy for staffing, and much more focus on prevention.
In practice it is not easy to change the health industry and infrastructure of a country as big as ours. Indeed one of the biggest problems for the founders of the NHS was that a lot of the estate they inherited was antiquated and unsuited.
Private health care (whether self or insurance funded) has a lot of inefficiencies too. In particular it cherry picks the most straightforward elective surgery, and leaves the complicated, long term and logistically difficult to the NHS.
Apart from anything else, both parties need to be honest that there is no simple or easy fix for the NHS. We need substantially more physical and personnel capacity, both in terms of numbers and suitability to the modern age. We really do need 40 new hospitals!
". In particular it cherry picks the most straightforward elective surgery, and leaves the complicated, long term and logistically difficult to the NHS. "
My experience is of exactly the opposite. I had a long-term health issue (partially caused by NHS incompetence) that did not fit into any of the NHS's tickboxes to fix. So they did not bother. Fortunately I got a private surgeon who eventually managed to fix me - or at least that particular issue.
The NHS is great and efficient at helping when your complaint fits into any number of pre-prepared boxes. You need a stent? Fine. A new hip? Also fine (with waiting lists). When you have something complex, that requires diagnosis, it's all too often "computer says no".
If it were not for private healthcare, I still might not be able to walk properly.
The problem is that a Swiss system would only work here if implemented by Labour.
The Tories will just be bought and paid for by the American companies who want their system here.
Only Labour can reform the NHS. And fix it.
They were making good progress on every measure until they were voted out. Shortest waiting times in history, highest rate of satisfaction ever. Cancer guarantee.
Get the Tories out.
The whole Swiss healthcare system is privatised and for profit, from insurers all the way down to immunisation providers for children. The reform would require junking the whole system, privatising healthcare entirely and making purchasing health insurance mandatory the same as car insurance.
Neither party is going to do that.
Even mentioning this by a Labour leader would cause a massive rift, and either he would be thrown out immediately or the party would split and he would be left in a tiny rump. Electoral and political suicide on a Trussian scale.
Maybe this is Keir Starmer's 4D chess move. He can say to Labour Remainers: "We can't rejoin the EU, yet, but we can adopt a European health system."
And, at a stroke, convert millions or Remainers into Leavers.
My personal, incorrect, judgement of the Referendum was that Remain would just win. Despite running a terrible campaign.
But that the U.K. would leave, on a second referendum, a decade down the line, due to the design of the European Health Service. Which would be mixed mode everywhere else. In turn single market rules would mean that BUPA et al would become part of the system. Which would be anathema to a large chunk of the Left.
"COVID-19 in China: Current Situation and Downstream effects: 🧵
1/ From the outset, it is very important to recognise that a humanitarian catastrophe is currently unfolding in China. Analysis of this situation is not incompatible with recognising the horror of the situation."
Also: stock up on crucial meds now. Prepare for a new variant. FUCKKKKK
Doesn't do a great deal for the global economic position either, does it?
No. At best we are going to get another bout of fierce downward pressure on the global "recovery"
A worse alternative is that we get globally interrupted supply lines for six months/year... which is ominous (on top of the millions-dead horror in China, of course)
Even worse: a new, nastier variant erupts when 800 million people all get Covid at once
Which is why I don't buy the bioweapon thesis.
It's going to royally fuck China. They covered it up out of embarrassment and because they wanted everyone else to suffer too, not just them; not because it was a sophisticated weapon to just cripple the West.
Yes, I don't believe it was a bioweapon. I DO believeChina was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons. This is all accepted. There is proof
Of course the USA was doing the same. Indeed one of the great ironies of Covid is that it likely came from the lab because the Americans deliberately funded Chinese GOF research in Wuhan. Why? One explanation: partly to get around the ban on GOF in the USA, but also because the Americans wanted an insider in Wuhan, to tell them what the Chinese were doing re bioweapons
I've read quite plausible analyses by sober people that Daszak - head of EcoHeath at WIV - was also working with the CIA, to do this insider stuff. That sounds totally mad - I admit- but it does explain why he has gone completely untouched to date, not even subpoena'd let alone brought to trial
"China was investigating coronaviruses as POTENTIAL bioweapons."
Without meaning to further your monomaniacal belief, the above could mean two things: 1) They were investigating them as potential weapons to be used against others (and with little other use), or 2) They were investigating them because they were afraid other might weaponise the diseases, and look at what it meant.
The second is a much more interesting one to consider, as it covers both a defence against such weapons, as well as what the weapons might be.
But I reckon it's all tinfoilhattery anyway. As ever, you go for the DRAMATIC!!!!!!!!!
There have been several times in the last ew decades (known thanks to increased surveillance) that there might have been a worldwide pandemic: MERS or H1N1 being examples. We got lucky then. We were unlucky with Covid.
On a balance of probabilities, the virus came from the Wuhan lab - the location of the outbreak, the still lack of any tracing back to a credible source zero and, maybe most of all, the reactions of Western Governments to shutting down the world, which suggests they knew - or feared - this could potentially be very dangerous because it had man-made properties.
It's as much tinfoil-hattery to shout out we shouldn't investigate the possibility it came from a lab as to shout out it 100% did. Same sort of irrationality, same sort of maniacal obsession not to question.
The trouble with pointing to the initial, panicked reaction of the Chinese government as evidence of a lab-leaked bioweapon, is that three years on, the Chinese government had not changed its Covid policies despite now knowing exactly where things stand.
I was thinking more about the reaction of Western Governments. They didn't close down things when we had SARS, MERS etc. Their speed of reaction suggests they had fears that this disease could have been a bio-weapon and / or potentially disastrous consequences. Closing down whole economies in capitalist societies like the US / U.K. is not taken lightly.
China's reaction seems logical if we look at it from a political control standpoint - Government initially fearful of the consequences but then needs to maintain initial measures to prove that it was "right". Changing course would be an admission they got it wrong.
Britain locked down late compared with Europe, let alone the Far East. And we did react to SARS and even to animal diseases like foot and mouth, BSE and bird flu. We should not read too much into these things.
The "way we reacted" to Covid is probably the weakest strand of evidence for Lab Leak. I've no idea why it is being touted
The best evidence is that this nasty apparently engineered novel bat coronavirus with alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site appeared 300 yards from the only lab in the world which was deliberately altering novel bat coronaviruses at the Furin Cleavage Site so as to make them nastier
It's like someone in Russia being a hit with a 3 metre wide French custard tart apparently fired from a 2nd hand Belgian euphonium and then you discover that 2 minutes walk away is the only factory in the world adapting 2nd hand Belgian euophoniums so they can fire enormous French custard tarts
OK it is possible that the custard tart thrower came back from France with his tart and on the way in Antwerp someone dropped it on a brass band and it got shaped like a euphonium....
Or the origin of the mischief is the fucking factory. Visible from the scene of the crime
You mean the Lepage 240mm Crème Brûlée gun, surely?
One shot turns an entire regiments into Left Bank Existentialists. One minute they are stealing washing machines, next they are debating if they exist over Gallois and tiny cups of coffee…
I reckon there's far too much doom-mongering about the concept of the NHS on here. Despite the nay-sayers, the NHS underwent serious improvements from 1997-2010, despite us having an ageing population etc. back then. On most metrics, especially waiting times, the service got significantly better. It deteriorated from 2010, roughly (can't imagine why), and obviously Covid has presented huge challenges. But there's nothing to stop it improving again, with an appropriate strategy for staffing, and much more focus on prevention.
