Klopp is EVS from 50/1 yesterday to be the next Prem manager to leave his job
He wouldn't run away from Liverpool like he ran away from Dortmund, would he?
His Mum just passed away and he couldn't go to the funeral, that must be tough. The rumour I heard was he was having time off to get over that, but I don't trust it really.
I was thinking of backing Mourinho as next one to go to be honest, so this has just stopped me doing that. Changing the formation to include more attacking players but still losing, and letting in 8 goals in 2 games, upsetting Alli and Bale, the ingredients are there. I can't imagine Tottenham fans are happy with the football they play under him, they have a reputation as a flair club, and if they aren't really progressing success wise either what's the point?
I'll tell you who won't be going. The Special One. David Moyes. He has got it rocking at West Ham. Pity no fans at Upton Park to see it. But over at your club - and mine sort of - it's not looking so great. The Arse are struggling and Arteta must be feeling under pressure. Least I hope he is. Bring back Wenger? It's not the worst idea in the world.
I'd take a guess at the Kent variant becoming dominant which makes existing measures less effective, you can see this in all of the places that didn't originally have big outbreaks of it.
There are a couple of comments I'd add to this piece:
1. You would expect older societies to do worse than younger ones. Simply lots of old people, means lots of people who can potentially die.
2. You need to look on a "deaths per 100k", or even an excess deaths metric. Otherwise you're just measuring different population sizes.
On vaccine availability, I'd note that the US (for example) is moving to a strategy of pretty much exclusive use of Pfizer and Modern. That means there are a lot of existing production of Novavax, AZ and J&J that will be available to the highest bidder. For that reason, I'd be very surprised if the EU had only received 300m doses by end June.
I think the EU will be probably 10-12 weeks behind the UK in getting rid of CV19. A serious deficit, to be sure, and I very much doubt they'll learn any lessons from it. But also not that long in the general scale of things.
Feels like an eternity if you are in a vulnerable group.
I think it's like that for almost everybody! Although obviously if you're especially vulnerable it's worse. Those of us with many elderly or shielding relatives and friends know that all too well, even if we're not considered to be at particular risk ourselves.
Who was it who suggested the other day that there should be a public holiday to celebrate when the vaccination campaign has been completed? I think that's a good idea. We don't have enough public holidays in this country anyway: one paltry bank holiday between late May and Christmas. It's stingy.
@MattW - thanks and good first header. I hope the EU gets rolling on vaccination and I think they will.
I have seen no sign, in much of Europe, of a big distribution effort being setup. There has been some stuff in Germany... but without a coordinated supply chain and delivery system....
I guess I was speaking more in hope than anything else. I bet they do surprise on the upside, though, from this point. There'll have been some eurohands banged on eurotables and some euroheads banged together.
I'd take a guess at the Kent variant becoming dominant which makes existing measures less effective, you can see this in all of the places that didn't originally have big outbreaks of it.
Klopp is EVS from 50/1 yesterday to be the next Prem manager to leave his job
He wouldn't run away from Liverpool like he ran away from Dortmund, would he?
His Mum just passed away and he couldn't go to the funeral, that must be tough. The rumour I heard was he was having time off to get over that, but I don't trust it really.
I was thinking of backing Mourinho as next one to go to be honest, so this has just stopped me doing that. Changing the formation to include more attacking players but still losing, and letting in 8 goals in 2 games, upsetting Alli and Bale, the ingredients are there. I can't imagine Tottenham fans are happy with the football they play under him, they have a reputation as a flair club, and if they aren't really progressing success wise either what's the point?
I'll tell you who won't be going. The Special One. David Moyes. He has got it rocking at West Ham. Pity no fans at Upton Park to see it. But over at your club - and mine sort of - it's not looking so great. The Arse are struggling and Arteta must be feeling under pressure. Least I hope he is. Bring back Wenger? It's not the worst idea in the world.
There’s a non-Covid reason there are no fans at Upton Park.
There are a couple of comments I'd add to this piece:
1. You would expect older societies to do worse than younger ones. Simply lots of old people, means lots of people who can potentially die.
2. You need to look on a "deaths per 100k", or even an excess deaths metric. Otherwise you're just measuring different population sizes.
On vaccine availability, I'd note that the US (for example) is moving to a strategy of pretty much exclusive use of Pfizer and Modern. That means there are a lot of existing production of Novavax, AZ and J&J that will be available to the highest bidder. For that reason, I'd be very surprised if the EU had only received 300m doses by end June.
I think the EU will be probably 10-12 weeks behind the UK in getting rid of CV19. A serious deficit, to be sure, and I very much doubt they'll learn any lessons from it. But also not that long in the general scale of things.
Feels like an eternity if you are in a vulnerable group.
I think it's like that for almost everybody! Although obviously if you're especially vulnerable it's worse. Those of us with many elderly or shielding relatives and friends know that all too well, even if we're not considered to be at particular risk ourselves.
Who was it who suggested the other day that there should be a public holiday to celebrate when the vaccination campaign has been completed? I think that's a good idea. We don't have enough public holidays in this country anyway: one paltry bank holiday between late May and Christmas. It's stingy.
To be pedantic, that's true of E&W only (and assuming no royal wedding etc) - the Scots have Sanct Andra's day, and the Nirish have the Boyne anniversary.
As an FYI, there’s been a major drop in turnout for today’s Catalan regional election. That just about guarantees a sizeable victory for the separatist parties as their vote is always much more organised and motivated.
I'd take a guess at the Kent variant becoming dominant which makes existing measures less effective, you can see this in all of the places that didn't originally have big outbreaks of it.
On the other hand, I think it had been reported to make up half of cases at the end of December already, and everyone else has much the same measures.
The existing measures are proving pretty effective in, well, Kent itself.
Hasn’t basically everyone in Kent now had it?
There is that possibility. I (fingers crossed) have not. But if you look at the bottom of Malmesbury’s R charts then, leaving aside the Orkneys and Shetlands, there is a remarkable preponderance of Kent, East Sussex, and Surrey districts. In truth I see no other explanation than some degree of population immunity kicking in.
