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A Vaccine against Stupidity – politicalbetting.com
A Vaccine against Stupidity – politicalbetting.com
The government must hope that Pfizer’s vaccine announcement will overshadow the continued rumblings about Kate Bingham, Chair of the Vaccine Task Force and her expensive (and, judging by results, useless) PR consultants. She is due to leave in January, as originally planned. If you believe Hancock, that is. He’s fast becoming this government’s Marie-Antoinette. According to his latest interview, people paid £670,000 for 6 months’ work in government should be thanked as they have “given up” six months of their life. Who knew that being highly paid to do the job you’re trained for was such a sacrifice? We can only guess at the likely reaction of low paid essential workers (some in the NHS) and unpaid volunteers. Let alone that of the rest of the public, for whom the last 6 months have not exactly been days of wine and roses.
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https://twitter.com/SamCoatesSky/status/1326491672600064002
Recount!!!
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/nov/11/dissatisfied-tory-mps-flock-to-erg-inspired-pressure-groups
The announcement of the Pfizer vaccine success is vindication of the government's approach and tbh, this whole thread is unnecessary whining when the vaccine taskforce has actually achieved its goal of building a wide variety of vaccines which will deliver by the end of this year and in H1.
So yeah, sorry Cyclefree, I don't care about £670k spent on PR, I don't care that we don't know the members of the taskforce and I don't care that there might be some signs of cronyism. We've secured 40m jabs of a 94% effective vaccine and hopefully another 100m of the AZ one which is also looking good.
If you don't want the vaccine then get ready to live on Rockall or Pitcairn Island.
A general mistrust of government will probably factor into vaccine take up, but even there if we exclude the regular anti-vaxxers, are people actually going to not trust the vaccines which won't be produced by government after all?
I am usually on board with these sort of pieces, and I do still agree they are important questions, but I don't quite buy that there will be as direct a connection or the level of connection between the posed issues as is suggested.
I agree with Mike Smithson Our Genial Host. The crunch comes on Dec 14 when electoral college meets and formalises the outcome.
I don’t think complacency or shrillness and anger, as we have seen from too many Biden supporter, is the way to fight Trumpism and achieve regime change in Washington. So to be on same page, lets calmly decide what we do agree on.
Scenario 1 Trump needs the EC votes from PA AZ and GA to be president.
Scenario 2 Trump needs an EC win on Dec 14 to be president.
It matters not how he does it. If he wins the EC on Dec 14 Trump will remain in office, neither Secret service or Military will remove him, nor will Dems urge their supporters to take up arms, any sort of violence plays straight into Trumps hands. If Trump achieves Scenario 1 or 2, the battle ground will be courts and ballot boxes in the years to come.
We have had 4 years of Trump, some more of it isn’t the end of the world when compared to actual violence. We agree so far?
In his favour he has much power to play with, Trump is President with 70% of his party behind him and this could grow under pressure, nearly all his voters still onside too; though arguable what SC would do, Trump feels he’s got a majority there to support him; he has the numbers in the senate to avoid impeachment.
How does Trump achieve either scenario? What can be big and leftfield to achieve scenario 1 or 2? Not by any of the chaff we have seen from TeamTrump so far in pressers, tweets and law suits. This will get him nowhere. It has to be big and it has to be leftfield. And the first place you will hear about it is announcement at a rally, he saves his big stuff for those. So if he is going to attend a rally, he is going to reveal his hand.
This result isn’t decided till Dec 14 when electoral college meets and formalises the outcome? If we wished otherwise, truth is Trump had too much support at the election to be blown away, so failing that it needs his concession or a Biden win at the college.
https://sophieehill.shinyapps.io/my-little-crony/
We can't have a vaccine which causes problems for significant numbers of people with pre-existing health conditions. I've also read there may be concerns it produces too strong an immune response which can cause other problems.
