I see the Mail has flipped from why isn't Boris cancelling Christmas, he is going to kill us all, to these lockdown tiers are an outrage....all in the space of a day.
In fairness schizophrenia and multiple personalities probably at least doubles their readership.
With Theresa May those same civil servants were known to be dragging their feet to try and force the unsatisfactory customs union solution (I have this from someone who worked there under Liam Fox) by resisting signing third party deals as "unnecessary" due to an impending customs union deal to be negotiated by the Brexit department. I've been told that they literally pushed that agenda and resisted rolling over existing trade deals to leave the Brexit team no choice but to go for the customs union option as that would be the only way for the UK to trade freely with non-EU countries. Unsurprisingly she quit.
It's why I've been even more impressed with Liz Truss than most, knowing the internal agenda of the department and also knowing that she's effectively had to face them down and get them on board with the government agenda of trading independently from the EU and act with speed to sign trade deals covering £200bn of our non-EU trade. As I've said before, her good work at the DIT has definitely helped our negotiating stance with the EU. This time last year we had 0% of our international trade covered by tariff free deals and the crash out scenario meant WTO terms for all of our exports, part of the EU's stance on trade was driven by knowing the crash out would be absolutely horrific because we would either have to apply tariffs to all imported goods resulting in 8-12% in price rises or go down the Minford route of having no tariffs at all to avoid the inflation and resulting job losses and poverty it comes with. By fixing that situation it's taken both of those off the table and the EU has realised we could accept tariffs on EU imports/exports as we have huge markets with tariff free access to replace a lot of the existing markets.
Don't just take my word for it, look at how much the EU has moved in the last few weeks on the LPF, they started at unilateral suspension of the deal if the UK failed to stay in lockstep with future EU regulations, now they are proposing arbitration set tariffs for future regression from the current levels. Their position is materially different to where they started, Liz Truss making no deal from a horrific disaster to something we could probably deal with in the medium to long term is part of why they have moved.
Well, Liam Fox is of course serially useless, so it's not surprising that little progress was made under him, especially since he's obsessed with the US. But I don't think that was the whole story - you have to remember that the future shape of the UK's long-term relationship with the EU was very unclear in the hung parliament, and no country could negotiate a rollover deal without having at least a pretty firm idea of where we were headed. So your characterisation of the attitude of the civil servants is unfair; how could they negotiate in the dark?
As for the LPF, the EU's position looks much the same as it has since March, but I'm delighted that Brexiteers think that they've made some big concessions.
It is completely different. The June 2020 briefing paper laid out the EU position as full future alignment with unilateral right to suspend the deal if alignment was seen to have been broken. Now it's saying arbitration led tariff setting for areas where the EU deems the UK to have regressed from current standards with neither side having the obligation to follow the other one upwards and defined treaty rules as to what a breach of the LPF is rather than either side unilaterally declaring the other side as breaching it. Once again, you keep spouting the remainer lines of the EU never giving an inch and the UK giving in or being tricked by some EU repackaging, but that's not true. The EU has given huge ground here, whether or not you want to recognise that is irrelevant. Keep that "capitulation" or "being tricked into it" narrative going if it makes you feel better about it, but the reality is that the EU has given huge ground on this.
On the previous position, it was their obstinance on not negotiating extensions of third party trade deals that forced the government into the idiotic customs union idea. Even someone as stupid as Theresa May recognised that we weren't in a position to lose both our EU trade and non-EU trade deals at the same time. Liz Truss has changed the equation and negotiating position for the government in a hugely positive manner. Once again, if you can't see that then it really is your problem.
I think some people simply can't process the fact the EU's made concessions because it goes totally against their world view.
I don't think it's as binary as that. It seems to me that the EU position progressively hardened as we dithered (with a significant step change after the May deal was rejected) and they have now rowed back somewhat. I'm far from convinced that all of this had to be left until two minutes to midnight. but of course there's no way to test alternative histories, and people will believe what they believe.
An apt place for me to jam in my summary take on the expected deal -
A terrible deal compared to membership. It makes trade with our largest market harder and we have lost our right of free movement on the continent of which we are a part. But a fabulous deal compared to not having one. We have tariff free access to the Single Market rather than basic WTO terms. However neither of these comparators – membership and no deal – were realistic options and we shouldn’t use them as a benchmark. In truth, the deal is neither good nor bad. The best adjective for it is inevitable. Discount the talk of hardball and bluffing and blinking and capitulating. All purely for the gallery. This was two sets of macro interests coming together and arriving at the place they were pretty much bound to. An agreement which respects the genuine red lines of each.
For the UK these were twofold. First and foremost the end of free movement. Immigration was the totemic issue of the referendum and there was no way whatsoever that any deal which preserved free movement could fly. Second, fishing rights. This speaks to sovereignty - not the wonky type of being able to do our own trade agreements, which few care about, but sovereignty in the visceral sense of controlling our waters and our natural resources, being fish in this case. It’s not big bucks but it means a lot to people. We had to have a win here.
The EU had one red line. Protect the integrity of their Single Market. The UK could leave it but could not “have our cake and eat it”. So tariff free access would be conditional on maintaining a level playing field. We start off aligned and are then free to diverge in the future but at a price.
So there we are. FOM, tick. Fishing, tick. SM integrity, tick. This is the deal and no other was ever going to be possible between the EU and this UK government. It could have been done months ago but then it would have looked too easy. Better for Johnson & Co to maintain for domestic consumption the fiction that no deal was a possibility - a probability even - until at the last minute unveiling the agreement. This generates an atmosphere of relief which will help him to sell it. It also creates the impression of haggling to the wire to wring the last drop of value from the negotiations. This too will help him to sell it.
"Oxford vaccine produces good immune response after two doses
The potential COVID-19 vaccine stimulates broad antibody and T-cell responses when doses are given, according to the latest results from Phase Two and Three clinical trials. "The booster doses of the vaccine are both shown to induce stronger antibody responses than a single dose, the standard dose/standard dose inducing the best response," the university said. The vaccine is currently being reviewed by regulators."
So they are now saying that full-full is better than half-full? Eh?
Yes....
Oxford’s COVID-19 vaccine candidate has a better immune response when a two full-dose regime is used rather than a full-dose followed by a half-dose booster, the university said on Thursday.
The vaccine candidate, which has been licensed to AstraZeneca, has published interim late stage trial results showing higher efficacy when a half dose is followed by a full dose, compared to a two full-dose regime, though more work needs to be done to affirm the result.
---
Head in hands...if only they had done their trials properly.
I know, I know.
I suspect this is where the government's plan for a mahoosive vaccination of the public gets slowed down because of the trials not being properly.
Hopefully not. We can't afford to wait the rest of the Winter for titting about.
The most important thing to establish is the safety of the vaccine, not details about which dosing regime is the most efficacious. Worries about efficacy can be ameliorated by concentrating use of the Pfizer jab on the oldest and most medically vulnerable people, whilst mass vaccinating the 50-65s and the non-medical key workers with the Oxford vaccine at the same time.
If we go for a regimen that offers 60% protection in January and then discover in April that we should've been using a different regimen that offers 90% protection, then this is still far preferable to waiting until April before doing anything.
"Oxford vaccine produces good immune response after two doses
The potential COVID-19 vaccine stimulates broad antibody and T-cell responses when doses are given, according to the latest results from Phase Two and Three clinical trials. "The booster doses of the vaccine are both shown to induce stronger antibody responses than a single dose, the standard dose/standard dose inducing the best response," the university said. The vaccine is currently being reviewed by regulators."
So they are now saying that full-full is better than half-full? Eh?
Yes....
Oxford’s COVID-19 vaccine candidate has a better immune response when a two full-dose regime is used rather than a full-dose followed by a half-dose booster, the university said on Thursday.
The vaccine candidate, which has been licensed to AstraZeneca, has published interim late stage trial results showing higher efficacy when a half dose is followed by a full dose, compared to a two full-dose regime, though more work needs to be done to affirm the result.
---
Head in hands...if only they had done their trials properly.
Am I reading it right that three dosing schemes are in play now?
Based on that picture, someone needs to invent a better machine for filling vials accurately. I've seen 5-year-olds cut birthday cakes more fairly than that.