As an FYI, there’s been a major drop in turnout for today’s Catalan regional election. That just about guarantees a sizeable victory for the separatist parties as their vote is always much more organised and motivated.
Yup - about 12% down - that was my reading of the interactive map earlier which showed the rural turnout holding up quite well compared to the coastal cities.
There are a couple of comments I'd add to this piece:
1. You would expect older societies to do worse than younger ones. Simply lots of old people, means lots of people who can potentially die.
2. You need to look on a "deaths per 100k", or even an excess deaths metric. Otherwise you're just measuring different population sizes.
On vaccine availability, I'd note that the US (for example) is moving to a strategy of pretty much exclusive use of Pfizer and Modern. That means there are a lot of existing production of Novavax, AZ and J&J that will be available to the highest bidder. For that reason, I'd be very surprised if the EU had only received 300m doses by end June.
I think the EU will be probably 10-12 weeks behind the UK in getting rid of CV19. A serious deficit, to be sure, and I very much doubt they'll learn any lessons from it. But also not that long in the general scale of things.
Feels like an eternity if you are in a vulnerable group.
I think it's like that for almost everybody! Although obviously if you're especially vulnerable it's worse. Those of us with many elderly or shielding relatives and friends know that all too well, even if we're not considered to be at particular risk ourselves.
Who was it who suggested the other day that there should be a public holiday to celebrate when the vaccination campaign has been completed? I think that's a good idea. We don't have enough public holidays in this country anyway: one paltry bank holiday between late May and Christmas. It's stingy.
To be pedantic, that's true of E&W only (and assuming no royal wedding etc) - the Scots have Sanct Andra's day, and the Nirish have the Boyne anniversary.
That's a fair point (although are those both official or customary, I can never remember...?)
Regardless, it might be rather nice to have a national day that's for everyone to enjoy. Religious festivals and the current menu of welcome but rather soulless bank holidays don't really cut it.
Excellent thread piece, Matt. Why you never done one before?
I agree with the main thrust of your argument. You shouldn't draw too many conclusions from the bare figures, especially as we don't know where it all ends yet. I do however think it is reasonable to pause over the current results and reflect that the UK's vaccination roll-out probably would almost certainly have gone less well had the country still been part of the EU.
This gives unreconstructed Europhiles like myself food for thought. My habit has been to mock Leavers over the absence of palpable benefits of leaving the EU. Now we appear to have a very tangible one.
Of course nobody could have foreseen this, but it would be dishonest of Remainers to deny these very real consequences. If it can be reasonably argued that they derive from the very nature of the EU, and therefore further benefits of leaving the EU are likely to accrue in due course, there will be a lot of humble pie to be eaten, not least on this site.
I might even have some myself.
That’s a fair argument, but it also need to incorporate the counter-factual of what the response might have been had the perpetually awkward and non communitaire UK remained part of the EU. I cannot see that we’d happily have acquiesced to the current EU scheme - and it’s quite conceivable we’d still have gone our own way.
We might even have persuaded the EU to have been more proactive.
I agree with all of this. The takeaway for me, as I said yesterday, is that the EU is fantastic at running an extremely effective free trade area. It’s trying to be a federal government in waiting though and is pants at that. It was less the vaccine cock up, any individual government could screw that up, as the Hungary situation. Orban is a dictator, Hungary is at best a semi-democracy, and the EU can/will do nothing while Poland is still there to veto any Art 7 proceedings. And visa versa. So it is an extremely less effective guarantor of democratic values on the Continent than I believed it to have been.
Interesting point, this. The EU as bulwark against political extremism is certainly in my locker as one of its many positives. And, yes, this argument falls if member states can be extreme and face no sanctions.
I'd take a guess at the Kent variant becoming dominant which makes existing measures less effective, you can see this in all of the places that didn't originally have big outbreaks of it.
On the other hand, I think it had been reported to make up half of cases at the end of December already, and everyone else has much the same measures.
The existing measures are proving pretty effective in, well, Kent itself.
Hasn’t basically everyone in Kent now had it?
There is that possibility. I (fingers crossed) have not. But if you look at the bottom of Malmesbury’s R charts then, leaving aside the Orkneys and Shetlands, there is a remarkable preponderance of Kent, East Sussex, and Surrey districts. In truth I see no other explanation than some degree of population immunity kicking in.
As an FYI, there’s been a major drop in turnout for today’s Catalan regional election. That just about guarantees a sizeable victory for the separatist parties as their vote is always much more organised and motivated.
Yup - about 12% down - that was my reading of the interactive map earlier which showed the rural turnout holding up quite well compared to the coastal cities.
Yep - it’s actually down over 15% in parts of Barcelona, Tarragona, L’Hospitalet and they are seeing the biggest falls. I guess it’s because a new independence push is now off the cards, so with covid and the weather the non-nationalist vote doesn’t feel the need to come out. It’s not existential this time.
@MattW Well done for the header. There's nothing to be had though in the competition for fewer deaths.
The EU has done what the EU has done. As has the UK. They've done their best and they should be roundly congratulated on that. All of them. Even Gavin Williamson.
So, not a butcher's bill, but more a recognition that many have died, and a huge thank-you to those that have helped us battle through it.
Deaths are what we focus on because they are the easiest to count (although even that has some caveats). However, as a lagging indicator, they actually tell us very little about how well or otherwise governments and societies did in their responses to COVID, as each country's starting position was different and how pandemics play out is very sensitive to those initial conditions.
I hate this constant national league tables of deaths, hospitalizations and infections, as they are all lagging indicators which measure outcomes. We should be focusing more on the leading indicators (mask wearing, social distancing, hand and respiratory hygiene, expansion of healthcare capacity, development of better treatments and, yes, rates of vaccination) but still not as some nationalistic bragging rights exercise, but as a means of better informing our future decisions and learning how to focus efforts.