In practice it is not easy to change the health industry and infrastructure of a country as big as ours. Indeed one of the biggest problems for the founders of the NHS was that a lot of the estate they inherited was antiquated and unsuited.
Private health care (whether self or insurance funded) has a lot of inefficiencies too. In particular it cherry picks the most straightforward elective surgery, and leaves the complicated, long term and logistically difficult to the NHS.
Apart from anything else, both parties need to be honest that there is no simple or easy fix for the NHS. We need substantially more physical and personnel capacity, both in terms of numbers and suitability to the modern age. We really do need 40 new hospitals!
". In particular it cherry picks the most straightforward elective surgery, and leaves the complicated, long term and logistically difficult to the NHS. "
My experience is of exactly the opposite. I had a long-term health issue (partially caused by NHS incompetence) that did not fit into any of the NHS's tickboxes to fix. So they did not bother. Fortunately I got a private surgeon who eventually managed to fix me - or at least that particular issue.
The NHS is great and efficient at helping when your complaint fits into any number of pre-prepared boxes. You need a stent? Fine. A new hip? Also fine (with waiting lists). When you have something complex, that requires diagnosis, it's all too often "computer says no".
If it were not for private healthcare, I still might not be able to walk properly.
Did your surgeon only work privately, or did he work in the NHS too, like almost all private surgeons in the country? Were they trained in the NHS? Our private hospitals do not train surgeons.
If so then it is more an issue of finding the right doctor, who is willing to listen and get to the right diagnosis and treatment than NHS vs Private.
I reckon there's far too much doom-mongering about the concept of the NHS on here. Despite the nay-sayers, the NHS underwent serious improvements from 1997-2010, despite us having an ageing population etc. back then. On most metrics, especially waiting times, the service got significantly better. It deteriorated from 2010, roughly (can't imagine why), and obviously Covid has presented huge challenges. But there's nothing to stop it improving again, with an appropriate strategy for staffing, and much more focus on prevention.
In practice it is not easy to change the health industry and infrastructure of a country as big as ours. Indeed one of the biggest problems for the founders of the NHS was that a lot of the estate they inherited was antiquated and unsuited.
Private health care (whether self or insurance funded) has a lot of inefficiencies too. In particular it cherry picks the most straightforward elective surgery, and leaves the complicated, long term and logistically difficult to the NHS.
Apart from anything else, both parties need to be honest that there is no simple or easy fix for the NHS. We need substantially more physical and personnel capacity, both in terms of numbers and suitability to the modern age. We really do need 40 new hospitals!
". In particular it cherry picks the most straightforward elective surgery, and leaves the complicated, long term and logistically difficult to the NHS. "
My experience is of exactly the opposite. I had a long-term health issue (partially caused by NHS incompetence) that did not fit into any of the NHS's tickboxes to fix. So they did not bother. Fortunately I got a private surgeon who eventually managed to fix me - or at least that particular issue.
The NHS is great and efficient at helping when your complaint fits into any number of pre-prepared boxes. You need a stent? Fine. A new hip? Also fine (with waiting lists). When you have something complex, that requires diagnosis, it's all too often "computer says no".
If it were not for private healthcare, I still might not be able to walk properly.
That was my experience as well - not so much “no” as “we think you can wait until we have space in the schedule. Or the Unix clock wraps around. The latter is more likely”.
Hence private insurance paid for by private employers. Notable is that muscular/skeletal problems often don’t go though a GP filter - my current policy says call them and they send you straight to a consultant.
The problem is that a Swiss system would only work here if implemented by Labour.
The Tories will just be bought and paid for by the American companies who want their system here.
Only Labour can reform the NHS. And fix it.
They were making good progress on every measure until they were voted out. Shortest waiting times in history, highest rate of satisfaction ever. Cancer guarantee.
Get the Tories out.
Such pointless partisanship insults the intelligence of everyone here.
You can post from a centre-left perspective, for sure, but please post constructive contributions not football team chants please.
It will be interesting to see just how badly your lot can fuck this up. You Do Not Pick A Fight With The Nurses.
"We're sticking to the independent pay review body. Which we overrode last year, and may interfere with to get the independent result we want next year." People aren't stupid. Told to clap for carers and our heroic NHS staff we're now being told they are on the shill for Putin.
I reckon there's far too much doom-mongering about the concept of the NHS on here. Despite the nay-sayers, the NHS underwent serious improvements from 1997-2010, despite us having an ageing population etc. back then. On most metrics, especially waiting times, the service got significantly better. It deteriorated from 2010, roughly (can't imagine why), and obviously Covid has presented huge challenges. But there's nothing to stop it improving again, with an appropriate strategy for staffing, and much more focus on prevention.
In practice it is not easy to change the health industry and infrastructure of a country as big as ours. Indeed one of the biggest problems for the founders of the NHS was that a lot of the estate they inherited was antiquated and unsuited.
Private health care (whether self or insurance funded) has a lot of inefficiencies too. In particular it cherry picks the most straightforward elective surgery, and leaves the complicated, long term and logistically difficult to the NHS.
Apart from anything else, both parties need to be honest that there is no simple or easy fix for the NHS. We need substantially more physical and personnel capacity, both in terms of numbers and suitability to the modern age. We really do need 40 new hospitals!
". In particular it cherry picks the most straightforward elective surgery, and leaves the complicated, long term and logistically difficult to the NHS. "
My experience is of exactly the opposite. I had a long-term health issue (partially caused by NHS incompetence) that did not fit into any of the NHS's tickboxes to fix. So they did not bother. Fortunately I got a private surgeon who eventually managed to fix me - or at least that particular issue.
The NHS is great and efficient at helping when your complaint fits into any number of pre-prepared boxes. You need a stent? Fine. A new hip? Also fine (with waiting lists). When you have something complex, that requires diagnosis, it's all too often "computer says no".
If it were not for private healthcare, I still might not be able to walk properly.
Did your surgeon only work privately, or did he work in the NHS too, like almost all private surgeons in the country? We're they trained in the NHS? Our private hospitals do not train surgeons.
If so then it is more an issue of finding the right doctor, who is willing to listen and get to the right diagnosis and treatment than NHS vs Private.diagnose
For a long period he worked in both; I think he had just stopped working at Whitechapel when I came along - he was near retirement at the time, and only had three non-'other job' related cases left. He said he took me on because he thought I was an interesting case.
My experience of the NHS was getting shunted down one route: it was an orthopedic problem. After all, they had put metal in my ankle, and therefore it was obviously something to do with that. Hence a few years of bone scans, x-rays, and some nasty ops.
One day, my physiotherapist said that there was someone downstairs she thought might like to see me (this was a private physio). She went downstairs, then took me down to see this portly white-haired gent. He read my records, looked at the problem, and said: "I think I know what's wrong; you've got severe nerve damage down there."
He is a hero in my eyes. It took him four or five operations over a few years, but he changed my life. And I guess that's the great thing about being a doctor: you can genuinely change lives. it must be a great feeling. I have zero doubt the NHS would not have fixed me.
It will be interesting to see just how badly your lot can fuck this up. You Do Not Pick A Fight With The Nurses.
"We're sticking to the independent pay review body. Which we overrode last year, and may interfere with to get the independent result we want next year." People aren't stupid. Told to clap for carers and our heroic NHS staff we're now being told they are on the shill for Putin.
The landing zone has to be similar to the Scottish settlement. Personally hope they face down the RMT, but healthcare needs and deserves better pay.