With Theresa May those same civil servants were known to be dragging their feet to try and force the unsatisfactory customs union solution (I have this from someone who worked there under Liam Fox) by resisting signing third party deals as "unnecessary" due to an impending customs union deal to be negotiated by the Brexit department. I've been told that they literally pushed that agenda and resisted rolling over existing trade deals to leave the Brexit team no choice but to go for the customs union option as that would be the only way for the UK to trade freely with non-EU countries. Unsurprisingly she quit.
It's why I've been even more impressed with Liz Truss than most, knowing the internal agenda of the department and also knowing that she's effectively had to face them down and get them on board with the government agenda of trading independently from the EU and act with speed to sign trade deals covering £200bn of our non-EU trade. As I've said before, her good work at the DIT has definitely helped our negotiating stance with the EU. This time last year we had 0% of our international trade covered by tariff free deals and the crash out scenario meant WTO terms for all of our exports, part of the EU's stance on trade was driven by knowing the crash out would be absolutely horrific because we would either have to apply tariffs to all imported goods resulting in 8-12% in price rises or go down the Minford route of having no tariffs at all to avoid the inflation and resulting job losses and poverty it comes with. By fixing that situation it's taken both of those off the table and the EU has realised we could accept tariffs on EU imports/exports as we have huge markets with tariff free access to replace a lot of the existing markets.
Don't just take my word for it, look at how much the EU has moved in the last few weeks on the LPF, they started at unilateral suspension of the deal if the UK failed to stay in lockstep with future EU regulations, now they are proposing arbitration set tariffs for future regression from the current levels. Their position is materially different to where they started, Liz Truss making no deal from a horrific disaster to something we could probably deal with in the medium to long term is part of why they have moved.
Well, Liam Fox is of course serially useless, so it's not surprising that little progress was made under him, especially since he's obsessed with the US. But I don't think that was the whole story - you have to remember that the future shape of the UK's long-term relationship with the EU was very unclear in the hung parliament, and no country could negotiate a rollover deal without having at least a pretty firm idea of where we were headed. So your characterisation of the attitude of the civil servants is unfair; how could they negotiate in the dark?
As for the LPF, the EU's position looks much the same as it has since March, but I'm delighted that Brexiteers think that they've made some big concessions.
It is completely different. The June 2020 briefing paper laid out the EU position as full future alignment with unilateral right to suspend the deal if alignment was seen to have been broken. Now it's saying arbitration led tariff setting for areas where the EU deems the UK to have regressed from current standards with neither side having the obligation to follow the other one upwards and defined treaty rules as to what a breach of the LPF is rather than either side unilaterally declaring the other side as breaching it. Once again, you keep spouting the remainer lines of the EU never giving an inch and the UK giving in or being tricked by some EU repackaging, but that's not true. The EU has given huge ground here, whether or not you want to recognise that is irrelevant. Keep that "capitulation" or "being tricked into it" narrative going if it makes you feel better about it, but the reality is that the EU has given huge ground on this.
On the previous position, it was their obstinance on not negotiating extensions of third party trade deals that forced the government into the idiotic customs union idea. Even someone as stupid as Theresa May recognised that we weren't in a position to lose both our EU trade and non-EU trade deals at the same time. Liz Truss has changed the equation and negotiating position for the government in a hugely positive manner. Once again, if you can't see that then it really is your problem.
I think some people simply can't process the fact the EU's made concessions because it goes totally against their world view.
I don't think it's as binary as that. It seems to me that the EU position progressively hardened as we dithered (with a significant step change after the May deal was rejected) and they have now rowed back somewhat. I'm far from convinced that all of this had to be left until two minutes to midnight. but of course there's no way to test alternative histories, and people will believe what they believe.
I would say that MaxPB is right - and I am a Remainer.
The total effect of the UK Government actions until quite recently has been to give the impression that they were desperate for *any* deal and would take *any* deal rather than no deal.
The last minute Macron intervention over fish should be seen in that light - he thought he could pull a significant victory for France by betting on *any* deal.
It is one of the paradoxes of basic Game Theory that refusing to confront or prepare for an option can make that option a nearly inevitable outcome.
I don't disagree that we are now negotiating with some degree of success (though that is by no means assured) - it's rather that significantly better deals were available far earlier on. As May's deal demonstrated - and that was after she'd hobbled herself.
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
I continue to be astonished by the over-optimism surrounding how quickly the vaccine can be rolled out and how soon it will get us out of jail. Escape by March or April is not a plausible scenario. It will take a bloody age just to get both shots into health and care workers and the very old - there are something like five million of them, each needing two injections, to be got through before you even get as far as the 75-79 group, the shielders don't even get a look in until the 70-74 group are inoculated, and panic about the collapse of the hospitals is going to continue, realistically, until everybody in phase one - i.e. the clinically vulnerable as well as the extremely vulnerable, the NHS, the care workers, and the entire general population over 50 - have all been immunised twice. I am desperate for my husband to move to the front of the queue for the vaccine but, given that the shielders are stuck back in that fourth segment behind the entirety of Shady Pines, the NHS and everyone over 75, I reckon he'll be waiting until March at the very earliest.
The only reason that we are likely to move from total lockdown to something marginally less fucking awful at some point after Easter is warmer, drier weather. The real challenge is getting enough of the population lanced to get out of this unending misery of incarceration, isolation, widespread socio-economic implosion and grotty face masks by next Autumn.
I'm slightly surprised how complicated people think vaccinating 5 million people is. The UK manages five times that number in three months with the annual flu vaccine.
Vaccine availability, not sticking needles in people, is the big issue.
I'm kind of with you on this. When I hear - as I do keep hearing - that rolling out the vaccine is a "huge logistical challenge", this does not feel quite right to me. Piece of piss, no, of course not, but "huge logistical challenge" strikes me as an exaggeration. And I hope I'm right because if it really is a mammoth undertaking requiring great skill and co-ordination then I'd be a lot less confident of normal life returning almost in full by the summer. And I am pretty confident.
I think some of the talked about difficulty is to stop folk getting worried that they haven't been called by the GP yet. Expectation management...
And there is a big logistical difference between offering an optional vaccine to a whole bunch of people, storing it in normal conditions and giving it to whoever turns up and asks, without any special precautions - and one where you have to manage a list of people to be called in a certain order, where the batches of vaccine have to be used within three days and dispensed under social distancing conditions.
As I mentioned yesterday, the father of a friend, who is 89 and lives in Islington, got a call yesterday from his own GP practice asking him in for the vaccine on Friday. He’s lucky his own GP practice is one of the few that is dispensing themselves, and I guess they are doing their own elderly patients first. My mother is also 89 and lives in Kent, and hasn’t heard anything yet. From the details published it looks as if she will be called to either Tunbridge Wells or Maidstone - both reasonably long journeys - and would have to book a taxi both ways to make the trip. She can afford this, but there will be many who can’t.
I see the Mail has flipped from why isn't Boris cancelling Christmas, he is going to kill us all, to these lockdown tiers are an outrage....all in the space of a day.
In fairness schizophrenia and multiple personalities probably at least doubles their readership.
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
I continue to be astonished by the over-optimism surrounding how quickly the vaccine can be rolled out and how soon it will get us out of jail. Escape by March or April is not a plausible scenario. It will take a bloody age just to get both shots into health and care workers and the very old - there are something like five million of them, each needing two injections, to be got through before you even get as far as the 75-79 group, the shielders don't even get a look in until the 70-74 group are inoculated, and panic about the collapse of the hospitals is going to continue, realistically, until everybody in phase one - i.e. the clinically vulnerable as well as the extremely vulnerable, the NHS, the care workers, and the entire general population over 50 - have all been immunised twice. I am desperate for my husband to move to the front of the queue for the vaccine but, given that the shielders are stuck back in that fourth segment behind the entirety of Shady Pines, the NHS and everyone over 75, I reckon he'll be waiting until March at the very earliest.
The only reason that we are likely to move from total lockdown to something marginally less fucking awful at some point after Easter is warmer, drier weather. The real challenge is getting enough of the population lanced to get out of this unending misery of incarceration, isolation, widespread socio-economic implosion and grotty face masks by next Autumn.