And, yes, we should look at the lagging indicators to see if our efforts in improving our leading indicators are changing the trends in outcomes (i.e. to validate the leading indicator metrics we have chosen), and to see if we can learn how other countries' focus on the leading indicators is impacting their outcomes. But never as a measure of how well we or they did.
That's an idea that has come up in a few twitter debates, and I think we are probably all agreed on that.
It is one of the clearest areas where we need to be talking about transfer of Best Practice, but we only to that by comparing data.
We know the Germany did well by dint of having more in place regional labs that could catch wave one, and the UK by having various national databases in place built as far back as the Blair era. Including ones that people like me may well have objected to on Civil Liberties grounds.
I think one point for the EU now is that the UK has learnt the consequences of the UK variant over Christmas with a large number of unnecessary deaths (10-15k?) - others now know that that is coming.
Excellent thread piece, Matt. Why you never done one before?
I agree with the main thrust of your argument. You shouldn't draw too many conclusions from the bare figures, especially as we don't know where it all ends yet. I do however think it is reasonable to pause over the current results and reflect that the UK's vaccination roll-out probably would almost certainly have gone less well had the country still been part of the EU.
This gives unreconstructed Europhiles like myself food for thought. My habit has been to mock Leavers over the absence of palpable benefits of leaving the EU. Now we appear to have a very tangible one.
Of course nobody could have foreseen this, but it would be dishonest of Remainers to deny these very real consequences. If it can be reasonably argued that they derive from the very nature of the EU, and therefore further benefits of leaving the EU are likely to accrue in due course, there will be a lot of humble pie to be eaten, not least on this site.
I might even have some myself.
That’s a fair argument, but it also need to incorporate the counter-factual of what the response might have been had the perpetually awkward and non communitaire UK remained part of the EU. I cannot see that we’d happily have acquiesced to the current EU scheme - and it’s quite conceivable we’d still have gone our own way.
We might even have persuaded the EU to have been more proactive.
I agree with all of this. The takeaway for me, as I said yesterday, is that the EU is fantastic at running an extremely effective free trade area. It’s trying to be a federal government in waiting though and is pants at that. It was less the vaccine cock up, any individual government could screw that up, as the Hungary situation. Orban is a dictator, Hungary is at best a semi-democracy, and the EU can/will do nothing while Poland is still there to veto any Art 7 proceedings. And visa versa. So it is an extremely less effective guarantor of democratic values on the Continent than I believed it to have been.
Interesting point, this. The EU as bulwark against political extremism is certainly in my locker as one of its many positives. And, yes, this argument falls if member states can be extreme and face no sanctions.
In which case, get rid of the political structures, turn the EU into a single market and free trade zone, and no more, and the UK can rejoin. Sorted
@MattW - thanks and good first header. I hope the EU gets rolling on vaccination and I think they will.
I have seen no sign, in much of Europe, of a big distribution effort being setup. There has been some stuff in Germany... but without a coordinated supply chain and delivery system....
I guess I was speaking more in hope than anything else. I bet they do surprise on the upside, though, from this point. There'll have been some eurohands banged on eurotables and some euroheads banged together.
All of which have, of course, no real impact, given health is not an EU competence. Why on earth this was done EU wide I'll never known.
@MattW Well done for the header. There's nothing to be had though in the competition for fewer deaths.
The EU has done what the EU has done. As has the UK. They've done their best and they should be roundly congratulated on that. All of them. Even Gavin Williamson.
So, not a butcher's bill, but more a recognition that many have died, and a huge thank-you to those that have helped us battle through it.
Tend to agree - though my point would be that there are opportunities for learning still.
Personally I hope that there is a benefit to be gained by some EU countries adjusting strategy on dose intervals, and as data comes in from UK I hope that some will do so.
@MattW - thanks and good first header. I hope the EU gets rolling on vaccination and I think they will.
I have seen no sign, in much of Europe, of a big distribution effort being setup. There has been some stuff in Germany... but without a coordinated supply chain and delivery system....
I guess I was speaking more in hope than anything else. I bet they do surprise on the upside, though, from this point. There'll have been some eurohands banged on eurotables and some euroheads banged together.
All of which have, of course, no real impact, given health is not an EU competence. Why on earth this was done EU wide I'll never known.
@MattW - thanks and good first header. I hope the EU gets rolling on vaccination and I think they will.
I have seen no sign, in much of Europe, of a big distribution effort being setup. There has been some stuff in Germany... but without a coordinated supply chain and delivery system....
I guess I was speaking more in hope than anything else. I bet they do surprise on the upside, though, from this point. There'll have been some eurohands banged on eurotables and some euroheads banged together.
All of which have, of course, no real impact, given health is not an EU competence. Why on earth this was done EU wide I'll never known.
Fear of division over vaccine supplies plus a power "push" (rather than grab) by Merkel
What she sees in von der Leyen, is very hard to understand. She has screwed up at least 2 cabinet posts in Germany. Which included mucking up procurement completely... and losing at lawfare with the supplying companies.
During a howling sub zero blizzard, our electricity went off at just after 11am. Cable completely snapped free of the wall and swinging wildly. Fixed by 3. Thanks to Northern Power. Don't know how much these guys are paid to be on our roof in a gale on a Sunday putting new cabling in, but they sure do earn it.
Great thread header. Thank you. Is that your first full blog since the heady days of the much missed Wardman Wire?
I did quite a few in between for Anna Raccoon. But apart form that, yes.
WW was always analytical with the aim of presenting a case, whereas my perception of AR and PB are that it is far more about throwing a stone into a pool to generate comments.
@MattW - thanks and good first header. I hope the EU gets rolling on vaccination and I think they will.
I have seen no sign, in much of Europe, of a big distribution effort being setup. There has been some stuff in Germany... but without a coordinated supply chain and delivery system....
I guess I was speaking more in hope than anything else. I bet they do surprise on the upside, though, from this point. There'll have been some eurohands banged on eurotables and some euroheads banged together.