I reckon there's far too much doom-mongering about the concept of the NHS on here. Despite the nay-sayers, the NHS underwent serious improvements from 1997-2010, despite us having an ageing population etc. back then. On most metrics, especially waiting times, the service got significantly better. It deteriorated from 2010, roughly (can't imagine why), and obviously Covid has presented huge challenges. But there's nothing to stop it improving again, with an appropriate strategy for staffing, and much more focus on prevention.
In practice it is not easy to change the health industry and infrastructure of a country as big as ours. Indeed one of the biggest problems for the founders of the NHS was that a lot of the estate they inherited was antiquated and unsuited.
Private health care (whether self or insurance funded) has a lot of inefficiencies too. In particular it cherry picks the most straightforward elective surgery, and leaves the complicated, long term and logistically difficult to the NHS.
Apart from anything else, both parties need to be honest that there is no simple or easy fix for the NHS. We need substantially more physical and personnel capacity, both in terms of numbers and suitability to the modern age. We really do need 40 new hospitals!
". In particular it cherry picks the most straightforward elective surgery, and leaves the complicated, long term and logistically difficult to the NHS. "
My experience is of exactly the opposite. I had a long-term health issue (partially caused by NHS incompetence) that did not fit into any of the NHS's tickboxes to fix. So they did not bother. Fortunately I got a private surgeon who eventually managed to fix me - or at least that particular issue.
The NHS is great and efficient at helping when your complaint fits into any number of pre-prepared boxes. You need a stent? Fine. A new hip? Also fine (with waiting lists). When you have something complex, that requires diagnosis, it's all too often "computer says no".
If it were not for private healthcare, I still might not be able to walk properly.
Did your surgeon only work privately, or did he work in the NHS too, like almost all private surgeons in the country? We're they trained in the NHS? Our private hospitals do not train surgeons.
If so then it is more an issue of finding the right doctor, who is willing to listen and get to the right diagnosis and treatment than NHS vs Private.diagnose
For a long period he worked in both; I think he had just stopped working at Whitechapel when I came along - he was near retirement at the time, and only had three non-'other job' related cases left. He said he took me on because he thought I was an interesting case.
My experience of the NHS was getting shunted down one route: it was an orthopedic problem. After all, they had put metal in my ankle, and therefore it was obviously something to do with that. Hence a few years of bone scans, x-rays, and some nasty ops.
One day, my physiotherapist said that there was someone downstairs she thought might like to see me (this was a private physio). She went downstairs, then took me down to see this portly white-haired gent. He read my records, looked at the problem, and said: "I think I know what's wrong; you've got severe nerve damage down there."
He is a hero in my eyes. It took him four or five operations over a few years, but he changed my life. And I guess that's the great thing about being a doctor: you can genuinely change lives. it must be a great feeling. I have zero doubt the NHS would not have fixed me.
It will be interesting to see just how badly your lot can fuck this up. You Do Not Pick A Fight With The Nurses.
"We're sticking to the independent pay review body. Which we overrode last year, and may interfere with to get the independent result we want next year." People aren't stupid. Told to clap for carers and our heroic NHS staff we're now being told they are on the shill for Putin.
A 6% rise for nurses in line with the average national rise maybe. Or one off extra payment.
It will be interesting to see just how badly your lot can fuck this up. You Do Not Pick A Fight With The Nurses.
"We're sticking to the independent pay review body. Which we overrode last year, and may interfere with to get the independent result we want next year." People aren't stupid. Told to clap for carers and our heroic NHS staff we're now being told they are on the shill for Putin.
A 6% rise for nurses in line with the average national rise maybe. Or one off extra payment.
The 19% rise the RCN want however is unaffordable
So you are saying Barclay should negotiate seriously on pay?
If so then the strikes are off, as the RCN has said.
The problem is that a Swiss system would only work here if implemented by Labour.
The Tories will just be bought and paid for by the American companies who want their system here.
Only Labour can reform the NHS. And fix it.
They were making good progress on every measure until they were voted out. Shortest waiting times in history, highest rate of satisfaction ever. Cancer guarantee.
Get the Tories out.
Such pointless partisanship insults the intelligence of everyone here.
You can post from a centre-left perspective, for sure, but please post constructive contributions not football team chants please.
Why can't CHB post partisan material? You do.
I most certainly do not.
I am entirely objective in my posts and my betting.
If you can't see that it's because you're part or the problem too.
I reckon there's far too much doom-mongering about the concept of the NHS on here. Despite the nay-sayers, the NHS underwent serious improvements from 1997-2010, despite us having an ageing population etc. back then. On most metrics, especially waiting times, the service got significantly better. It deteriorated from 2010, roughly (can't imagine why), and obviously Covid has presented huge challenges. But there's nothing to stop it improving again, with an appropriate strategy for staffing, and much more focus on prevention.
In practice it is not easy to change the health industry and infrastructure of a country as big as ours. Indeed one of the biggest problems for the founders of the NHS was that a lot of the estate they inherited was antiquated and unsuited.
Private health care (whether self or insurance funded) has a lot of inefficiencies too. In particular it cherry picks the most straightforward elective surgery, and leaves the complicated, long term and logistically difficult to the NHS.
Apart from anything else, both parties need to be honest that there is no simple or easy fix for the NHS. We need substantially more physical and personnel capacity, both in terms of numbers and suitability to the modern age. We really do need 40 new hospitals!
". In particular it cherry picks the most straightforward elective surgery, and leaves the complicated, long term and logistically difficult to the NHS. "
My experience is of exactly the opposite. I had a long-term health issue (partially caused by NHS incompetence) that did not fit into any of the NHS's tickboxes to fix. So they did not bother. Fortunately I got a private surgeon who eventually managed to fix me - or at least that particular issue.
The NHS is great and efficient at helping when your complaint fits into any number of pre-prepared boxes. You need a stent? Fine. A new hip? Also fine (with waiting lists). When you have something complex, that requires diagnosis, it's all too often "computer says no".
If it were not for private healthcare, I still might not be able to walk properly.
Did your surgeon only work privately, or did he work in the NHS too, like almost all private surgeons in the country? Were they trained in the NHS? Our private hospitals do not train surgeons.
If so then it is more an issue of finding the right doctor, who is willing to listen and get to the right diagnosis and treatment than NHS vs Private.
On that point, isn't there mileage in mandating that private hospitals also need to begin teaching and training for junior doctors as part of their operating remit. That would result in a huge increase in training of doctors (and nurses) relatively cost free. Having said that, I went for a follow up scan yesterday and there was a notice in the private hospital I went to that student doctors may be present and if I'd prefer not to have them then instruct reception to opt out, so some private hospitals must be training juniors and student doctors.
It will be interesting to see just how badly your lot can fuck this up. You Do Not Pick A Fight With The Nurses.
"We're sticking to the independent pay review body. Which we overrode last year, and may interfere with to get the independent result we want next year." People aren't stupid. Told to clap for carers and our heroic NHS staff we're now being told they are on the shill for Putin.
A 6% rise for nurses in line with the average national rise maybe. Or one off extra payment.
The 19% rise the RCN want however is unaffordable
... in your view; "unaffordable" is your subjective view. 6% is a real-terms pay cut.
Why didn't the government come right out and say public service workers will get CPI increases? It was ok for pensioners.
It will be interesting to see just how badly your lot can fuck this up. You Do Not Pick A Fight With The Nurses.