I'm slightly surprised how complicated people think vaccinating 5 million people is. The UK manages five times that number in three months with the annual flu vaccine.
Vaccine availability, not sticking needles in people, is the big issue.
Does the flu vaccination have to be administered to each patient twice, in the middle of a pandemic where the medical profession are spinning round in ever decreasing circles trying to deal with tsunami waves of the dead and dying at the same time, and with all the wretched social distancing requirements, and with each recipient having to be monitored after the jab to make sure they don't turn red, blow up like a balloon and start gasping like a fish out of water because of an ultra-rare allergic reaction?
That + lack of supply + cold chain storage issues + tendency of everything this Government touches to turn to shit = slow, slow, slow. I mean, I'll be absolutely delighted to be proven wrong and be able to burn my horrible mask by mid-March, but the whole 2020 experience teaches one to always, ALWAYS expect everything to turn out badly. Because the development of the vaccines would appear to be just about the only thing that's gone well.
So, getting a completely novel form of treatment invented, tested on tens of thousands of people, approved and with manufacturing already ramped up to millions of doses a month is 'turned out badly'.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines weren't developed.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines didn't work.
Turning out badly would be if manufacturing wasn't being successfully ramped.
Turning out badly would be if we were looking at CV19 and there was no end in sight.
It's about ten months since CV19 arrived in force in the Western World. Since then at least two successful vaccines have been developed, and probably a third. Johnson & Johnson is likely to announce successful results of its vaccine in January (and the UK has 30 million doses of that due in the first half of next year and it only requires a single dose).
If the vaccines are available, they will be stuck into peoples' arms. It doesn't matter if the doses are seven weeks apart or three. It doesn't matter if one-in-three people never bother getting the secnd dose. If they are available, then they won't be sticking around gathering dust, they will be injected into people. And the more people that get it, the fewer deaths there will be, and the lower R will be, and the fewer restrictions will be needed.
Human kind will have had a bad 15 months. But compared to the Spanish flu, or the world wars, we've had a utter walk in the park.
Quite. Temporarily throwing away the tier system was a mistake that allows the logically challenged to make pseudo arguments like that. Should have instead introduced tier 4 with the same restrictions as the lockdown, and move each area straight to the tier it needs.
Each change in restrictions for an area has a transaction cost, due to people dashing down to the pubs or shops just before restrictions increase, and again when they're reduced.
If they haven't spent it the Treasury should claw it back.
The cheque for those £500 bonuses for those whose jobs have not been at risk during this economic winter don't write themselves you know. Yet more retail jobs to be lost.
£330 mill on 'Brexit related needs' would basically be a big budget 'awareness campaign' offering 'help' whilst highlighting what a traumatic disaster it all is with all the subtlety of an Elton John concert.
Quite. Temporarily throwing away the tier system was a mistake that allows the logically challenged to make pseudo arguments like that. Should have instead introduced tier 4 with the same restrictions as the lockdown, and move each area straight to the tier it needs.
Each change in restrictions for an area has a transaction cost, due to people dashing down to the pubs or shops just before restrictions increase, and again when they're reduced.
But that would require the PM to follow Scotland again !
Based on that picture, someone needs to invent a better machine for filling vials accurately. I've seen 5-year-olds cut birthday cakes more fairly than that.
Hand cut labels (using a table in Word probably) don't really do it for me either....
I see the Mail has flipped from why isn't Boris cancelling Christmas, he is going to kill us all, to these lockdown tiers are an outrage....all in the space of a day.
In fairness schizophrenia and multiple personalities probably at least doubles their readership.
Quite. Temporarily throwing away the tier system was a mistake that allows the logically challenged to make pseudo arguments like that. Should have instead introduced tier 4 with the same restrictions as the lockdown, and move each area straight to the tier it needs.
Each change in restrictions for an area has a transaction cost, due to people dashing down to the pubs or shops just before restrictions increase, and again when they're reduced.
But that would require the PM to follow Scotland again !
They're tiers, not levels, so completely different.
Worth remembering that the flu vaccine was adminstered pretty efficiently this year in the UK in the middle of a pandemic.
Yeah I had mine done through the window of my car. Really efficient system and they asked me to wait for fifteen minutes afterwards in a car parking space with a nurse on hand nearby so clearly someone anticipated that requirement. If they do that again then they'll blow through vaccinations.
With Theresa May those same civil servants were known to be dragging their feet to try and force the unsatisfactory customs union solution (I have this from someone who worked there under Liam Fox) by resisting signing third party deals as "unnecessary" due to an impending customs union deal to be negotiated by the Brexit department. I've been told that they literally pushed that agenda and resisted rolling over existing trade deals to leave the Brexit team no choice but to go for the customs union option as that would be the only way for the UK to trade freely with non-EU countries. Unsurprisingly she quit.
It's why I've been even more impressed with Liz Truss than most, knowing the internal agenda of the department and also knowing that she's effectively had to face them down and get them on board with the government agenda of trading independently from the EU and act with speed to sign trade deals covering £200bn of our non-EU trade. As I've said before, her good work at the DIT has definitely helped our negotiating stance with the EU. This time last year we had 0% of our international trade covered by tariff free deals and the crash out scenario meant WTO terms for all of our exports, part of the EU's stance on trade was driven by knowing the crash out would be absolutely horrific because we would either have to apply tariffs to all imported goods resulting in 8-12% in price rises or go down the Minford route of having no tariffs at all to avoid the inflation and resulting job losses and poverty it comes with. By fixing that situation it's taken both of those off the table and the EU has realised we could accept tariffs on EU imports/exports as we have huge markets with tariff free access to replace a lot of the existing markets.
Don't just take my word for it, look at how much the EU has moved in the last few weeks on the LPF, they started at unilateral suspension of the deal if the UK failed to stay in lockstep with future EU regulations, now they are proposing arbitration set tariffs for future regression from the current levels. Their position is materially different to where they started, Liz Truss making no deal from a horrific disaster to something we could probably deal with in the medium to long term is part of why they have moved.
Well, Liam Fox is of course serially useless, so it's not surprising that little progress was made under him, especially since he's obsessed with the US. But I don't think that was the whole story - you have to remember that the future shape of the UK's long-term relationship with the EU was very unclear in the hung parliament, and no country could negotiate a rollover deal without having at least a pretty firm idea of where we were headed. So your characterisation of the attitude of the civil servants is unfair; how could they negotiate in the dark?
As for the LPF, the EU's position looks much the same as it has since March, but I'm delighted that Brexiteers think that they've made some big concessions.
It is completely different. The June 2020 briefing paper laid out the EU position as full future alignment with unilateral right to suspend the deal if alignment was seen to have been broken. Now it's saying arbitration led tariff setting for areas where the EU deems the UK to have regressed from current standards with neither side having the obligation to follow the other one upwards and defined treaty rules as to what a breach of the LPF is rather than either side unilaterally declaring the other side as breaching it. Once again, you keep spouting the remainer lines of the EU never giving an inch and the UK giving in or being tricked by some EU repackaging, but that's not true. The EU has given huge ground here, whether or not you want to recognise that is irrelevant. Keep that "capitulation" or "being tricked into it" narrative going if it makes you feel better about it, but the reality is that the EU has given huge ground on this.
On the previous position, it was their obstinance on not negotiating extensions of third party trade deals that forced the government into the idiotic customs union idea. Even someone as stupid as Theresa May recognised that we weren't in a position to lose both our EU trade and non-EU trade deals at the same time. Liz Truss has changed the equation and negotiating position for the government in a hugely positive manner. Once again, if you can't see that then it really is your problem.
I think some people simply can't process the fact the EU's made concessions because it goes totally against their world view.
I don't think it's as binary as that. It seems to me that the EU position progressively hardened as we dithered (with a significant step change after the May deal was rejected) and they have now rowed back somewhat. I'm far from convinced that all of this had to be left until two minutes to midnight. but of course there's no way to test alternative histories, and people will believe what they believe.
I would say that MaxPB is right - and I am a Remainer.
The total effect of the UK Government actions until quite recently has been to give the impression that they were desperate for *any* deal and would take *any* deal rather than no deal.