All of which have, of course, no real impact, given health is not an EU competence. Why on earth this was done EU wide I'll never known.
Because the EU Commission - as is its habit - saw a chance to grab power, and simultaneously unite Europe - around a single date when every nation could start jabbing AND NOT BEFORE, making the EU look great. Merkel and Macron - as innate europhiles - acquiesced.
An insane idea but one that was almost inevitable given that the answer ‘more Europe’, despite often being a terrible idea (cf the euro) is woven into the DNA of everything the EU does - as Brexiteers have been pointing out for decades.
@MattW - thanks and good first header. I hope the EU gets rolling on vaccination and I think they will.
I have seen no sign, in much of Europe, of a big distribution effort being setup. There has been some stuff in Germany... but without a coordinated supply chain and delivery system....
I guess I was speaking more in hope than anything else. I bet they do surprise on the upside, though, from this point. There'll have been some eurohands banged on eurotables and some euroheads banged together.
All of which have, of course, no real impact, given health is not an EU competence. Why on earth this was done EU wide I'll never known.
Fear of division over vaccine supplies plus a power "push" (rather than grab) by Merkel
What she sees in von der Leyen, is very hard to understand. She has screwed up at least 2 cabinet posts in Germany. Which included mucking up procurement completely... and losing at lawfare with the supplying companies.
Would almost certainly have done better with nation state procurement; some nations would have probably over ordered and could have transferred to others in that event.
I could understand the EU pooling if they'd gone Dutch on improving production capacity. But they didnt....
@MattW - thanks and good first header. I hope the EU gets rolling on vaccination and I think they will.
I have seen no sign, in much of Europe, of a big distribution effort being setup. There has been some stuff in Germany... but without a coordinated supply chain and delivery system....
I guess I was speaking more in hope than anything else. I bet they do surprise on the upside, though, from this point. There'll have been some eurohands banged on eurotables and some euroheads banged together.
All of which have, of course, no real impact, given health is not an EU competence. Why on earth this was done EU wide I'll never known.
The thinking seems to have been: 'OK, we suck at actually keeping major members inside the bloc, so let's raise the morale of the rest by showing them how awesome we are at crisis management and logistics across the continent. What could go wrong?'
Excellent thread piece, Matt. Why you never done one before?
I agree with the main thrust of your argument. You shouldn't draw too many conclusions from the bare figures, especially as we don't know where it all ends yet. I do however think it is reasonable to pause over the current results and reflect that the UK's vaccination roll-out probably would almost certainly have gone less well had the country still been part of the EU.
This gives unreconstructed Europhiles like myself food for thought. My habit has been to mock Leavers over the absence of palpable benefits of leaving the EU. Now we appear to have a very tangible one.
Of course nobody could have foreseen this, but it would be dishonest of Remainers to deny these very real consequences. If it can be reasonably argued that they derive from the very nature of the EU, and therefore further benefits of leaving the EU are likely to accrue in due course, there will be a lot of humble pie to be eaten, not least on this site.
I might even have some myself.
That’s a fair argument, but it also need to incorporate the counter-factual of what the response might have been had the perpetually awkward and non communitaire UK remained part of the EU. I cannot see that we’d happily have acquiesced to the current EU scheme - and it’s quite conceivable we’d still have gone our own way.
We might even have persuaded the EU to have been more proactive.
I agree with all of this. The takeaway for me, as I said yesterday, is that the EU is fantastic at running an extremely effective free trade area. It’s trying to be a federal government in waiting though and is pants at that. It was less the vaccine cock up, any individual government could screw that up, as the Hungary situation. Orban is a dictator, Hungary is at best a semi-democracy, and the EU can/will do nothing while Poland is still there to veto any Art 7 proceedings. And visa versa. So it is an extremely less effective guarantor of democratic values on the Continent than I believed it to have been.
Interesting point, this. The EU as bulwark against political extremism is certainly in my locker as one of its many positives. And, yes, this argument falls if member states can be extreme and face no sanctions.
In which case, get rid of the political structures, turn the EU into a single market and free trade zone, and no more, and the UK can rejoin. Sorted
Or it shows the structures are not strictures and we ran away from a fictional bogeyman.
Cases have levelled off. You have to look at this at both the R figure (which is the proportional fall/growth) and the absolute numbers.
England numbers are still cratering but in cases per head of population there is still far more happening in England. In the last 7 days Scotland has recorded 107 cases per 100,000 whilst England has had 167 per 100,000 (The ONS estimates are England 1 in 80 people, Scotland 1 in 150).
My fear is that once England gets down to current Scotland level of infections it too will level off. That the level of restrictions we have can get down to a steady state there but not lower.
It is why I think Scottish School opening on the 22nd of Feb is a busted flush. Opening the schools will push R higher and R is currently 1 in Scotland. You can't take an action that puts R above 1, that's a slow motion suicide note.
EDIT: I see that Kent is at 105 per 100k, the same level as Scotland. A good candidate to see if it "Does a Scotland" and levels off.
I'd take a guess at the Kent variant becoming dominant which makes existing measures less effective, you can see this in all of the places that didn't originally have big outbreaks of it.
Does look something like that. Hopefully it’s not the SA variant...
Scottish cases...
What's worrying with the Scottish data is the high positivity rate and that's been the case for a few weeks now. The positivity rate in England is back under 2%, I'd like to see it back under 1%, but the fall in the Scottish positivity rate has stalled. That's worrying.
Any idea why that is? Is there not as much testing and tracing going on?
I think the EU will be probably 10-12 weeks behind the UK in getting rid of CV19. A serious deficit, to be sure, and I very much doubt they'll learn any lessons from it. But also not that long in the general scale of things.
Will they necessarily be that quick? It's not simply a matter of getting sufficient quantities of vaccines delivered, do all of the states necessarily have adequate infrastructure in place to deliver a whole population vaccination campaign at speed?
We have been told more than once that the relatively centralized and integrated nature of the NHS is ideally suited to this sort of task, but our model of healthcare is not typical.