None of this invalidates the important questions and issues @Cyclefree raises and it's little surprise to see supporters of the Government hand-waving these legitimate concerns.
https://twitter.com/darylsturgis/status/1326611112599621632/photo/2
1. Is it a change of hair style?
2. Executive order that the military are his private armed forces?
3. Announcing something bigly for Christmas day?
4. Annexing Canada and Scotland's golf courses?
5. Making the USA a reality tv show on Fox?
In Phase 1, it was tested in 13 groups of 15 healthy adults (in age groups: 18-55 and 65-85), of whom 12 in each group received the vaccine (so 156 got the vaccine). They were carefully and repeatedly reviewed over multiple months before progressing to Phase 2/3.
Then, tens of thousands of people (including 2,000 children between age 12-15) in age groups of 12-15, 16-55, 55+, including non-healthy adults (it is notable that none of the following conditions prevented enrolment: HIV, Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C, COPD, heart disease, chronic and/or acute liver disease, COPD, diabetes, asthma, obesity) received the vaccine and were carefully watched over a period of months.
FPT - Re Trump 'Plan'
Tony Schwarz who ghost-wrote The Art of the Deal for Trump was interviewed by Evan Davis on R4 earlier this evening. He basically answered your question for you.
There is no plan, just a horror of losing and determination to deny it as long as possible.
You'd need the Isle of Wight, more likely.
There will be some people terrified of it, and others who want to leverage their pet conspiracy theories.
That Bob Stewart speech about the IRA bomb at the Dropin Well is weirdly moving.
How do spoken words provoke tears? Yet they do.
It's one thing we need to reform the regulations on post Brexit - it needs to be open to more SMEs (at present it crowds out anyone who can't afford lengthy tenders) and that almost always sucks in big companies and the Big4.
Just a few weeks ago the Conte government was winning plaudits for its handling of the virus,
To quote one example: "We have had 4 years of Trump, some more of it isn’t the end of the world when compared to actual violence."
Four more years of Trump (indeed any days of Trump beyond 20 January) would mean democracy in the US is dead. And if it dies in the US, it's chances of surviving long anywhere else are minimal.
Violence to defend democracy would be far preferable to giving in to dictatorship.
Obviously a peaceful trasition to the democratically elected President would be the best option, and the one we must all hope for.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/did-brexit-boost-britain-s-vaccine-deal-
A vaccine certificate (with a medical exemption certificate for those who cannot have the vaccine for medical reasons) will solve these problems.
And what counts as a Biden supporter in this context? Certainly I very much wanted Biden to win, buy if there is evidence he 'won' due to cheating I would at once say Trump should be President, so preferring Biden doesn't mean anthing when assessing what should happen post election.
?
But he doesn’t have hair
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxHd8JJ8hCU
All these arguments about transparency, bidding, appointments, tendering and the like would be just fine if we had time. But we don't have time, every day wasted is hundreds more dead.
If I thought that setting a 30 foot tall pile of £20 notes on fire would shorten the pandemic by a week, I'd be up for that.
If Al-Qaeda could secure us 300 million doses of vaccine, I'd at least take a good look at their bid.
If the best person to run some multi-billion pound programme just happens to be a blood relative of the PM, I'd turn a blind eye.
I expect there was a lot of wastage, cronyism, and little to no transparency during the second world war as well.
The reality is that we've done well, the US is looking a bit shaky as they are a bit over-dependent on Moderna and Novavax, and the EU is OK.
My guess is that the UK will achieve 60+% vaccinated by the end of next Summer, while most EU countries will be there by the end of next year, and the US gets there in 1H2022.
The experience of Eat Out to Help Out is people will quite happily go for something that looks good and I imagine the vaccine will be prevented as the path back to "normality" (however each one of us defines that).
I suspect we won't go back in totality to the life we had pre-Covid. I imagine some will try to forget the last 8 months have happened and will want to go back to the life they used to have before the virus. Others may have seen the past eight months as an opportunity for some personal re-evaluation and that's no bad thing either.