The last minute Macron intervention over fish should be seen in that light - he thought he could pull a significant victory for France by betting on *any* deal.
It is one of the paradoxes of basic Game Theory that refusing to confront or prepare for an option can make that option a nearly inevitable outcome.
I don't disagree that we are now negotiating with some degree of success (though that is by no means assured) - it's rather that significantly better deals were available far earlier on. As May's deal demonstrated - and that was after she'd hobbled herself.
May and Johnson both got roughly what they asked for from the EU.
In May's case, it was "Minimal economic risk consistent with stopping immigration", hence a Customs Union by stealth. Johnson wanted "Basic FTA with as many bells and whistles as I can haggle", which turned out to be few-to-none. But that's fine, from a negotiation point of view. The negotiation was never the important bit; the initial request was.
Remember- the art of the conjourer is to focus your attention on the irrelevant bit, while the business happens elsewhere.
What remains to be seen is who made the more sensible initial ask.
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
I continue to be astonished by the over-optimism surrounding how quickly the vaccine can be rolled out and how soon it will get us out of jail. Escape by March or April is not a plausible scenario. It will take a bloody age just to get both shots into health and care workers and the very old - there are something like five million of them, each needing two injections, to be got through before you even get as far as the 75-79 group, the shielders don't even get a look in until the 70-74 group are inoculated, and panic about the collapse of the hospitals is going to continue, realistically, until everybody in phase one - i.e. the clinically vulnerable as well as the extremely vulnerable, the NHS, the care workers, and the entire general population over 50 - have all been immunised twice. I am desperate for my husband to move to the front of the queue for the vaccine but, given that the shielders are stuck back in that fourth segment behind the entirety of Shady Pines, the NHS and everyone over 75, I reckon he'll be waiting until March at the very earliest.
The only reason that we are likely to move from total lockdown to something marginally less fucking awful at some point after Easter is warmer, drier weather. The real challenge is getting enough of the population lanced to get out of this unending misery of incarceration, isolation, widespread socio-economic implosion and grotty face masks by next Autumn.
I'm slightly surprised how complicated people think vaccinating 5 million people is. The UK manages five times that number in three months with the annual flu vaccine.
Vaccine availability, not sticking needles in people, is the big issue.
I'm kind of with you on this. When I hear - as I do keep hearing - that rolling out the vaccine is a "huge logistical challenge", this does not feel quite right to me. Piece of piss, no, of course not, but "huge logistical challenge" strikes me as an exaggeration. And I hope I'm right because if it really is a mammoth undertaking requiring great skill and co-ordination then I'd be a lot less confident of normal life returning almost in full by the summer. And I am pretty confident.
I think some of the talked about difficulty is to stop folk getting worried that they haven't been called by the GP yet. Expectation management...
And there is a big logistical difference between offering an optional vaccine to a whole bunch of people, storing it in normal conditions and giving it to whoever turns up and asks, without any special precautions - and one where you have to manage a list of people to be called in a certain order, where the batches of vaccine have to be used within three days and dispensed under social distancing conditions.
As I mentioned yesterday, the father of a friend, who is 89 and lives in Islington, got a call yesterday from his own GP practice asking him in for the vaccine on Friday. He’s lucky his own GP practice is one of the few that is dispensing themselves, and I guess they are doing their own elderly patients first. My mother is also 89 and lives in Kent, and hasn’t heard anything yet. From the details published it looks as if she will be called to either Tunbridge Wells or Maidstone - both reasonably long journeys - and would have to book a taxi both ways to make the trip. She can afford this, but there will be many who can’t.
This is why I suggested the priority list should take into account logistics and favour those who are easiest to reach. At the top end, hospitals and care homes, as now, but then universities, schools, workplaces and anywhere else large numbers of people gather as a matter of course, rather than scour the countryside for the more-or-less housebound elderly scattered hither and thither. Though perhaps it is only when more vaccines are on tap that it will make a significant difference.
So they are now saying that full-full is better than full-half. But previously said that half-full was better than full-full.
So no contradiction.
Nope not in this case. This looks to be an actual legit trial decision as well.
Quite likely it will turn out that half-full isn't really better, there's too many question marks around that result.
Possibly, but there's always hope. Fingers crossed in any case. If it does turn out that the overall effectiveness is around 70% against infection and near 100% against severe disease I'll still be jumping for joy.
I see the Mail has flipped from why isn't Boris cancelling Christmas, he is going to kill us all, to these lockdown tiers are an outrage....all in the space of a day.
In fairness schizophrenia and multiple personalities probably at least doubles their readership.
Quite. Temporarily throwing away the tier system was a mistake that allows the logically challenged to make pseudo arguments like that. Should have instead introduced tier 4 with the same restrictions as the lockdown, and move each area straight to the tier it needs.
Each change in restrictions for an area has a transaction cost, due to people dashing down to the pubs or shops just before restrictions increase, and again when they're reduced.
My brother has just emailed to say that his restaurant in Surrey is now shut down over Xmas. I hadn’t twigged that the five-day Xmas period rules are an exemption for family gatherings, and that for businesses the tier restrictions remain in place throughout.
Worth remembering that the flu vaccine was adminstered pretty efficiently this year in the UK in the middle of a pandemic.
Yeah I had mine done through the window of my car. Really efficient system and they asked me to wait for fifteen minutes afterwards in a car parking space with a nurse on hand nearby so clearly someone anticipated that requirement. If they do that again then they'll blow through vaccinations.
I didn't even need an appointment. I went for a Quit Smoking session and my opportunistic counselor surprised me by whipping it out and doing me before we even got started on the main event. Never had it before.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/12/17/moderna-vaccine-fda-panel/ ...Does Moderna’s vaccine prevent viral transmission in addition to symptomatic disease? Has the virus figured out how to get around it? And what happened with the 11 volunteers who got Covid-19 despite getting vaccinated?
The answer to those questions, posed by the panelists after Moderna’s exhaustive presentation on safety and efficacy, is pretty simple: No one knows yet. Jacqueline Miller, head of Moderna’s infectious disease unit, said the company is still collecting and analyzing key data, which is unlikely to be ready until next month.
To panelist Paul Offit, a virologist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, those 11 so-called breakthrough cases of Covid-19 are particularly key. If it turns out those patients had demonstrably lower levels of neutralizing antibodies than vaccinated patients who didn’t get Covid-19, that could help establish a baseline immune response needed to protect against infection. As it stands, no one is certain just what kind of antibody levels are needed to prevent Covid-19.
Similarly, as University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine virologist Patrick Moore pointed out, those 11 volunteers could be instrumental in understanding how SARS-CoV-2 might mutate. If their viruses turn out to be genetically different from others in the study, it might suggest that SARS-CoV-2 can evolve to get around vaccination, which would be alarming.
But they’ll have to wait, Miller said, as Moderna has yet to do the swabbing, serology, and sequencing necessary to answer those vital questions...
So they are now saying that full-full is better than full-half. But previously said that half-full was better than full-full.
So no contradiction.
Nope not in this case. This looks to be an actual legit trial decision as well.
Quite likely it will turn out that half-full isn't really better, there's too many question marks around that result.
Possibly, but there's always hope. Fingers crossed in any case. If it does turn out that the overall effectiveness is around 70% against infection and near 100% against severe disease I'll still be jumping for joy.
Totally agree, but it's unfortunate that they have allowed a whole load of confusion to arise over their trials. There are a lot of "vaccine hesitant" people out there, and the lack of clarity isn't inspiring confidence.
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
I continue to be astonished by the over-optimism surrounding how quickly the vaccine can be rolled out and how soon it will get us out of jail. Escape by March or April is not a plausible scenario. It will take a bloody age just to get both shots into health and care workers and the very old - there are something like five million of them, each needing two injections, to be got through before you even get as far as the 75-79 group, the shielders don't even get a look in until the 70-74 group are inoculated, and panic about the collapse of the hospitals is going to continue, realistically, until everybody in phase one - i.e. the clinically vulnerable as well as the extremely vulnerable, the NHS, the care workers, and the entire general population over 50 - have all been immunised twice. I am desperate for my husband to move to the front of the queue for the vaccine but, given that the shielders are stuck back in that fourth segment behind the entirety of Shady Pines, the NHS and everyone over 75, I reckon he'll be waiting until March at the very earliest.