EDIT: and that's without getting into the subject of hesitancy, which is known to be a serious problem in France but is also quite significant in Germany, for example.
I don't know. I think both EU and UK have a strong "Not Invented Here" syndrome at present.
That has much interesting information within. They are still struggling with this like sequencing, and distribution is clearly not as regular across countries as would be ideal.
There are perhaps some problems with having an extra tier of governance at EU level, but there may also be benefits. Time will tell.
@MattW - thanks and good first header. I hope the EU gets rolling on vaccination and I think they will.
I have seen no sign, in much of Europe, of a big distribution effort being setup. There has been some stuff in Germany... but without a coordinated supply chain and delivery system....
I guess I was speaking more in hope than anything else. I bet they do surprise on the upside, though, from this point. There'll have been some eurohands banged on eurotables and some euroheads banged together.
All of which have, of course, no real impact, given health is not an EU competence. Why on earth this was done EU wide I'll never known.
Fear of division over vaccine supplies plus a power "push" (rather than grab) by Merkel
What she sees in von der Leyen, is very hard to understand. She has screwed up at least 2 cabinet posts in Germany. Which included mucking up procurement completely... and losing at lawfare with the supplying companies.
Would almost certainly have done better with nation state procurement; some nations would have probably over ordered and could have transferred to others in that event.
I could understand the EU pooling if they'd gone Dutch on improving production capacity. But they didnt....
They were so afraid of the tragedy of the commons that they ran headlong into the tragedy of the communes...
On the EU, this is a perceptive analysis of its problems from a journalist who is generally seen as pro-EU and critical of Brexit. For his pains he has had loads of abuse from Remainers
As an FYI, there’s been a major drop in turnout for today’s Catalan regional election. That just about guarantees a sizeable victory for the separatist parties as their vote is always much more organised and motivated.
Yup - about 12% down - that was my reading of the interactive map earlier which showed the rural turnout holding up quite well compared to the coastal cities.
Yep - it’s actually down over 15% in parts of Barcelona, Tarragona, L’Hospitalet and they are seeing the biggest falls. I guess it’s because a new independence push is now off the cards, so with covid and the weather the non-nationalist vote doesn’t feel the need to come out. It’s not existential this time.
Klopp is EVS from 50/1 yesterday to be the next Prem manager to leave his job
He wouldn't run away from Liverpool like he ran away from Dortmund, would he?
His Mum just passed away and he couldn't go to the funeral, that must be tough. The rumour I heard was he was having time off to get over that, but I don't trust it really.
I was thinking of backing Mourinho as next one to go to be honest, so this has just stopped me doing that. Changing the formation to include more attacking players but still losing, and letting in 8 goals in 2 games, upsetting Alli and Bale, the ingredients are there. I can't imagine Tottenham fans are happy with the football they play under him, they have a reputation as a flair club, and if they aren't really progressing success wise either what's the point?
I'll tell you who won't be going. The Special One. David Moyes. He has got it rocking at West Ham. Pity no fans at Upton Park to see it. But over at your club - and mine sort of - it's not looking so great. The Arse are struggling and Arteta must be feeling under pressure. Least I hope he is. Bring back Wenger? It's not the worst idea in the world.
On the contrary, Arteta has got us playing really well since Christmas. For the first time in years I feel like we are legitimately looking like a good side. Even in defeat at Wolves and Villa we played some lovely stuff.
Saka is a superstar, ESR pretty damn good too.
Moyes has done a great job, he was very harshly sacked last time. Soucek was a fantastic signing
Cases have levelled off. You have to look at this at both the R figure (which is the proportional fall/growth) and the absolute numbers.
England numbers are still cratering but in cases per head of population there is still far more happening in England. In the last 7 days Scotland has recorded 107 cases per 100,000 whilst England has had 167 per 100,000 (The ONS estimates are England 1 in 80 people, Scotland 1 in 150).
My fear is that once England gets down to current Scotland level of infections it too will level off. That the level of restrictions we have can get down to a steady state there but not lower.
It is why I think Scottish School opening on the 22nd of Feb is a busted flush. Opening the schools will push R higher and R is currently 1 in Scotland. You can't take an action that puts R above 1, that's a slow motion suicide note.
Hospital Admissions R is 0.91 or so in Scotland, I think. Other UK R values vary a little bit from that... But, I would say that any lifting of the restrictions, anywhere in the UK would put R above 1.
Cases have levelled off. You have to look at this at both the R figure (which is the proportional fall/growth) and the absolute numbers.
England numbers are still cratering but in cases per head of population there is still far more happening in England. In the last 7 days Scotland has recorded 107 cases per 100,000 whilst England has had 167 per 100,000 (The ONS estimates are England 1 in 80 people, Scotland 1 in 150).
My fear is that once England gets down to current Scotland level of infections it too will level off. That the level of restrictions we have can get down to a steady state there but not lower.
It is why I think Scottish School opening on the 22nd of Feb is a busted flush. Opening the schools will push R higher and R is currently 1 in Scotland. You can't take an action that puts R above 1, that's a slow motion suicide note.
EDIT: I see that Kent is at 105 per 100k, the same level as Scotland. A good candidate to see if it "Does a Scotland" and levels off.
Hmm, I think it's more likely to be the Kent variant becoming dominant in an area where it wasn't before, that's a time limited effect though so the downwards trend should pick up as we continue to vaccinate everyone.
In a closed system NPIs will have a constant R so as long as people aren't breaking the rules I don't see why the R will have trended to 1 other than having to accommodate a more transmissive variant into the overall figures.
Does the PB brains trust have any comment on this rather startling conclusion from a bean counter at JP Morgan who thinks it’ll all be over by the end of April -
So the "butcher's bill" for the delays in vaccination in the EU is going to be somewhere between 150 and 200k EU citizens. Wow.
What is the counterfactual though? We did well in contracting to get vaccines early. Had the EU done the same would we have had less? Would we not have made our 15m target? Or would there simply be more vaccine being manufactured right now on our part of the planet? My guess is a bit of both.