"We're sticking to the independent pay review body. Which we overrode last year, and may interfere with to get the independent result we want next year." People aren't stupid. Told to clap for carers and our heroic NHS staff we're now being told they are on the shill for Putin.
A 6% rise for nurses in line with the average national rise maybe. Or one off extra payment.
The 19% rise the RCN want however is unaffordable
So you are saying Barclay should negotiate seriously on pay?
If so then the strikes are off, as the RCN has said.
I think it’s clear he should. Fiscal responsibility is all well and good, but we’ve ripped up that rule book since early 2020. It’s no wonder people can’t see why a little extra pay rise can be afforded yet test and trace can, and energy payments.
I reckon there's far too much doom-mongering about the concept of the NHS on here. Despite the nay-sayers, the NHS underwent serious improvements from 1997-2010, despite us having an ageing population etc. back then. On most metrics, especially waiting times, the service got significantly better. It deteriorated from 2010, roughly (can't imagine why), and obviously Covid has presented huge challenges. But there's nothing to stop it improving again, with an appropriate strategy for staffing, and much more focus on prevention.
In practice it is not easy to change the health industry and infrastructure of a country as big as ours. Indeed one of the biggest problems for the founders of the NHS was that a lot of the estate they inherited was antiquated and unsuited.
Private health care (whether self or insurance funded) has a lot of inefficiencies too. In particular it cherry picks the most straightforward elective surgery, and leaves the complicated, long term and logistically difficult to the NHS.
Apart from anything else, both parties need to be honest that there is no simple or easy fix for the NHS. We need substantially more physical and personnel capacity, both in terms of numbers and suitability to the modern age. We really do need 40 new hospitals!
". In particular it cherry picks the most straightforward elective surgery, and leaves the complicated, long term and logistically difficult to the NHS. "
My experience is of exactly the opposite. I had a long-term health issue (partially caused by NHS incompetence) that did not fit into any of the NHS's tickboxes to fix. So they did not bother. Fortunately I got a private surgeon who eventually managed to fix me - or at least that particular issue.
The NHS is great and efficient at helping when your complaint fits into any number of pre-prepared boxes. You need a stent? Fine. A new hip? Also fine (with waiting lists). When you have something complex, that requires diagnosis, it's all too often "computer says no".
If it were not for private healthcare, I still might not be able to walk properly.
Did your surgeon only work privately, or did he work in the NHS too, like almost all private surgeons in the country? We're they trained in the NHS? Our private hospitals do not train surgeons.
If so then it is more an issue of finding the right doctor, who is willing to listen and get to the right diagnosis and treatment than NHS vs Private.diagnose
For a long period he worked in both; I think he had just stopped working at Whitechapel when I came along - he was near retirement at the time, and only had three non-'other job' related cases left. He said he took me on because he thought I was an interesting case.
My experience of the NHS was getting shunted down one route: it was an orthopedic problem. After all, they had put metal in my ankle, and therefore it was obviously something to do with that. Hence a few years of bone scans, x-rays, and some nasty ops.
One day, my physiotherapist said that there was someone downstairs she thought might like to see me (this was a private physio). She went downstairs, then took me down to see this portly white-haired gent. He read my records, looked at the problem, and said: "I think I know what's wrong; you've got severe nerve damage down there."
He is a hero in my eyes. It took him four or five operations over a few years, but he changed my life. And I guess that's the great thing about being a doctor: you can genuinely change lives. it must be a great feeling. I have zero doubt the NHS would not have fixed me.
Do you think he treated his NHS patients with less care and expertise than his private ones?
I think that's a rather silly question - of he course he treated them the same. My point is that the NHS railroaded me into an 'orthopedic' route, when the problem was neurological. I only got to see him because I moved to London and my parents decided to take my physio private. There is no way I would have got to see Sid under the NHS.
The point is that private healthcare gave me another, alternative, route to diagnosis. If it had been left to the NHS, they'd probably have chopped my foot off by now. And that's only a slight exaggeration - one option was to put a metal plate between bones in my foot and leg, anchoring my ankle at a set angle so I could not move my foot. With hindsight that would have been barabaric, but it was proposed.
And made worse by the fact the NHS caused the neurological damage in the first place (a stitch left in, from memory, that rubbed against a nerve).
I reckon there's far too much doom-mongering about the concept of the NHS on here. Despite the nay-sayers, the NHS underwent serious improvements from 1997-2010, despite us having an ageing population etc. back then. On most metrics, especially waiting times, the service got significantly better. It deteriorated from 2010, roughly (can't imagine why), and obviously Covid has presented huge challenges. But there's nothing to stop it improving again, with an appropriate strategy for staffing, and much more focus on prevention.
In practice it is not easy to change the health industry and infrastructure of a country as big as ours. Indeed one of the biggest problems for the founders of the NHS was that a lot of the estate they inherited was antiquated and unsuited.
Private health care (whether self or insurance funded) has a lot of inefficiencies too. In particular it cherry picks the most straightforward elective surgery, and leaves the complicated, long term and logistically difficult to the NHS.
Apart from anything else, both parties need to be honest that there is no simple or easy fix for the NHS. We need substantially more physical and personnel capacity, both in terms of numbers and suitability to the modern age. We really do need 40 new hospitals!
". In particular it cherry picks the most straightforward elective surgery, and leaves the complicated, long term and logistically difficult to the NHS. "
My experience is of exactly the opposite. I had a long-term health issue (partially caused by NHS incompetence) that did not fit into any of the NHS's tickboxes to fix. So they did not bother. Fortunately I got a private surgeon who eventually managed to fix me - or at least that particular issue.
The NHS is great and efficient at helping when your complaint fits into any number of pre-prepared boxes. You need a stent? Fine. A new hip? Also fine (with waiting lists). When you have something complex, that requires diagnosis, it's all too often "computer says no".
If it were not for private healthcare, I still might not be able to walk properly.
Did your surgeon only work privately, or did he work in the NHS too, like almost all private surgeons in the country? Were they trained in the NHS? Our private hospitals do not train surgeons.
If so then it is more an issue of finding the right doctor, who is willing to listen and get to the right diagnosis and treatment than NHS vs Private.
On that point, isn't there mileage in mandating that private hospitals also need to begin teaching and training for junior doctors as part of their operating remit. That would result in a huge increase in training of doctors (and nurses) relatively cost free. Having said that, I went for a follow up scan yesterday and there was a notice in the private hospital I went to that student doctors may be present and if I'd prefer not to have them then instruct reception to opt out, so some private hospitals must be training juniors and student doctors.
There is a move to insist that Private Hospitals doing NHS work need to participate in training in order to retain their contracts. Private hospitals have always done Nurse training, though obviously can only do some areas of practice. There is virtually no private hospital maternity care in the country for example.
It will be interesting to see just how badly your lot can fuck this up. You Do Not Pick A Fight With The Nurses.
"We're sticking to the independent pay review body. Which we overrode last year, and may interfere with to get the independent result we want next year." People aren't stupid. Told to clap for carers and our heroic NHS staff we're now being told they are on the shill for Putin.
A 6% rise for nurses in line with the average national rise maybe. Or one off extra payment.
The 19% rise the RCN want however is unaffordable
So go and negotiate. They have opened extreme. You are refusing to negotiate. So regardless of what they asked for, its the government being unreasonable.
It will be interesting to see just how badly your lot can fuck this up. You Do Not Pick A Fight With The Nurses.