The only reason that we are likely to move from total lockdown to something marginally less fucking awful at some point after Easter is warmer, drier weather. The real challenge is getting enough of the population lanced to get out of this unending misery of incarceration, isolation, widespread socio-economic implosion and grotty face masks by next Autumn.
I'm slightly surprised how complicated people think vaccinating 5 million people is. The UK manages five times that number in three months with the annual flu vaccine.
Vaccine availability, not sticking needles in people, is the big issue.
Does the flu vaccination have to be administered to each patient twice, in the middle of a pandemic where the medical profession are spinning round in ever decreasing circles trying to deal with tsunami waves of the dead and dying at the same time, and with all the wretched social distancing requirements, and with each recipient having to be monitored after the jab to make sure they don't turn red, blow up like a balloon and start gasping like a fish out of water because of an ultra-rare allergic reaction?
That + lack of supply + cold chain storage issues + tendency of everything this Government touches to turn to shit = slow, slow, slow. I mean, I'll be absolutely delighted to be proven wrong and be able to burn my horrible mask by mid-March, but the whole 2020 experience teaches one to always, ALWAYS expect everything to turn out badly. Because the development of the vaccines would appear to be just about the only thing that's gone well.
So, getting a completely novel form of treatment invented, tested on tens of thousands of people, approved and with manufacturing already ramped up to millions of doses a month is 'turned out badly'.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines weren't developed.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines didn't work.
Turning out badly would be if manufacturing wasn't being successfully ramped.
Turning out badly would be if we were looking at CV19 and there was no end in sight.
It's about ten months since CV19 arrived in force in the Western World. Since then at least two successful vaccines have been developed, and probably a third. Johnson & Johnson is likely to announce successful results of its vaccine in January (and the UK has 30 million doses of that due in the first half of next year and it only requires a single dose).
If the vaccines are available, they will be stuck into peoples' arms. It doesn't matter if the doses are seven weeks apart or three. It doesn't matter if one-in-three people never bother getting the second dose. If they are available, then they won't be sticking around gathering dust, they will be injected into people. And the more people that get it, the fewer deaths there will be, and the lower R will be, and the fewer restrictions will be needed.
Human kind will have had a bad 15 months. But compared to the Spanish flu, or the world wars, we've had a utter walk in the park.
1. I did say that the vaccine projects were about the only thing that appeared to have gone right. It doesn't follow that most of the rest of the year wasn't awful 2. "Well, it's not been quite as catastrophic as the Siege of Leningrad" is a pretty low bar to be setting
When this agony is finally over I will be taking a small number of positives from the experience. Last Spring was lovely (from the meteorological point of view, though evidently not for all those massacred or bereaved by the first big spike of the Plague.) My bank balance has got a lot fatter. I've taken up running and discovered I liked it. I may even be starting to learn not to worry about inconsequential bullshit like who wins or loses elections (which, so long as we don't end up with an extremist ideologue in charge, really doesn't matter very much in the grand scheme of things.) But I've also spent much of the time being anxious, miserable, worried about my livelihood, and worried about the people around me getting sick and dying of this bloody thing. And I'm well aware that, so far, I've actually been lucky. Back when this all kicked off I said to my husband that we'd be very fortunate if we got to the end of 2020 without having to bury anybody we love or find new employment and, it now being December 17th and disaster not yet having come knocking, it looks like fortune has smiled on us. But even so, millions and millions of people have had an absolutely dreadful time (and there's no guarantee that 2021 won't start out even worse, even if it eventually improves as we all hope and expect.)
So yes, 2020 has, by any reasonable reckoning, been a bloody awful year. Being less awful than, say, 1643 or 1349 doesn't change the fact.
Booked my mother in for a vaccination Dec 29th. Super efficient system could have done it a week earlier. Spaces are being booked up super quickly but that comes with plenty of cancellations so there are plenty of options. Done at the local hospital because the village GP isn't up to it.
Worth remembering that the flu vaccine was adminstered pretty efficiently this year in the UK in the middle of a pandemic.
Yeah I had mine done through the window of my car. Really efficient system and they asked me to wait for fifteen minutes afterwards in a car parking space with a nurse on hand nearby so clearly someone anticipated that requirement. If they do that again then they'll blow through vaccinations.
I didn't even need an appointment. I went for a Quit Smoking session and my opportunistic counselor surprised me by whipping it out and doing me before we even got started on the main event. Never had it before.
I thought that sort of thing only happened in movies with black cases?
Booked my mother in for a vaccination Dec 29th. Super efficient system could have done it a week earlier. Spaces are being booked up super quickly but that comes with plenty of cancellations so there are plenty of options. Done at the local hospital because the village GP isn't up to it.
Had my annual medical today - GP hinting that I'd likely get the Oxford/Astra jab when they start mass vaccination in the sports hall.....
Stand in the way of the sitting VP, who would become the first female President? Buttegieg is bold, no question, that's why he ran in the first place, but that bold?
Sure, several Asian countries were better prepared for the pandemic -- but that is at the cost of severe restrictions on civil liberties that those countries are willing to accept. It is not really fair to compare South Korea or PR China with us, because there is no way those restrictions could be implemented here at the present moment.
I called some of my Beijing buddies the other day, and the level of restrictions in place even in Beijing (where there is no local transmission) is still terrifying. You sign in by smartphone wherever you go. The Government knows where you are at all time.
However, I was talking more generally about rare, destructive events, not just biological threats. We do not know whether the next threat will be a pandemic. It could e.g, come from space. Rare impact events are rare -- but not very rare on century timescales.
And, there are diseases for which vaccines cannot be developed. Humans are very ingenious. And some humans are very bad.
I am sure a bad, but ingenious, human can create a disease for which it is not true that "the tools developed to deal with this one are equally applicable to any future pandemic."
Rapid sequencing, rapid mass testing, isolation of infected individuals, and vaccines ought to be applicable to any infection. And certainly the first three.
To kill all of humanity with a pandemic, what do I need to do?
(And something will one day kill all of humanity, just as something killed the dinosaurs).
I need to make the disease MORE fatal than COVID, and I need to make it MORE infectious. But, I need to ensure delayed onset, so that the pathogen does not kill the human host before the host infects more and more people.
And now the question is: could a biotechnologist create such a disease ?
Nature may take some time to create such a killer disease, but with human help ...
From my memory of various pandemic type games, making a killer disease flu like is a great strategy.
Booked my mother in for a vaccination Dec 29th. Super efficient system could have done it a week earlier. Spaces are being booked up super quickly but that comes with plenty of cancellations so there are plenty of options. Done at the local hospital because the village GP isn't up to it.
Had my annual medical today - GP hinting that I'd likely get the Oxford/Astra jab when they start mass vaccination in the sports hall.....
Nice! Have to say was super impressed by the service. 1 min wait to be answered by the hospital vac dept. And then answered by humans who got it.
I find that highly unsurprising news. Complexities of parliamentary drafting aside, I feel like the core elements could have been and probably were drafted a long time ago.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
I continue to be astonished by the over-optimism surrounding how quickly the vaccine can be rolled out and how soon it will get us out of jail. Escape by March or April is not a plausible scenario. It will take a bloody age just to get both shots into health and care workers and the very old - there are something like five million of them, each needing two injections, to be got through before you even get as far as the 75-79 group, the shielders don't even get a look in until the 70-74 group are inoculated, and panic about the collapse of the hospitals is going to continue, realistically, until everybody in phase one - i.e. the clinically vulnerable as well as the extremely vulnerable, the NHS, the care workers, and the entire general population over 50 - have all been immunised twice. I am desperate for my husband to move to the front of the queue for the vaccine but, given that the shielders are stuck back in that fourth segment behind the entirety of Shady Pines, the NHS and everyone over 75, I reckon he'll be waiting until March at the very earliest.
The only reason that we are likely to move from total lockdown to something marginally less fucking awful at some point after Easter is warmer, drier weather. The real challenge is getting enough of the population lanced to get out of this unending misery of incarceration, isolation, widespread socio-economic implosion and grotty face masks by next Autumn.