There would have been more manufacturing.
A little remarked upon fact is that the UK spent more on developing vaccines, priming manufacturing etc than the entire EU combined. The UK spent more per capita than the USA and about 7x more per capita than the EU and the output now scales almost perfectly to the per capita spending of all the countries concerned.
I think that more ramping up of new factories in parallel could have been achieved.
There are a couple of comments I'd add to this piece:
1. You would expect older societies to do worse than younger ones. Simply lots of old people, means lots of people who can potentially die.
2. You need to look on a "deaths per 100k", or even an excess deaths metric. Otherwise you're just measuring different population sizes.
On vaccine availability, I'd note that the US (for example) is moving to a strategy of pretty much exclusive use of Pfizer and Modern. That means there are a lot of existing production of Novavax, AZ and J&J that will be available to the highest bidder. For that reason, I'd be very surprised if the EU had only received 300m doses by end June.
I think the EU will be probably 10-12 weeks behind the UK in getting rid of CV19. A serious deficit, to be sure, and I very much doubt they'll learn any lessons from it. But also not that long in the general scale of things.
Feels like an eternity if you are in a vulnerable group.
That is very true.
And it will feel like an eternity.
But I really can't emphasise enough how much the analysis above misses the tsunami of vaccine availability there will be.
Pfizer - just four weeks ago - said they would deliver 1.2 billion doses in 2021. They now say they can deliver 2 billion.
The Serum Institute of India is going to produce a further 2 billion doses of AstraZeneca and Novavax.
Moderna only ever sold about 60% of its billion doses of capacity for 2021, planning on selling additional doses to the highest bidder. (And in LA, the price of a pair of private Moderna jabs has fallen from $10,000 to a little bit less than $5,000 in the last three weeks - although it's worth noting there's a bit of a mark up un there.)
Novavax, CureVac, Valneva, Johnson & Johnson, etc., are all ramping up production.
There has also been massive over-ordering. Not just in the UK, but in the US as well. There is talk in the US of not approving the (90% effective) Novavax vaccine at all, as it simply isn't as efficacious as Moderna and Pfizer.
I suspect you will see governments in the EU making direct orders of vaccines, particularly of those where they are not bound by EU solidarity (i.e. buying vaccines from manufacturers where the EU didn't order). I also suspect you will see the EU announce increased orders, just as the US has announced bigger orders of Pfizer and Moderna.
It's worth remembering the UK only really started vaccinating people eight weeks ago, and look how far we've gone. Israel has done even better and has got to 60 doses per 100 people in the same time.
Once vaccine availability is not the problem (and that will happen much faster than people think), then arms will get jabbed.
Here's my proposition.
CV19 is considered 'practically' eliminated when cases per 100k fall to below 5 and stay there.
I think Israel will be there in early April. I think the UK will be there at the end of April. And I think the EU will be there in early to mid-July. (Now, there will EU countries full of vaccine refuseniks - like France - who might do worse, and there will be those who will do better.)
That's a 10 week or so gap between the UK and the EU. Happy to have some small bets with PBers if you like.
I'd take a guess at the Kent variant becoming dominant which makes existing measures less effective, you can see this in all of the places that didn't originally have big outbreaks of it.
On the other hand, I think it had been reported to make up half of cases at the end of December already, and everyone else has much the same measures.
The existing measures are proving pretty effective in, well, Kent itself.
Hasn’t basically everyone in Kent now had it?
There is that possibility. I (fingers crossed) have not. But if you look at the bottom of Malmesbury’s R charts then, leaving aside the Orkneys and Shetlands, there is a remarkable preponderance of Kent, East Sussex, and Surrey districts. In truth I see no other explanation than some degree of population immunity kicking in.
Clearly immunity has to play a role, but another part of it could be that lockdown compliance is higher where it's been really bad recently, as lots of people have had serious cases among friends and family.
As an FYI, there’s been a major drop in turnout for today’s Catalan regional election. That just about guarantees a sizeable victory for the separatist parties as their vote is always much more organised and motivated.
Yup - about 12% down - that was my reading of the interactive map earlier which showed the rural turnout holding up quite well compared to the coastal cities.
Yep - it’s actually down over 15% in parts of Barcelona, Tarragona, L’Hospitalet and they are seeing the biggest falls. I guess it’s because a new independence push is now off the cards, so with covid and the weather the non-nationalist vote doesn’t feel the need to come out. It’s not existential this time.
RTVE 18.00 - numbers overall down 23%!
Elections in a time of covid are not necessarily a great idea! That said, I’m not sure if the numbers include postal votes. Has there been any mention of that?
Does the PB brains trust have any comment on this rather startling conclusion from a bean counter at JP Morgan who thinks it’ll all be over by the end of April -
Reported cases in Scotland this week almost the same as last week: 6024 vs 6107.
I think that means the reopening of early school years Monday week will be postponed.
Two theories to choose from, not necessarily exclusive: - The virus has mostly died out among people who can and do stay home, but is circulating among those who can't or won't. - The mere mention of some lockdown easing together with the vaccine success has resulted in reduced lockdown compliance.
Looking against specimen date, it's still declining. Ignoring the most recent couple of days (incomplete), the 7-day total to the 10th was 5,764 while the 7-day total to the 3rd was 6,743 (with a uniform decline between those numbers)
Excellent thread piece, Matt. Why you never done one before?
I agree with the main thrust of your argument. You shouldn't draw too many conclusions from the bare figures, especially as we don't know where it all ends yet. I do however think it is reasonable to pause over the current results and reflect that the UK's vaccination roll-out probably would almost certainly have gone less well had the country still been part of the EU.
This gives unreconstructed Europhiles like myself food for thought. My habit has been to mock Leavers over the absence of palpable benefits of leaving the EU. Now we appear to have a very tangible one.