It may be that for many the "back to normal" won't be wholly welcome and some of the ways of life gained during the Covid experience will be retained (home working, more time with family etc).
I'll confess I'm not the same person I was before the virus - I like home and being at home, I don't miss the commute or the madness of commuting. I've lost a little weight and slept a lot more. I'm looking forward to travelling again but I'm more aware of my own health and hygiene and suspect I'd have been healthier over the past 20 years if I'd taken a few basic precautions but the lifestyle/workstyle didn't allow for that.
If Biden is seen to have won, and the Electoral College decides otherwise then there will be civil war in the US.
I hold no candle for this government, or Boris, who has taken chumocracy to a whole new level - we know he only hires those personally loyal or beholden to him - however, on buying and securing vaccines at least, it would be churlish to criticise it too severely.
I don’t want to be rude or anything, but the mistake many posting here are making, You are thinking with a faith in democracy to win through, that nice guys win, you are not thinking like a gangster. You need to channel your inner Constantine and the shenanigans at the Council of Nicaea. Where the Emperor strode around like a mafia boss. It shaped Christianity but its not argued much anymore exactly how.
If only there had been some clue...
Turns out that was all bollocks. Their second wave is now worse than ours.
And you are making the mistake of thinking that those who voted Biden will just roll over.
In any case, this is all irrelevant. If this hinged on a single state, it would be one thing, but it doesn't. Biden has won, and the legal challenges will be rejected.
As others elude to above, the Electoral College has to be the target. Doesn't matter what people think they voted for, they're voting for Electors. Who don't even have to represent their views.
It will be way, way, safer to take the vaccine than not to take it, or even to postpone taking it, I'm sure.
(Also remember that some of the people who are trying to worry you about side effects are anti-vaxxers or anti-vax adjacent.)
--AS
And why aren't I convinced there's a surprise move that's so clever only the stable genius Trump has thought of it?
Is it threatening/bribing the electoral college electors?
That would be about trump's level of genius.
But on Covid we seem to continually make very firm sounding judgements on nations' responses, without seeming to think about the possibility time will move on.
Remember that similar chaos is raging across Europe - France to Denmark, Spain to Poland, Czechia to Italy, and they are not dealing with Brexit AS WELL. And let's avert our eyes from the American election, BLM, etc etc.
The world has gone to shit, so has Western governance, pretty much in toto,
The logic of the Swedish approach was that vaccines would take ages, and might never arrive. Hmm.
I don't think it'll be necessary. Trump is setting himself up to be The Opposition. He'll be good at it, and he's entitled to try that and stand next time or have an anointed acolyte.. Override this election? Nah.
The programme of vaccination, in terms of priority, will hopefully be published before soon so I will know when it's "my turn".
The one thing we know, unless you can cut yourself from the outside world or you have state sponsored spying on your citizen's, your getting this and it will.be bad.
It is not going to happen, he does not have the votes to overturn the result in Pennsylvania or Arizona and the Biden electors will stick with him on Dec 14 and Trump will then have to concede or be evicted in January
I don't see the ECs playing fast and loose with the electorate. What's to gain? Everything to lose.
Many countries it will be at least 2 year, maybe 3, maybe more if pfizer is the only working one.
The Swedes have been candid about their biggest mistake, not protecting care homes. That is what has caused a big bulk of the deaths.
1. One of our neighbours youngest child self isolating after a classmate tested positive. Under the rules, the rest of the family can carry on as normal. Bizarre.
2. Friend of Wor Lass disclosed that she's had Long Covid for over 6 months. Normally fit and well, just totally lacking in energy.
Although maybe it WAS actually deliberate, and Johnson thinks it will help his popularity in the UK. Which it may well do. But i still think it was probably a slip of the tongue.
Really!
https://twitter.com/PickardJE/status/1324464485910937601?s=20