I'm slightly surprised how complicated people think vaccinating 5 million people is. The UK manages five times that number in three months with the annual flu vaccine.
Vaccine availability, not sticking needles in people, is the big issue.
Does the flu vaccination have to be administered to each patient twice, in the middle of a pandemic where the medical profession are spinning round in ever decreasing circles trying to deal with tsunami waves of the dead and dying at the same time, and with all the wretched social distancing requirements, and with each recipient having to be monitored after the jab to make sure they don't turn red, blow up like a balloon and start gasping like a fish out of water because of an ultra-rare allergic reaction?
That + lack of supply + cold chain storage issues + tendency of everything this Government touches to turn to shit = slow, slow, slow. I mean, I'll be absolutely delighted to be proven wrong and be able to burn my horrible mask by mid-March, but the whole 2020 experience teaches one to always, ALWAYS expect everything to turn out badly. Because the development of the vaccines would appear to be just about the only thing that's gone well.
So, getting a completely novel form of treatment invented, tested on tens of thousands of people, approved and with manufacturing already ramped up to millions of doses a month is 'turned out badly'.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines weren't developed.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines didn't work.
Turning out badly would be if manufacturing wasn't being successfully ramped.
Turning out badly would be if we were looking at CV19 and there was no end in sight.
It's about ten months since CV19 arrived in force in the Western World. Since then at least two successful vaccines have been developed, and probably a third. Johnson & Johnson is likely to announce successful results of its vaccine in January (and the UK has 30 million doses of that due in the first half of next year and it only requires a single dose).
If the vaccines are available, they will be stuck into peoples' arms. It doesn't matter if the doses are seven weeks apart or three. It doesn't matter if one-in-three people never bother getting the secnd dose. If they are available, then they won't be sticking around gathering dust, they will be injected into people. And the more people that get it, the fewer deaths there will be, and the lower R will be, and the fewer restrictions will be needed.
Human kind will have had a bad 15 months. But compared to the Spanish flu, or the world wars, we've had a utter walk in the park.
“ the medical profession are spinning round in ever decreasing circles trying to deal with tsunami waves of the dead and dying at the same time”.
Let’s not carried away. The all cause excess death rate on a national level at the moment is only about 10%. I know the doom porn merchants don’t like to acknowledge it but we’re in nowhere near the same place as we were in the spring.
As I understand it, one of the biggest problems is the repeated isolation for medical staff that show symptoms or are track-and-traced. Once they’re vaxxed, a sensible policy decision is in play to say that in all likelihood their ability to onward transmit disease is next to nothing, so stay at work. Who knows, by Jan or Feb we may have the data to backup that supposition.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I dobbed in a fellow solicitor for saying something outrageously racist on Twitter a couple of years back and I didn’t regret it for a second. I was only disappointed they didn’t throw the book at her.
So they are now saying that full-full is better than full-half. But previously said that half-full was better than full-full.
So no contradiction.
Nope not in this case. This looks to be an actual legit trial decision as well.
Quite likely it will turn out that half-full isn't really better, there's too many question marks around that result.
Possibly, but there's always hope. Fingers crossed in any case. If it does turn out that the overall effectiveness is around 70% against infection and near 100% against severe disease I'll still be jumping for joy.
Totally agree, but it's unfortunate that they have allowed a whole load of confusion to arise over their trials. There are a lot of "vaccine hesitant" people out there, and the lack of clarity isn't inspiring confidence.
I'm not sure how big an impact that will really have. Much skepticism seems to be iether from people who are already highly skeptical about a long of things they probably shouldn't be, or are skeptical because people usually have no knowledge about vaccines at all, so getting snippets of info on this one but not really understanding vaccines generally, means they are more hesitant, and I'm not sure that knowing more about it actually helps there.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
I feel like anger at Starmer for factionalism is fabulously ironic, especially from those who championed the rise of a party within the party in support of their faction.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
The government says freedom by the spring, and then extends the furlough period to the end of April??
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
Backbenchers always feel like they are being taken for granted, because they usually are. Usually it's only a small awkward squad which cares enough to complain about that, which can be positive and negative. Given his majority Boris really should be pretty bulletproof for several years, even if (when) they have some poor election results, as you'd expect the sentiment to take time to build. Brexit and Covid may accelerate it of course.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
The government says freedom by the spring, and then extends the furlough period to the end of April??
Something doesn't add up.
Don’t over think it. Reality is we should have the most at risk vaccinated by then, but Covid will still be endemic and it will be a while before we reduce cases enough to fully reopen. Plus if we do get to open sooner, businesses don’t have to keep using furlough.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
The government says freedom by the spring, and then extends the furlough period to the end of April??
Something doesn't add up.
They are in a place now where I think it will be very difficult for them to accept any Covid deaths.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
The government says freedom by the spring, and then extends the furlough period to the end of April??
Something doesn't add up.
Don’t over think it.
On PB? It'd be most unusual, I'm not sure I have it in me.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
The government says freedom by the spring, and then extends the furlough period to the end of April??
Something doesn't add up.
They are in a place now where I think it will be very difficult for them to accept any Covid deaths.
I bloody well hope not. If they're going for elimination then we'll be locked up until the end of time, to no useful effect. Might as well skip the rest of the nonsense and move directly to the bottle of whisky and sleeping pills.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
The government says freedom by the spring, and then extends the furlough period to the end of April??
Something doesn't add up.
They are in a place now where I think it will be very difficult for them to accept any Covid deaths.
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
I continue to be astonished by the over-optimism surrounding how quickly the vaccine can be rolled out and how soon it will get us out of jail. Escape by March or April is not a plausible scenario. It will take a bloody age just to get both shots into health and care workers and the very old - there are something like five million of them, each needing two injections, to be got through before you even get as far as the 75-79 group, the shielders don't even get a look in until the 70-74 group are inoculated, and panic about the collapse of the hospitals is going to continue, realistically, until everybody in phase one - i.e. the clinically vulnerable as well as the extremely vulnerable, the NHS, the care workers, and the entire general population over 50 - have all been immunised twice. I am desperate for my husband to move to the front of the queue for the vaccine but, given that the shielders are stuck back in that fourth segment behind the entirety of Shady Pines, the NHS and everyone over 75, I reckon he'll be waiting until March at the very earliest.
The only reason that we are likely to move from total lockdown to something marginally less fucking awful at some point after Easter is warmer, drier weather. The real challenge is getting enough of the population lanced to get out of this unending misery of incarceration, isolation, widespread socio-economic implosion and grotty face masks by next Autumn.
I'm slightly surprised how complicated people think vaccinating 5 million people is. The UK manages five times that number in three months with the annual flu vaccine.
Vaccine availability, not sticking needles in people, is the big issue.
Does the flu vaccination have to be administered to each patient twice, in the middle of a pandemic where the medical profession are spinning round in ever decreasing circles trying to deal with tsunami waves of the dead and dying at the same time, and with all the wretched social distancing requirements, and with each recipient having to be monitored after the jab to make sure they don't turn red, blow up like a balloon and start gasping like a fish out of water because of an ultra-rare allergic reaction?
That + lack of supply + cold chain storage issues + tendency of everything this Government touches to turn to shit = slow, slow, slow. I mean, I'll be absolutely delighted to be proven wrong and be able to burn my horrible mask by mid-March, but the whole 2020 experience teaches one to always, ALWAYS expect everything to turn out badly. Because the development of the vaccines would appear to be just about the only thing that's gone well.
So, getting a completely novel form of treatment invented, tested on tens of thousands of people, approved and with manufacturing already ramped up to millions of doses a month is 'turned out badly'.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines weren't developed.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines didn't work.
Turning out badly would be if manufacturing wasn't being successfully ramped.
Turning out badly would be if we were looking at CV19 and there was no end in sight.
It's about ten months since CV19 arrived in force in the Western World. Since then at least two successful vaccines have been developed, and probably a third. Johnson & Johnson is likely to announce successful results of its vaccine in January (and the UK has 30 million doses of that due in the first half of next year and it only requires a single dose).