Of course nobody could have foreseen this, but it would be dishonest of Remainers to deny these very real consequences. If it can be reasonably argued that they derive from the very nature of the EU, and therefore further benefits of leaving the EU are likely to accrue in due course, there will be a lot of humble pie to be eaten, not least on this site.
I might even have some myself.
That’s a fair argument, but it also need to incorporate the counter-factual of what the response might have been had the perpetually awkward and non communitaire UK remained part of the EU. I cannot see that we’d happily have acquiesced to the current EU scheme - and it’s quite conceivable we’d still have gone our own way.
We might even have persuaded the EU to have been more proactive.
I agree with all of this. The takeaway for me, as I said yesterday, is that the EU is fantastic at running an extremely effective free trade area. It’s trying to be a federal government in waiting though and is pants at that. It was less the vaccine cock up, any individual government could screw that up, as the Hungary situation. Orban is a dictator, Hungary is at best a semi-democracy, and the EU can/will do nothing while Poland is still there to veto any Art 7 proceedings. And visa versa. So it is an extremely less effective guarantor of democratic values on the Continent than I believed it to have been.
Interesting point, this. The EU as bulwark against political extremism is certainly in my locker as one of its many positives. And, yes, this argument falls if member states can be extreme and face no sanctions.
In which case, get rid of the political structures, turn the EU into a single market and free trade zone, and no more, and the UK can rejoin. Sorted
Or it shows the structures are not strictures and we ran away from a fictional bogeyman.
No. It actually reinforces something that sceptics have long said: the strictures restict nations like the United Kingdom that play by the rules (or indeed gold plate them) but do nothing against nations that flout and disregard the rules.
The lack of action against Hungary and Poland is nothing new. France has long ignored the rules whenever they don't suit her.
Since the UK is a nation that plays by the rules, see the histrionics when it was suggested we would not, being in an institution that relies on self restrain constrains us more than others.
On the EU, this is a perceptive analysis of its problems from a journalist who is generally seen as pro-EU and critical of Brexit. For his pains he has had loads of abuse from Remainers
I'd take a guess at the Kent variant becoming dominant which makes existing measures less effective, you can see this in all of the places that didn't originally have big outbreaks of it.
On the other hand, I think it had been reported to make up half of cases at the end of December already, and everyone else has much the same measures.
The existing measures are proving pretty effective in, well, Kent itself.
Hasn’t basically everyone in Kent now had it?
There is that possibility. I (fingers crossed) have not. But if you look at the bottom of Malmesbury’s R charts then, leaving aside the Orkneys and Shetlands, there is a remarkable preponderance of Kent, East Sussex, and Surrey districts. In truth I see no other explanation than some degree of population immunity kicking in.
Clearly immunity has to play a role, but another part of it could be that lockdown compliance is higher where it's been really bad recently, as lots of people have had serious cases among friends and family.
I can only speak from my own observations but that doesn’t seem to be the case round here in East Kent.
@MattW - thanks and good first header. I hope the EU gets rolling on vaccination and I think they will.
I have seen no sign, in much of Europe, of a big distribution effort being setup. There has been some stuff in Germany... but without a coordinated supply chain and delivery system....
I guess I was speaking more in hope than anything else. I bet they do surprise on the upside, though, from this point. There'll have been some eurohands banged on eurotables and some euroheads banged together.
All of which have, of course, no real impact, given health is not an EU competence. Why on earth this was done EU wide I'll never known.
To use co-ordinated needs and buying power for a better deal and a more efficient and equitable overall result than would arise from the chaos of 27 countries ad hoc doing their own thing. No problem with the concept. It makes perfect sense. It was the execution and the people doing the executing. The crisis required a deviation from the usual MO of the EC. It required some commercial nous and financial risk taking rather than a traditional arms length value-for-money approach. They were unable to work like this - it's not how they roll or are meant to roll with OPM - and the production shortfalls exposed them. Horses for courses and this was a jumper running on the Lingfield AW flat track.
Oh dear. More anti-vax nonsense, this time in the NHS.
Significant disparities in vaccine uptake among healthcare workers in England may undermine the rollout and its ability to bring the coronavirus pandemic under control, with far lower rates among black and south Asian staff, workers under 30, and those living in the most deprived areas, a scientific adviser to the government has said.
Doctors at the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS trust, which employs one of the largest and most diverse healthcare workforces in the country, raised the issue on Sunday after releasing the first public data on vaccination rates among UK healthcare workers.
Reading the piece, the disparities in terms of take-up are astonishing. Scandalous, in fact. As with the care homes, if the staff won't get vaccinated they jeopardise the welfare of the patients. And there's certainly no point in the Government putting out the kind of guilt tripping adverts, like the one that's just been playing on the TV as I've been typing, entreating the public to protect the NHS if large chunks of the NHS workforce won't bloody well protect themselves.
I mean, is medicine in this country to be governed by science, or by antique prejudices and bullshit shared on anti-social media? Not good enough.
Excellent thread piece, Matt. Why you never done one before?
I agree with the main thrust of your argument. You shouldn't draw too many conclusions from the bare figures, especially as we don't know where it all ends yet. I do however think it is reasonable to pause over the current results and reflect that the UK's vaccination roll-out probably would almost certainly have gone less well had the country still been part of the EU.
This gives unreconstructed Europhiles like myself food for thought. My habit has been to mock Leavers over the absence of palpable benefits of leaving the EU. Now we appear to have a very tangible one.
Of course nobody could have foreseen this, but it would be dishonest of Remainers to deny these very real consequences. If it can be reasonably argued that they derive from the very nature of the EU, and therefore further benefits of leaving the EU are likely to accrue in due course, there will be a lot of humble pie to be eaten, not least on this site.
I might even have some myself.
That’s a fair argument, but it also need to incorporate the counter-factual of what the response might have been had the perpetually awkward and non communitaire UK remained part of the EU. I cannot see that we’d happily have acquiesced to the current EU scheme - and it’s quite conceivable we’d still have gone our own way.
We might even have persuaded the EU to have been more proactive.
