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The Oxford/AZ vaccine gets approved – now ministers needs to ensure that it gets out quickly and in
While the United States and the EU continue to deliberate on the Oxford vaccine the big news in the UK is that it has now been approved and that we are told 4 million jobs are ready for distribution.
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Each MP should be the very last person in their constituency to get a jab, after everyone else who wants one has had one.
If that’s the criteria for avoiding political meltdown, the government are more buggered than a reluctant Turkish conscript.
CarlottaVance said:
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So Scotland should leave the EU with no deal?
Scotland should have remained in the EU and will be back in as soon as possible after independence. Unfortunately being a colony we were forced out by our Colonial Masters against our will.
But I agree, the optics would be bad, given how hated they are.
But, of course, unlike most people of their age and frailty they don’t have to share carers.
Haven’t you noticed?
No one talks about “the EU” anymore - it triggers far too many difficult questions - nowadays it’s just “Europe” (what ever that means).
Also think teachers , police , civil servants , police , army should be considered.
Sorry to go OT but FPT No I never said the UK didn't choose the Lisbon Treaty. What I said was that I didn't choose it.
The UK in the form of Gordon Brown and Tony Blair reneging on their last election manifesto chose it - and what was the result afterwards? The UK rejected that party and elected Cameron and has never looked back leading to Brexit.
Do you see the point yet? Democracy should rest with the public ultimately and no Parliament can or should bind its successors. Blair and Brown reneging on their manifesto by signing Lisbon was a disreputable way to act. The public by voting 4 General Election and 1 Referendum in a row have reversed that.
Brown signing Lisbon having promised at the election not to is not the same as me choosing my own wife. It is more comparable to one "elder" choosing everyone's partner, compelling them to get married, then saying there is no way to get divorced without leaving the tribe. Now people have chosen to leave the tribe.
For me the absolute priority is speed. I don't want people faffing about trying to work out who's turn it is. Vaccinate as many as possible as quickly as possible and pray that this stops the recipients being transmitters.
TOPPING was trying to argue that my being married is incompatible with "personal sovereignty". His analogy not mine. Difference is though I chose my wife, she chose me - and if either of us decide we don't want to remain married we can get divorced.
So yes the marriage analogy was crap. But I was arguing against it.
I remember my school biology teacher telling us this as he insisted we all stand in line outside the science building in winter.
So now after the vaccine that works (Pfizer)
We now have the placebo for plebs one (AZ)
The JCVI are operating on the assumption that it will - that afterall is why Care and NHS staff are in the first and second priority groupings - not to protect themselves but to protect those they work with.
He is your goto for advice on the "obvious".
What worries me is not so much cancelling them but the fact that it is becoming absolutely painfully obvious that nobody has thought of alternative forms of assessment. If History, Geography, English, languages and the creative arts had been switched to externally moderated coursework - a perfectly feasible option - it might just have been possible to salvage exams for maths and science. But nobody made the effort to think and have plans in place.
Edit - incidentally if it’s a ‘no brainer’ the government still won’t do it, as while they have no brains they are so dim even a no brainer wouldn’t compute.
"The Country" chose to sign the Lisbon Treaty.
So the analogy stands. You, by getting married, gave up some of your personal sovereignty and ability to go whoring but were wholly sovereign nevertheless as you could at any time go whoring and could indeed leave the marriage.
That you choose to stay in your marriage (which I hope will last for many years) is therefore a compromise of your personal sovereignty.
That particular aspect hasn’t been studied yet. “There is a theoretical risk that you could pass the virus on to others despite being vaccinated,” says Kirsten Hokeness, Ph.D., director of Bryant University’s new Center for Health and Behavioral Sciences. And we definitely need more answers before people stop wearing masks.
But virus transmission by vaccinated people hopefully won’t be the case. “The goal of the vaccine is to create immunological memory in the body so that when you encounter the virus in the future, your immune system rapidly ramps up and attacks the virus very quickly before you get sick. Therefore, as long as the vaccine boasts a strong immunological response, it is likely that the virus will be stopped from replicating in your system pretty quickly,” Dr. Hokeness says. That would limit your ability to spread it to others. “It can happen, but the risks would be far less than if you were not vaccinated,” she says, adding that “since the vaccine requires a booster it may be that your ability to spread the virus would be greater if you only got one dose, but there is not data available yet that would suggest that that is the case.