If the vaccines are available, they will be stuck into peoples' arms. It doesn't matter if the doses are seven weeks apart or three. It doesn't matter if one-in-three people never bother getting the secnd dose. If they are available, then they won't be sticking around gathering dust, they will be injected into people. And the more people that get it, the fewer deaths there will be, and the lower R will be, and the fewer restrictions will be needed.
Human kind will have had a bad 15 months. But compared to the Spanish flu, or the world wars, we've had a utter walk in the park.
Except economically. And in a mental health sense.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
The government says freedom by the spring, and then extends the furlough period to the end of April??
Something doesn't add up.
They are in a place now where I think it will be very difficult for them to accept any Covid deaths.
???
...There are hundreds every day....
Now yes absolutely. My point is I can't see a time when they will accept that X hundred Covid deaths is ok over any shorter time period. Hence they will continue the restrictions.
Or rather they will find it difficult. We need to know what number the govt thinks is tolerable for us to get back to "normal.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
The government says freedom by the spring, and then extends the furlough period to the end of April??
Something doesn't add up.
They are in a place now where I think it will be very difficult for them to accept any Covid deaths.
I bloody well hope not. If they're going for elimination then we'll be locked up until the end of time, to no useful effect. Might as well skip the rest of the nonsense and move directly to the bottle of whisky and sleeping pills.
Booked my mother in for a vaccination Dec 29th. Super efficient system could have done it a week earlier. Spaces are being booked up super quickly but that comes with plenty of cancellations so there are plenty of options. Done at the local hospital because the village GP isn't up to it.
Had my annual medical today - GP hinting that I'd likely get the Oxford/Astra jab when they start mass vaccination in the sports hall.....
Strange, I think most people are having it in the arm.
I feel like anger at Starmer for factionalism is fabulously ironic, especially from those who championed the rise of a party within the party in support of their faction.
Starmer and Katie Green have not had a good two weeks. They should be tearing Johnson a new one over his awful mishandling of schools. Instead, effective opposition has been left to the ASCL while Green obsesses about whether the E in OBE should stand for ‘Empire’ or ‘Excellence.’
Whether they are able to exploit the situation when none of these tests can be administered by extra personnel and all teaching staff strike in point blank refusal to administer them remains to be seen.
Worth remembering that the flu vaccine was adminstered pretty efficiently this year in the UK in the middle of a pandemic.
Yeah I had mine done through the window of my car. Really efficient system and they asked me to wait for fifteen minutes afterwards in a car parking space with a nurse on hand nearby so clearly someone anticipated that requirement. If they do that again then they'll blow through vaccinations.
I didn't even need an appointment. I went for a Quit Smoking session and my opportunistic counselor surprised me by whipping it out and doing me before we even got started on the main event. Never had it before.
I thought that sort of thing only happened in movies with black cases?
☺ - Sadly this was not for me that thrilling. She seemed to enjoy it though.
Booked my mother in for a vaccination Dec 29th. Super efficient system could have done it a week earlier. Spaces are being booked up super quickly but that comes with plenty of cancellations so there are plenty of options. Done at the local hospital because the village GP isn't up to it.
Had my annual medical today - GP hinting that I'd likely get the Oxford/Astra jab when they start mass vaccination in the sports hall.....
Strange, I think most people are having it in the arm.
Try not to project your personal fetishes onto others.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
I have a natural disdain for Johnson. However many of the Conservative MPs of whom you speak have a personal debt to Johnson for their very existence as MPs. Indeed many of the remaining duplicitous bunch would only be too happy to stab Johnson in the back in order to climb the greasy pole, much as he did to Mrs May and Mr Cameron.
Don't underestimate the voters, they love Johnson like they loved Benny Hill forty years ago. He is a national treasure, not my national treasure, but a national treasure nonetheless.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
The government says freedom by the spring, and then extends the furlough period to the end of April??
Something doesn't add up.
They are in a place now where I think it will be very difficult for them to accept any Covid deaths.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
I have a natural disdain for Johnson. However many of the Conservative MPs of whom you speak have a personal debt to Johnson for their very existence as MPs. Indeed many of the remaining duplicitous bunch would only be too happy to stab Johnson in the back in order to climb the greasy pole, much as he did to Mrs May and Mr Cameron.
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
I continue to be astonished by the over-optimism surrounding how quickly the vaccine can be rolled out and how soon it will get us out of jail. Escape by March or April is not a plausible scenario. It will take a bloody age just to get both shots into health and care workers and the very old - there are something like five million of them, each needing two injections, to be got through before you even get as far as the 75-79 group, the shielders don't even get a look in until the 70-74 group are inoculated, and panic about the collapse of the hospitals is going to continue, realistically, until everybody in phase one - i.e. the clinically vulnerable as well as the extremely vulnerable, the NHS, the care workers, and the entire general population over 50 - have all been immunised twice. I am desperate for my husband to move to the front of the queue for the vaccine but, given that the shielders are stuck back in that fourth segment behind the entirety of Shady Pines, the NHS and everyone over 75, I reckon he'll be waiting until March at the very earliest.
The only reason that we are likely to move from total lockdown to something marginally less fucking awful at some point after Easter is warmer, drier weather. The real challenge is getting enough of the population lanced to get out of this unending misery of incarceration, isolation, widespread socio-economic implosion and grotty face masks by next Autumn.
I'm slightly surprised how complicated people think vaccinating 5 million people is. The UK manages five times that number in three months with the annual flu vaccine.
Vaccine availability, not sticking needles in people, is the big issue.
Does the flu vaccination have to be administered to each patient twice, in the middle of a pandemic where the medical profession are spinning round in ever decreasing circles trying to deal with tsunami waves of the dead and dying at the same time, and with all the wretched social distancing requirements, and with each recipient having to be monitored after the jab to make sure they don't turn red, blow up like a balloon and start gasping like a fish out of water because of an ultra-rare allergic reaction?
That + lack of supply + cold chain storage issues + tendency of everything this Government touches to turn to shit = slow, slow, slow. I mean, I'll be absolutely delighted to be proven wrong and be able to burn my horrible mask by mid-March, but the whole 2020 experience teaches one to always, ALWAYS expect everything to turn out badly. Because the development of the vaccines would appear to be just about the only thing that's gone well.
So, getting a completely novel form of treatment invented, tested on tens of thousands of people, approved and with manufacturing already ramped up to millions of doses a month is 'turned out badly'.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines weren't developed.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines didn't work.
Turning out badly would be if manufacturing wasn't being successfully ramped.
Turning out badly would be if we were looking at CV19 and there was no end in sight.
It's about ten months since CV19 arrived in force in the Western World. Since then at least two successful vaccines have been developed, and probably a third. Johnson & Johnson is likely to announce successful results of its vaccine in January (and the UK has 30 million doses of that due in the first half of next year and it only requires a single dose).
If the vaccines are available, they will be stuck into peoples' arms. It doesn't matter if the doses are seven weeks apart or three. It doesn't matter if one-in-three people never bother getting the secnd dose. If they are available, then they won't be sticking around gathering dust, they will be injected into people. And the more people that get it, the fewer deaths there will be, and the lower R will be, and the fewer restrictions will be needed.
Human kind will have had a bad 15 months. But compared to the Spanish flu, or the world wars, we've had a utter walk in the park.
Except economically. And in a mental health sense.
Confused. Help me out here. Are you suggesting that the economic / MH harm of Covid-19 are worse than World Wars or Spanish Flu? If not, what are you saying?
Covid-19 is the worst thing to happen in the fortysomething years of my lifetime, sure. I hope and pray that goes for my children as well.
But the relative awfulness of this year is a sign of how lucky we have been as a generation.
Comments
He was on here fairly recently, slagging off John le Carre, as if she were some sort of authority, but I haven't noticed her since.
Must have been bad. Something about Mike's hairstyle?
So no contradiction.
As to why that is - I haven't come out with a convincing explanation. Something there... but....
And it is across the UK
A terrible deal compared to membership. It makes trade with our largest market harder and we have lost our right of free movement on the continent of which we are a part. But a fabulous deal compared to not having one. We have tariff free access to the Single Market rather than basic WTO terms. However neither of these comparators – membership and no deal – were realistic options and we shouldn’t use them as a benchmark. In truth, the deal is neither good nor bad. The best adjective for it is inevitable. Discount the talk of hardball and bluffing and blinking and capitulating. All purely for the gallery. This was two sets of macro interests coming together and arriving at the place they were pretty much bound to. An agreement which respects the genuine red lines of each.