"We're sticking to the independent pay review body. Which we overrode last year, and may interfere with to get the independent result we want next year." People aren't stupid. Told to clap for carers and our heroic NHS staff we're now being told they are on the shill for Putin.
A 6% rise for nurses in line with the average national rise maybe. Or one off extra payment.
The 19% rise the RCN want however is unaffordable
... in your view; "unaffordable" is your subjective view. 6% is a real-terms pay cut.
Why didn't the government come right out and say public service workers will get CPI increases? It was ok for pensioners.
6.2% is the average current private sector payrise.
Any more than that has to be paid for from higher taxes on those same private sector workers
I reckon there's far too much doom-mongering about the concept of the NHS on here. Despite the nay-sayers, the NHS underwent serious improvements from 1997-2010, despite us having an ageing population etc. back then. On most metrics, especially waiting times, the service got significantly better. It deteriorated from 2010, roughly (can't imagine why), and obviously Covid has presented huge challenges. But there's nothing to stop it improving again, with an appropriate strategy for staffing, and much more focus on prevention.
In practice it is not easy to change the health industry and infrastructure of a country as big as ours. Indeed one of the biggest problems for the founders of the NHS was that a lot of the estate they inherited was antiquated and unsuited.
Private health care (whether self or insurance funded) has a lot of inefficiencies too. In particular it cherry picks the most straightforward elective surgery, and leaves the complicated, long term and logistically difficult to the NHS.
Apart from anything else, both parties need to be honest that there is no simple or easy fix for the NHS. We need substantially more physical and personnel capacity, both in terms of numbers and suitability to the modern age. We really do need 40 new hospitals!
". In particular it cherry picks the most straightforward elective surgery, and leaves the complicated, long term and logistically difficult to the NHS. "
My experience is of exactly the opposite. I had a long-term health issue (partially caused by NHS incompetence) that did not fit into any of the NHS's tickboxes to fix. So they did not bother. Fortunately I got a private surgeon who eventually managed to fix me - or at least that particular issue.
The NHS is great and efficient at helping when your complaint fits into any number of pre-prepared boxes. You need a stent? Fine. A new hip? Also fine (with waiting lists). When you have something complex, that requires diagnosis, it's all too often "computer says no".
If it were not for private healthcare, I still might not be able to walk properly.
Did your surgeon only work privately, or did he work in the NHS too, like almost all private surgeons in the country? We're they trained in the NHS? Our private hospitals do not train surgeons.
If so then it is more an issue of finding the right doctor, who is willing to listen and get to the right diagnosis and treatment than NHS vs Private.diagnose
For a long period he worked in both; I think he had just stopped working at Whitechapel when I came along - he was near retirement at the time, and only had three non-'other job' related cases left. He said he took me on because he thought I was an interesting case.
My experience of the NHS was getting shunted down one route: it was an orthopedic problem. After all, they had put metal in my ankle, and therefore it was obviously something to do with that. Hence a few years of bone scans, x-rays, and some nasty ops.
One day, my physiotherapist said that there was someone downstairs she thought might like to see me (this was a private physio). She went downstairs, then took me down to see this portly white-haired gent. He read my records, looked at the problem, and said: "I think I know what's wrong; you've got severe nerve damage down there."
He is a hero in my eyes. It took him four or five operations over a few years, but he changed my life. And I guess that's the great thing about being a doctor: you can genuinely change lives. it must be a great feeling. I have zero doubt the NHS would not have fixed me.
Do you think he treated his NHS patients with less care and expertise than his private ones?
I think that's a rather silly question - of he course he treated them the same. My point is that the NHS railroaded me into an 'orthopedic' route, when the problem was neurological. I only got to see him because I moved to London and my parents decided to take my physio private. There is no way I would have got to see Sid under the NHS.
The point is that private healthcare gave me another, alternative, route to diagnosis. If it had been left to the NHS, they'd probably have chopped my foot off by now. And that's only a slight exaggeration - one option was to put a metal plate between bones in my foot and leg, anchoring my ankle at a set angle so I could not move my foot. With hindsight that would have been barabaric, but it was proposed.
And made worse by the fact the NHS caused the neurological damage in the first place (a stitch left in, from memory, that rubbed against a nerve).
Your GP, or a competent orthopedic surgeon could have made a referral if they wanted to.
The problem is not NHS vs Private, it is seeing a doctor who reconsiders the diagnosis, and come up with the right treatment. That can happen in either sector and either direction. It is about training and expertise, not the structure of the health care system.
"COVID-19 in China: Current Situation and Downstream effects: 🧵
1/ From the outset, it is very important to recognise that a humanitarian catastrophe is currently unfolding in China. Analysis of this situation is not incompatible with recognising the horror of the situation."
Also: stock up on crucial meds now. Prepare for a new variant. FUCKKKKK
Doesn't do a great deal for the global economic position either, does it?
No. At best we are going to get another bout of fierce downward pressure on the global "recovery"
A worse alternative is that we get globally interrupted supply lines for six months/year... which is ominous (on top of the millions-dead horror in China, of course)
Even worse: a new, nastier variant erupts when 800 million people all get Covid at once
Which is why I don't buy the bioweapon thesis.
It's going to royally fuck China. They covered it up out of embarrassment and because they wanted everyone else to suffer too, not just them; not because it was a sophisticated weapon to just cripple the West.
Like two of four of the cold coronaviruses. Like MERS.
So literally half of human-affecting coronaviruses prior to SARS-CoV-2.
I wonder which lab leaked OC43 in the 1880s.
No doubt Leon will leap in and insult me and others whilst screaming "DRAMA! BRACE! EVUL!"
Accepting anything that might imply lab leak regardless of content or origin with total credulity and lack of anything resembling critical thought whilst discounting any evidence against it as fatally biased and dishonest will inevitably lead you to one conclusion.
I've seen scientists online refuse to even discuss it any more due to the level of vitriol and abuse hurled at them if they don't subscribe to the lab leakers beliefs. I can empathise. I'm quitting discussing it here. Leon doesn't want to believe or listen to anything that might shake his over-excited and dramatic conviction in his simple answer with goodies and baddies, one that makes for such a good story and drama.
And he'll inevitably post rapidly, repetitively, and abusively on this yet again, so there's no point even looking in here again tonight, I reckon.
Leon, you're going to come up with something either patronising or abusive or irrelevant, so there's no point in reading it. It's just tedious now.
Thanks for posting this. I think there is little point debating with him any more. He speaks with the shallow knowledge of someone who gets his science from Twitter.
aaaaand there you go. You get to ignore the now frankly overwhelming evidence that it came from the lab. Suits you, Mister "people make mistakes, 20 million died, whatever" Turbowotsit
The problem is that a Swiss system would only work here if implemented by Labour.
The Tories will just be bought and paid for by the American companies who want their system here.
Only Labour can reform the NHS. And fix it.
They were making good progress on every measure until they were voted out. Shortest waiting times in history, highest rate of satisfaction ever. Cancer guarantee.
Get the Tories out.
Such pointless partisanship insults the intelligence of everyone here.
You can post from a centre-left perspective, for sure, but please post constructive contributions not football team chants please.
Why can't CHB post partisan material? You do.
I most certainly do not.
I am entirely objective in my posts and my betting.
If you can't see that it's because you're part or the problem too.
Maybe if you can clear the board of anyone but uber- Conservatives you will be more content with the quality of the posts.
It will be interesting to see just how badly your lot can fuck this up. You Do Not Pick A Fight With The Nurses.