Scotland had two choices in 2014
a) you are part of the U.K. demos
b) you are a distinct demos
You chose (a)
Therefore when there was a vote of the U.K. demos in 2016 you voted as part of it.
The only scenario where your claim would be true is if you had voted for independence in 2014 abut it hadn’t yet been completed by the time Brexit happened and the EU turned out to be a rigid and impracticable organisation
But one amusing statistic is that fewer voted to Remain in the EU in 2016 than voted to remain in the UK in 2014.
So don't assume Scots are more pro-EU than pro-UK.
But those who chose not to vote don't get to complain or get added to either side.
The government did breaching its manifesto promise - there is nothing democratic about that. The government lost its next election, that is democratic.
So under the principle of "no Parliament can bind its successor" then the rogue Parliament of Brown signing Lisbon in breach of his manifesto commitment not to do so without a referendum ought to have been able to be reversed by the next Parliament. But its wasn't possible.
That I choose to stay in my marriage is not a compromise of my personal sovereignty, it is my choice. If I choose to end it I can do so. The UK could not reverse what Brown did signing Lisbon without leaving the EU altogether - so thankfully we have now taken that course. I am sure you must applaud that since it was the only option left post-Brown right?
My wife taught for many years at College in subjects with no external assessment. The results were pitiful and I had great sympathy for any student who either took their subjects seriously or thought that the piece of paper handed out at the end had any value. Last year, after the collapse of the exam system and the algorithm we had record numbers of A passes devaluing everyone's achievements. We are set to do exactly the same again.
And it is incredibly unhelpful to spread false messages about something as important as this.
Even in jest
We should definitely lock everything down for 6-8 weeks in my view, but demanding this stay in place until we've 80% of the population vaccinated shows they have no respect or understanding for those struggling from the economic effects of this.
Still, good to see the Unionist offer taking shape.
If NHS capacity cannot cope with demand, then why restrict delivery rather than open up to other agents. I am only suggesting opening up to private providers when supply exceeds NHS capacity.
Remember that we are dealing with an exhausted NHS at full stretch already.
Exams can be useful, and accurate, and reliable as a form of assessment. But (a) current public exams are not, on the whole, and certainly would not be at this moment, and (b) there are in fact other ways of finding out how able somebody is, if used correctly, which again, we are not proposing to.
This doesn’t suit say, Johnson, Gove or Cummings because actually exams play to their intellectual strengths as plausible blaggers and hide their enormous weaknesses, particularly an inability to gather facts and master complex details.
And as a result, here we go again.
It would make sense to use the pharmacy channel but that’s only technically “private” in my view.
The principle you keep ignoring that is a key element of Parliamentary Democracy is that no Parliament can bind it's successors. If a government does something we dislike not a part of its manifesto (like Lisbon) then we can elect a different government to reverse that.
The EU made laws irreversible. That is why it is antidemocratic.
Given Brown passed Lisbon in breach of the manifesto and against the public's wishes how do you think the public can or should get it democratically reversed?
I get a handful of colds each year, I don't mind if one of those happens to be covid if my chances of getting seriously ill from it is less than 1 in 20000.
At that time Brexit hadn’t been voted for (and I don’t think the referendum had even been announced).
No statement about the future looks at every conceivable scenario
Do most Brexiteers regret what the country has endured in the last 4 to 5 years? Or do they view it as a price worth paying to get laws applying to this country made in this country?
Seems logical for the Scots to do the same.
BBC News - Luke Letlow: Newly-elected US lawmaker, 41, dies from Covid
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-55481711
The UK is too small to deal with the big problems on its own, and too big to be responsive to local concerns, like those of London. It's absurd to fetishise one layer of decision making (the nation state) over all others - especially when the nation state is as dysfunctional and shit as ours.