For the UK these were twofold. First and foremost the end of free movement. Immigration was the totemic issue of the referendum and there was no way whatsoever that any deal which preserved free movement could fly. Second, fishing rights. This speaks to sovereignty - not the wonky type of being able to do our own trade agreements, which few care about, but sovereignty in the visceral sense of controlling our waters and our natural resources, being fish in this case. It’s not big bucks but it means a lot to people. We had to have a win here.
The EU had one red line. Protect the integrity of their Single Market. The UK could leave it but could not “have our cake and eat it”. So tariff free access would be conditional on maintaining a level playing field. We start off aligned and are then free to diverge in the future but at a price.
So there we are. FOM, tick. Fishing, tick. SM integrity, tick. This is the deal and no other was ever going to be possible between the EU and this UK government. It could have been done months ago but then it would have looked too easy. Better for Johnson & Co to maintain for domestic consumption the fiction that no deal was a possibility - a probability even - until at the last minute unveiling the agreement. This generates an atmosphere of relief which will help him to sell it. It also creates the impression of haggling to the wire to wring the last drop of value from the negotiations. This too will help him to sell it.
The most important thing to establish is the safety of the vaccine, not details about which dosing regime is the most efficacious. Worries about efficacy can be ameliorated by concentrating use of the Pfizer jab on the oldest and most medically vulnerable people, whilst mass vaccinating the 50-65s and the non-medical key workers with the Oxford vaccine at the same time.
If we go for a regimen that offers 60% protection in January and then discover in April that we should've been using a different regimen that offers 90% protection, then this is still far preferable to waiting until April before doing anything.
half-full > full-full > full-half ?
As I mentioned yesterday, the father of a friend, who is 89 and lives in Islington, got a call yesterday from his own GP practice asking him in for the vaccine on Friday. He’s lucky his own GP practice is one of the few that is dispensing themselves, and I guess they are doing their own elderly patients first. My mother is also 89 and lives in Kent, and hasn’t heard anything yet. From the details published it looks as if she will be called to either Tunbridge Wells or Maidstone - both reasonably long journeys - and would have to book a taxi both ways to make the trip. She can afford this, but there will be many who can’t.
But porridge was a clue.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines weren't developed.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines didn't work.
Turning out badly would be if manufacturing wasn't being successfully ramped.
Turning out badly would be if we were looking at CV19 and there was no end in sight.
It's about ten months since CV19 arrived in force in the Western World. Since then at least two successful vaccines have been developed, and probably a third. Johnson & Johnson is likely to announce successful results of its vaccine in January (and the UK has 30 million doses of that due in the first half of next year and it only requires a single dose).
If the vaccines are available, they will be stuck into peoples' arms. It doesn't matter if the doses are seven weeks apart or three. It doesn't matter if one-in-three people never bother getting the secnd dose. If they are available, then they won't be sticking around gathering dust, they will be injected into people. And the more people that get it, the fewer deaths there will be, and the lower R will be, and the fewer restrictions will be needed.
Human kind will have had a bad 15 months. But compared to the Spanish flu, or the world wars, we've had a utter walk in the park.
Worth remembering that the flu vaccine was adminstered pretty efficiently this year in the UK in the middle of a pandemic.
Each change in restrictions for an area has a transaction cost, due to people dashing down to the pubs or shops just before restrictions increase, and again when they're reduced.
In May's case, it was "Minimal economic risk consistent with stopping immigration", hence a Customs Union by stealth.
Johnson wanted "Basic FTA with as many bells and whistles as I can haggle", which turned out to be few-to-none. But that's fine, from a negotiation point of view.
The negotiation was never the important bit; the initial request was.
Remember- the art of the conjourer is to focus your attention on the irrelevant bit, while the business happens elsewhere.
What remains to be seen is who made the more sensible initial ask.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/12/17/moderna-vaccine-fda-panel/
...Does Moderna’s vaccine prevent viral transmission in addition to symptomatic disease? Has the virus figured out how to get around it? And what happened with the 11 volunteers who got Covid-19 despite getting vaccinated?
The answer to those questions, posed by the panelists after Moderna’s exhaustive presentation on safety and efficacy, is pretty simple: No one knows yet. Jacqueline Miller, head of Moderna’s infectious disease unit, said the company is still collecting and analyzing key data, which is unlikely to be ready until next month.
To panelist Paul Offit, a virologist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, those 11 so-called breakthrough cases of Covid-19 are particularly key. If it turns out those patients had demonstrably lower levels of neutralizing antibodies than vaccinated patients who didn’t get Covid-19, that could help establish a baseline immune response needed to protect against infection. As it stands, no one is certain just what kind of antibody levels are needed to prevent Covid-19.
Similarly, as University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine virologist Patrick Moore pointed out, those 11 volunteers could be instrumental in understanding how SARS-CoV-2 might mutate. If their viruses turn out to be genetically different from others in the study, it might suggest that SARS-CoV-2 can evolve to get around vaccination, which would be alarming.
But they’ll have to wait, Miller said, as Moderna has yet to do the swabbing, serology, and sequencing necessary to answer those vital questions...
2. "Well, it's not been quite as catastrophic as the Siege of Leningrad" is a pretty low bar to be setting
When this agony is finally over I will be taking a small number of positives from the experience. Last Spring was lovely (from the meteorological point of view, though evidently not for all those massacred or bereaved by the first big spike of the Plague.) My bank balance has got a lot fatter. I've taken up running and discovered I liked it. I may even be starting to learn not to worry about inconsequential bullshit like who wins or loses elections (which, so long as we don't end up with an extremist ideologue in charge, really doesn't matter very much in the grand scheme of things.) But I've also spent much of the time being anxious, miserable, worried about my livelihood, and worried about the people around me getting sick and dying of this bloody thing. And I'm well aware that, so far, I've actually been lucky. Back when this all kicked off I said to my husband that we'd be very fortunate if we got to the end of 2020 without having to bury anybody we love or find new employment and, it now being December 17th and disaster not yet having come knocking, it looks like fortune has smiled on us. But even so, millions and millions of people have had an absolutely dreadful time (and there's no guarantee that 2021 won't start out even worse, even if it eventually improves as we all hope and expect.)
So yes, 2020 has, by any reasonable reckoning, been a bloody awful year. Being less awful than, say, 1643 or 1349 doesn't change the fact.
https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1339626172959707137
Booked my mother in for a vaccination Dec 29th. Super efficient system could have done it a week earlier. Spaces are being booked up super quickly but that comes with plenty of cancellations so there are plenty of options. Done at the local hospital because the village GP isn't up to it.
Between them, they still failed to make an imbecile.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lsde48yRgNU
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
I have not heard the expression before. Thanks
Let’s not carried away. The all cause excess death rate on a national level at the moment is only about 10%. I know the doom porn merchants don’t like to acknowledge it but we’re in nowhere near the same place as we were in the spring.
As I understand it, one of the biggest problems is the repeated isolation for medical staff that show symptoms or are track-and-traced. Once they’re vaxxed, a sensible policy decision is in play to say that in all likelihood their ability to onward transmit disease is next to nothing, so stay at work. Who knows, by Jan or Feb we may have the data to backup that supposition.
Lots of scrutiny by the negotiating teams.
....Very, very disappointed.......
Disappointment shares soar.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
Something doesn't add up.
...There are hundreds every day....
Or rather they will find it difficult. We need to know what number the govt thinks is tolerable for us to get back to "normal.
Whether they are able to exploit the situation when none of these tests can be administered by extra personnel and all teaching staff strike in point blank refusal to administer them remains to be seen.
https://xkcd.com/2399/
And makes you realise just how much empty space there is in the middle.
Don't underestimate the voters, they love Johnson like they loved Benny Hill forty years ago. He is a national treasure, not my national treasure, but a national treasure nonetheless.
Worried about you.
Covid-19 is the worst thing to happen in the fortysomething years of my lifetime, sure. I hope and pray that goes for my children as well.
But the relative awfulness of this year is a sign of how lucky we have been as a generation.