"We're sticking to the independent pay review body. Which we overrode last year, and may interfere with to get the independent result we want next year." People aren't stupid. Told to clap for carers and our heroic NHS staff we're now being told they are on the shill for Putin.
A 6% rise for nurses in line with the average national rise maybe. Or one off extra payment.
The 19% rise the RCN want however is unaffordable
So go and negotiate. They have opened extreme. You are refusing to negotiate. So regardless of what they asked for, its the government being unreasonable.
I saw Barclay on the news earlier. Talking matter if factory about not reopening this year’s pay settlement, independent pay review, important to look forward etc as if this were just some run of the mill contractual process they were going through. Completely tin eared lack of engagement. Not even anything for the die hard Tories like a promise to bring back corporal punishment for skiving paramedics. Almost, dare I say, Major government circa 1996.
The problem is that a Swiss system would only work here if implemented by Labour.
The Tories will just be bought and paid for by the American companies who want their system here.
Only Labour can reform the NHS. And fix it.
They were making good progress on every measure until they were voted out. Shortest waiting times in history, highest rate of satisfaction ever. Cancer guarantee.
Get the Tories out.
Such pointless partisanship insults the intelligence of everyone here.
You can post from a centre-left perspective, for sure, but please post constructive contributions not football team chants please.
Why can't CHB post partisan material? You do.
I most certainly do not.
I am entirely objective in my posts and my betting.
Even if that is true, people can still post partisan stuff. It's easily dismissed when it is blatant.
The problem is that a Swiss system would only work here if implemented by Labour.
The Tories will just be bought and paid for by the American companies who want their system here.
Only Labour can reform the NHS. And fix it.
They were making good progress on every measure until they were voted out. Shortest waiting times in history, highest rate of satisfaction ever. Cancer guarantee.
Get the Tories out.
Such pointless partisanship insults the intelligence of everyone here.
You can post from a centre-left perspective, for sure, but please post constructive contributions not football team chants please.
Why can't CHB post partisan material? You do.
I most certainly do not.
I am entirely objective in my posts and my betting.
If you can't see that it's because you're part or the problem too.
It can be mocked as being a Disney Prince in totally serious criticism of supposed western overegging of Zelensky, but if a big part of being a leader in wartime is inspiring people by deed and word, it is the sort of thing that helps.
A 6% rise for nurses in line with the average national rise maybe. Or one off extra payment.
The 19% rise the RCN want however is unaffordable
So go and negotiate. They have opened extreme. You are refusing to negotiate. So regardless of what they asked for, its the government being unreasonable.
In particular, I look at Scotland and see the much more effective progress of negotiations with nursing unions there, and it seems to me a fair conclusion that the problems here south of the border are the Westminster government's fault...
As my contributions are clearly not valued I will be leaving again.
Wish you a good Christmas
Thoughtful contributions are valued, but if all you have is, "it was all great when Labour were in office - get the Tories out" then that isn't one I value, I'm afraid.
For one thing that splurge in funding on the NHS over the 2000-2008 period was off the back of a huge boom in financial services and an asset bubble. And Labour weren't in office to deal with the huge contraction in the health of the public finances after the GFC.
For that to be credible, now, you'd have to identify how Labour would materially change the funding levels of the NHS in the current environment to achieve that same step change again.
Otherwise it's just football team stuff I'm afraid. I think you're better than that, and so are we.
Comments
I'm not convinced there is much more money to be made available from other sources given recent increases, and I think there may be a crunch coming in the next Government period as a more stable status is sought after Covid can no longer be an excuse for whatever it is wanted to be an excuse. There's Covid money to other priorities, however.
How will it change? Gradually and by marginal gains.
At the margins, some services will be privatised by neglect where there is not an acute requirement. Recent examples imo have eg been dealing with earwax - now done by setups such as Specsavers rather than your local GP practice, and some podiatry type services.
I can't call what will happen on dentistry.
GPs will focus on whatever it is they get paid to do, filtered through a scrummage about productivity / capacity / reward. Services offered via GP surgeries will continue to broaden. Ditto pharmacies, I'd suggest.
I think there are also potential productivity improvements, and significant long term gains to be made by preventative care. I'd say from experience that the NHS is increasingly good at this.
The increased no of part time GPs offers an opportunity for more resource. Ditto the NHS staff count being up by approx 10% since 2019; that must offer opportunities.
Some things the NHS does very well and will - from administrative things like purchase of drugs and research where uniform access to large datasets is a value-creator They will also keep the chronic and the complex. The unified model also avoid getting clogged as the German system did in the Covid vaccine rollout when the medical data was held by different professionals from those who needed to know who to vaccinate.
There are also potential benefits for general health from the Active Travel policies. Even marginal gains - say 10% of travel in London by bicycle - will offer big benefits by moving part of the population away from sedentary lifestyles. London offers a good illustration of how long it takes to get this stuff even somewhat right (my interpretation is 3 generations of infrastructure design so far), and how tough it is to change an embedded culture.
Have we considered the possibility that Covid is a well-intentioned effort to solve the global warming problem by reducing the world's population by ... I dunno ... maybe 90% or so?
Personally I'd make sure there was a vaccine available for friends and family before releasing it into the wild but ... best-laid plans and all that.
It seemed to me then, as it does now, that Republican voters were, slowly, coming to understand that Trump is a loser, and that they are also coming to understand, perhaps more slowly, with the endless scandal stories, that he isn't fit to be president. Combined, those two make it unlikely that he can win the nomination.
And, if he were to win the nomination, he would face stiff odds in any general election. "About a month after launching his 2024 presidential campaign, former President Donald Trump’s standing with voters has hit its lowest point in more than seven years, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday."
source: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/14/trump-hits-7-year-low-in-new-national-poll-as-biden-approval-climbs.html
I expect this wave to be severe but short in China, as indeed pandemic waves usually are.
Worth noting that of major affected countries Japan did amongst the best, despite an aged population. Minimal deaths, minimal mandatory lockdowns, minimal educational disruption. The voluntary mask wearing and politeness culture was probably a big part of that.
Some things the NHS does very well and will continue to do so - eg administrative things like purchase of drugs and research where uniform access to large datasets is a value-creator.
I try to put myself in their shoes, not very effectively I admit, and even seeing him (somehow) as a symbol of the things I would like, I'd get frustrated at him being constantly distracted by his own self imposed problems. Even if I thought the deep state was behind the attacks on Trump at least with a new candidate it'd take awhile before they got into a similar position.
The Republican House Committee report on Covid Origins is dynamite. Why are people ignoring it?
I hope PB will forgive me from quoting at length:
"AMMS’ 2015 Book on Weaponizing Artificially Engineered Chimeric Coronaviruses
[AMMS is the Bioweapon division of the Chinese military]
The declassified Updated Assessment [Biden's official report] also failed to address the AMMS’ publicly stated interest in the development of engineered coronaviruses for biological weapons purposes. In 2015, the official publishing house of the AMMS released a book titled The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Artificial Humanized Viruses as Genetic Weapons.
The book was produced and edited using 18 experts, 16 of whom were officers at AMMS or other PLA research centers. Indeed, one of the editors not only works for the Fifth Institute but also has a long history of collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, having coauthored 12 scientific papers...
The book described the PLA researchers’ broader belief that other nations are developing chimeric coronaviruses to use as genetic weapons.
The authors described how to create weaponized chimeric SARS coronaviruses, the potentially broader scope for their use compared to traditional bioweapons, and the benefits of being able to plausibly deny that such chimeric coronaviruses were artificially created rather than naturally occurring...
The authors described the experimental techniques virologists could use to create weaponized
chimeric coronaviruses:
1. Apply the latest genetic modification technology to induce a
recombination between an animal virus and a human virus,,,
until the point that the virus can directly attack humans.
2. Take an animal pathogen (at present this is mostly viruses) and use
various methods and channels to attack animals with cellular receptors
that are very similar to humans, and conduct various kinds of passaging
many times until the pathogen ultimately adapts to transmit among the
intended group of animals...
3. Combine the two methods described above.
The authors noted that these techniques could also be used in benign research, such that the research is inherently dual-use and it would thus be difficult for others to distinguish between efforts for defensive and offensive purposes.
The authors also argued that the potential scope for the use of weaponized chimeric
coronaviruses would be much broader than the traditional wartime uses of bioweapons.
They also note such weapons could strain the victim countries’ healthcare systems, potentially “causing the enemy’s medical system to collapse.”"
https://republicans-intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/final_unclass_summary_-_covid_origins_report_.pdf
If the Chinese really did develop this as a weapon, and leaked it accidentally, then my sympathies for their upcoming Covid Horror are *somewhat restrained*
China's reaction seems logical if we look at it from a political control standpoint - Government initially fearful of the consequences but then needs to maintain initial measures to prove that it was "right". Changing course would be an admission they got it wrong.
https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/strategies-reduce-waiting-times-elective-care
Good positive management and support of staff, and clear targets are other elements.
I have long believed that the best single thing the US could do for our health is encourage exercise. How best to do that would vary from place to place. I think, for example, that in some high-crime inner city areas, the people might benefit from escorted walks and bicycle rides.
(There is an intriguing clue as to what helps health here: "The Hispanic paradox is an epidemiological finding that Hispanic Americans tend to have health outcomes that "paradoxically" are comparable to, or in some cases better than, those of their U.S. non-Hispanic White counterparts, even though Hispanics have lower average income and education. Low socioeconomic status is almost universally associated with worse population health and higher death rates everywhere in the world.[2] The paradox usually refers in particular to low mortality among Hispanics in the United States relative to non-Hispanic Whites.[3][4][5][6][7][8] According to the Center for Disease Control's 2015 Vital Signs report, Hispanics in the United States had a 24% lower risk of mortality, as well as lower risk for nine of the fifteen leading causes of death as compared to Whites." source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic_paradox
In my opinion, these better health outcomes are the result of stronger families and communities -- but I will admit that I don't see any simple way for the government to help with either.)
Don’t get sucked in.
But what you say is also only a (small) part of it. Sadly, the NHS needs a massive restructuring: and in my inexpert view, GP services and care are the areas that are gumming up the system. If Labour really want to 'fix' the NHS, they ned to keep the core 'free at the point of use' concept and work out what best matches that. What we have at the moment does not - yet it is the Labour supporters who are most aghast at any fundamental change.
Hence we will only get fiddling around at the edges, and more money thrown at the problem. You will earn more lucre, but we'll be back at the same position in a few years.
They even speculate as to how likely they think lab leak is, with most saying "probably came from a lab"
Laughably, Jeremy Farrar, the head of Wellcome, gave his estimation of the chances of lab leak as 50%, and yet just ten days later he co-signed a fraudulent letter to the Lancet, where he claimed lab leak was a racist "conspiracy theory". Strange that he didn't tell us that it was a "racist conspiracy theory" he himself believed was 50% likely ten days before
Farrar is now head boffin of WHO. He has been rewarded for loyalty to Beijing
https://www.who.int/news/item/13-12-2022-world-health-organization-names-sir-jeremy-farrar-as-chief-scientist-dr-amelia-latu-afuhaamango-tuipulotu-as-chief-nursing-officer
However, I will note how you have slightly twisted the argument. What I mentioned that Western governments reactions were very different to what they had practiced before, and also would have not have been taken lightly if this was thought of as 'just another virus'. There is something that obviously triggered governments to text they did and it wasn't people being admitted to hospital (we didn't lock down the country over Monkeypox, for example). You don't lock down whole economies in a capitalist system for nothing.
As I said originally, it's as much tinfoil-hattish to try to avoid questions as it is to believe in the theory 100%. Are you sure you are not in your armchair with a pair of M&S Y-fronts and some Sainsbury's kitchen foil stick to your head?
LOL
"In Sir Jeremy's initial email, he revealed his and other experts' main suspicions centred around Covid's unique furin cleavage site — the part of the spike protein which makes it so efficient at infecting human cells. This is an email FROM Jeremy Farrar
"The email, sent on February 2 when the first Covid death outside of China was confirmed, continued: '[Professor Farzan] is bothered by the furin site and has a hard time [to] explain that as an event outside the lab, though there are possible ways in nature but highly unlikely.
'I think this becomes a question of how do you put all this together, whether you believe in this series of coincidences, what you know of the lab in Wuhan, how much could be in nature — accidental release or natural event? I am 70:30 or 60:40.'
Sir Jeremy later downgraded his estimate 50:50 in further emails just days later on February 4."
This is Feb 2020. They think lab leak is likely. Do you think they didn't tell western governments?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10393581/Top-SAGE-adviser-admitted-lab-leak-theory-likely-origin-Covid-February-2020.html
The more PB debates this topic the more I realise most of you have no fucking clue what you are talking about. You simply haven't looked at the evidence
If you are a specialist in cancer drugs you can get whisked off to MIT or similar with a healthy grant and unlimited funding - not a hard calculation personally or professionally.
I reckon there is now a serious chance we will end up concluding this not only came from the lab (already highly probable) but that the virus was engineered, AND it was engineered in tandem with the desires of Chinese bioweapons researchers, looking into dangerous "chimeric coronaviruses" able to "cripple enemy health systems"
That's quite a long way from "a pangolin pissed on a fruitbat in a curry"
Silly post.
You can post from a centre-left perspective, for sure, but please post constructive contributions not football team chants please.
https://www.americashealthrankings.org/learn/reports/2019-annual-report/international-comparison
I don't 'avoid' the question. I just laugh at those who continue to ask the questions like a petulant three year old child when we answer 'we don't know!', as if their questions hold a hidden truth and they know the certain answer.
I am perfectly willing to accept that it mat have been a bioengineered virus released deliberately from a lab. I am perfectly willing to accept it might be totally natural in origin (*), or the myriad of scenarios in between. What amuses me are those who *only* go on about the former and tis ilk, because it fits in with their biases or because it is more dramatic. We simply don't know, and continually going on about *one* potential cause is utterly stupid. Unless they have other reasons for doing so.
We will probably never learn the true cause. But in a way its is irrelevant: China deserves censure for the secrecy early on in the outbreak, in January to March 2020. Their decision to try to hide the issue did much to accelerate the pandemic. And people wanting to 'blame' someone would be on much firmer ground with that.
Regardless of its origins, China could have made rational decisions that delayed the disease's spread. They did not do so for political reasons, and they are damned for that.
(*) That is the way I currently lean.
The best evidence is that this nasty apparently engineered novel bat coronavirus with alterations at the Furin Cleavage Site appeared 300 yards from the only lab in the world which was deliberately altering novel bat coronaviruses at the Furin Cleavage Site so as to make them nastier
It's like someone in Russia being a hit with a 3 metre wide French custard tart apparently fired from a 2nd hand Belgian euphonium and then you discover that 2 minutes walk away is the only factory in the world adapting 2nd hand Belgian euophoniums so they can fire enormous French custard tarts
OK it is possible that the custard tart thrower came back from France with his tart and on the way in Antwerp someone dropped it on a brass band and it got shaped like a euphonium....
Or the origin of the mischief is the fucking factory. Visible from the scene of the crime
We're split both ways basically.
I believe you are off travelling soon? Hopefully do your mental state some good. You say that your stay, sorry Eadrics stay, in Wales was thanks for a tip off about what was coming. I think you do this a lot - but a bit like the fake mediums casting round for names. You are pushing the China/doom/new variant meme right now. Maybe you will be right, and in eight weeks time we’re locked down again. But I doubt it.
Coming from you, that's quite funny. I'm unsure you would recognise 'evidence' if it wiped its damp knickers in your face.
You are physically incapable of accepting this probably came from the lab, even though you pretend to have shifted away from wet market/zoonosis to a "neutral position". Deep down you fundamentally and emotionally reject the lab leak hypothesis - because you are a scientist and it troubles you existentially that your friends and colleagues might have done this
Ergo, your opinion on all this is frankly worthless?
On other topics I am sure you are much more fun, I just can't remember any examples of that
FS regulation - on reflection I think our frame of reference is largely domestic rather than either. Given we wrote the EU regs it’s us who influence them rather than vice versa. We don’t lock financial criminals up for decades like the US do either.
Private health care (whether self or insurance funded) has a lot of inefficiencies too. In particular it cherry picks the most straightforward elective surgery, and leaves the complicated, long term and logistically difficult to the NHS.
Apart from anything else, both parties need to be honest that there is no simple or easy fix for the NHS. We need substantially more physical and personnel capacity, both in terms of numbers and suitability to the modern age. We really do need 40 new hospitals!
I think you have decided that what happened is scientists paid by Fauci, changed the original virus by inserting a furin cleavage abiliy, and it’s this that escaped. Hence you want to put Fauci on trial.
Maybe you are right. But it’s definitely possible to have been natural in origin.
As I keep saying, see Spanish Flu, SARS, MERS, the Black Death.
Like two of four of the cold coronaviruses. Like MERS.
So literally half of human-affecting coronaviruses prior to SARS-CoV-2.
I wonder which lab leaked OC43 in the 1880s.
No doubt Leon will leap in and insult me and others whilst screaming "DRAMA! BRACE! EVUL!"
Accepting anything that might imply lab leak regardless of content or origin with total credulity and lack of anything resembling critical thought whilst discounting any evidence against it as fatally biased and dishonest will inevitably lead you to one conclusion.
I've seen scientists online refuse to even discuss it any more due to the level of vitriol and abuse hurled at them if they don't subscribe to the lab leakers beliefs. I can empathise. I'm quitting discussing it here. Leon doesn't want to believe or listen to anything that might shake his over-excited and dramatic conviction in his simple answer with goodies and baddies, one that makes for such a good story and drama.
And he'll inevitably post rapidly, repetitively, and abusively on this yet again, so there's no point even looking in here again tonight, I reckon.
Leon, you're going to come up with something either patronising or abusive or irrelevant, so there's no point in reading it. It's just tedious now.
He speaks with the shallow knowledge of someone who gets his science from Twitter.
My experience is of exactly the opposite. I had a long-term health issue (partially caused by NHS incompetence) that did not fit into any of the NHS's tickboxes to fix. So they did not bother. Fortunately I got a private surgeon who eventually managed to fix me - or at least that particular issue.
The NHS is great and efficient at helping when your complaint fits into any number of pre-prepared boxes. You need a stent? Fine. A new hip? Also fine (with waiting lists). When you have something complex, that requires diagnosis, it's all too often "computer says no".
If it were not for private healthcare, I still might not be able to walk properly.
My personal, incorrect, judgement of the Referendum was that Remain would just win. Despite running a terrible campaign.
But that the U.K. would leave, on a second referendum, a decade down the line, due to the design of the European Health Service. Which would be mixed mode everywhere else. In turn single market rules would mean that BUPA et al would become part of the system. Which would be anathema to a large chunk of the Left.
One shot turns an entire regiments into Left Bank Existentialists. One minute they are stealing washing machines, next they are debating if they exist over Gallois and tiny cups of coffee…
If so then it is more an issue of finding the right doctor, who is willing to listen and get to the right diagnosis and treatment than NHS vs Private.
More blame the government than the RCN for the nurses' strikes still though
https://twitter.com/JackElsom/status/1605175599911342083?s=20&t=P3bxPuT3izbE8bvFRDQdjQ
Hence private insurance paid for by private employers. Notable is that muscular/skeletal problems often don’t go though a GP filter - my current policy says call them and they send you straight to a consultant.
"We're sticking to the independent pay review body. Which we overrode last year, and may interfere with to get the independent result we want next year." People aren't stupid. Told to clap for carers and our heroic NHS staff we're now being told they are on the shill for Putin.
My experience of the NHS was getting shunted down one route: it was an orthopedic problem. After all, they had put metal in my ankle, and therefore it was obviously something to do with that. Hence a few years of bone scans, x-rays, and some nasty ops.
One day, my physiotherapist said that there was someone downstairs she thought might like to see me (this was a private physio). She went downstairs, then took me down to see this portly white-haired gent. He read my records, looked at the problem, and said: "I think I know what's wrong; you've got severe nerve damage down there."
He is a hero in my eyes. It took him four or five operations over a few years, but he changed my life. And I guess that's the great thing about being a doctor: you can genuinely change lives. it must be a great feeling. I have zero doubt the NHS would not have fixed me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Watkins
The 19% rise the RCN want however is unaffordable
If so then the strikes are off, as the RCN has said.
I am entirely objective in my posts and my betting.
If you can't see that it's because you're part or the problem too.
Why didn't the government come right out and say public service workers will get CPI increases? It was ok for pensioners.
The point is that private healthcare gave me another, alternative, route to diagnosis. If it had been left to the NHS, they'd probably have chopped my foot off by now. And that's only a slight exaggeration - one option was to put a metal plate between bones in my foot and leg, anchoring my ankle at a set angle so I could not move my foot. With hindsight that would have been barabaric, but it was proposed.
And made worse by the fact the NHS caused the neurological damage in the first place (a stitch left in, from memory, that rubbed against a nerve).
Any more than that has to be paid for from higher taxes on those same private sector workers
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/october2022
Those on just the state pension earn less than minimum wage.
Nurses now earn £37k on average
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/63587909.amp
Wish you a good Christmas
https://twitter.com/VerstyukIvan/status/1605232732082249729
Antarctica: the best journey in the world"
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/antarctica-the-best-journey-in-the-world/
It is remarkable that only right wing partisanship is acceptable to certain posters.
The problem is not NHS vs Private, it is seeing a doctor who reconsiders the diagnosis, and come up with the right treatment. That can happen in either sector and either direction. It is about training and expertise, not the structure of the health care system.
I am glad it worked for you.
It's all white wherever you look.
For one thing that splurge in funding on the NHS over the 2000-2008 period was off the back of a huge boom in financial services and an asset bubble. And Labour weren't in office to deal with the huge contraction in the health of the public finances after the GFC.
For that to be credible, now, you'd have to identify how Labour would materially change the funding levels of the NHS in the current environment to achieve that same step change again.
Otherwise it's just football team stuff I'm afraid. I think you're better than that, and so are we.