I agree with all of this. The takeaway for me, as I said yesterday, is that the EU is fantastic at running an extremely effective free trade area. It’s trying to be a federal government in waiting though and is pants at that. It was less the vaccine cock up, any individual government could screw that up, as the Hungary situation. Orban is a dictator, Hungary is at best a semi-democracy, and the EU can/will do nothing while Poland is still there to veto any Art 7 proceedings. And visa versa. So it is an extremely less effective guarantor of democratic values on the Continent than I believed it to have been.
Interesting point, this. The EU as bulwark against political extremism is certainly in my locker as one of its many positives. And, yes, this argument falls if member states can be extreme and face no sanctions.
In which case, get rid of the political structures, turn the EU into a single market and free trade zone, and no more, and the UK can rejoin. Sorted
Or it shows the structures are not strictures and we ran away from a fictional bogeyman.
No. It actually reinforces something that sceptics have long said: the strictures restict nations like the United Kingdom that play by the rules (or indeed gold plate them) but do nothing against nations that flout and disregard the rules.
The lack of action against Hungary and Poland is nothing new. France has long ignored the rules whenever they don't suit her.
Since the UK is a nation that plays by the rules, see the histrionics when it was suggested we would not, being in an institution that relies on self restrain constrains us more than others.
As a Remainer, I long advocated a French attitude towards EU rules - a sensible safety valve.
The problem was that a lot of people like using "The EU" as their method of pushing agendas. Rather like the misuse of Health and Safety by morons*.
*Who should be blindfolded. And left to wander in buildings full of live, exposed wires and unguarded, empty elevator shafts....
And yet he is going to win by a mile, almost certainly on the first count. Doesn't say much for our political class, does it?
The Tories can no longer compete in London, post Brexit. London is dead then for a generation, maybe forever.
That leaves the Lib Dems. I’ve seen one very short clip of their candidate where she appears to be about 13 years old.
The rule for London so far is don’t bother competing unless you are a v big beast.
Luisa Porritt is actually 33. She was elected as a councillor in Camden in 2018 and became an MEP in 2019. She has worked in communications and lectures in economic history.
There are a couple of comments I'd add to this piece:
1. You would expect older societies to do worse than younger ones. Simply lots of old people, means lots of people who can potentially die.
2. You need to look on a "deaths per 100k", or even an excess deaths metric. Otherwise you're just measuring different population sizes.
On vaccine availability, I'd note that the US (for example) is moving to a strategy of pretty much exclusive use of Pfizer and Modern. That means there are a lot of existing production of Novavax, AZ and J&J that will be available to the highest bidder. For that reason, I'd be very surprised if the EU had only received 300m doses by end June.
I think the EU will be probably 10-12 weeks behind the UK in getting rid of CV19. A serious deficit, to be sure, and I very much doubt they'll learn any lessons from it. But also not that long in the general scale of things.
Feels like an eternity if you are in a vulnerable group.
That is very true.
And it will feel like an eternity.
But I really can't emphasise enough how much the analysis above misses the tsunami of vaccine availability there will be.
Pfizer - just four weeks ago - said they would deliver 1.2 billion doses in 2021. They now say they can deliver 2 billion.
The Serum Institute of India is going to produce a further 2 billion doses of AstraZeneca and Novavax.
Moderna only ever sold about 60% of its billion doses of capacity for 2021, planning on selling additional doses to the highest bidder. (And in LA, the price of a pair of private Moderna jabs has fallen from $10,000 to a little bit less than $5,000 in the last three weeks - although it's worth noting there's a bit of a mark up un there.)
Novavax, CureVac, Valneva, Johnson & Johnson, etc., are all ramping up production.
There has also been massive over-ordering. Not just in the UK, but in the US as well. There is talk in the US of not approving the (90% effective) Novavax vaccine at all, as it simply isn't as efficacious as Moderna and Pfizer.
I suspect you will see governments in the EU making direct orders of vaccines, particularly of those where they are not bound by EU solidarity (i.e. buying vaccines from manufacturers where the EU didn't order). I also suspect you will see the EU announce increased orders, just as the US has announced bigger orders of Pfizer and Moderna.
It's worth remembering the UK only really started vaccinating people eight weeks ago, and look how far we've gone. Israel has done even better and has got to 60 doses per 100 people in the same time.
Once vaccine availability is not the problem (and that will happen much faster than people think), then arms will get jabbed.
Here's my proposition.
CV19 is considered 'practically' eliminated when cases per 100k fall to below 5 and stay there.
I think Israel will be there in early April. I think the UK will be there at the end of April. And I think the EU will be there in early to mid-July. (Now, there will EU countries full of vaccine refuseniks - like France - who might do worse, and there will be those who will do better.)
That's a 10 week or so gap between the UK and the EU. Happy to have some small bets with PBers if you like.
Well, you’re in agreement with the JP Morgan chap then.
@MattW - thanks and good first header. I hope the EU gets rolling on vaccination and I think they will.
I have seen no sign, in much of Europe, of a big distribution effort being setup. There has been some stuff in Germany... but without a coordinated supply chain and delivery system....
I guess I was speaking more in hope than anything else. I bet they do surprise on the upside, though, from this point. There'll have been some eurohands banged on eurotables and some euroheads banged together.
All of which have, of course, no real impact, given health is not an EU competence. Why on earth this was done EU wide I'll never known.
To use co-ordinated needs and buying power for a better deal and a more efficient and equitable overall result than would arise from the chaos of 27 countries ad hoc doing their own thing. No problem with the concept. It makes perfect sense. It was the execution and the people doing the executing. The crisis required a deviation from the usual MO of the EC. It required some commercial nous and financial risk taking rather than a traditional arms length value-for-money approach. They were unable to work like this - it's not how they roll or are meant to roll with OPM - and the production shortfalls exposed them. Horses for courses and this was a jumper running on the Lingfield AW flat track.
It makes no sense whatsoever. This isn't a Turkish bazaar needing a "better deal" nor is there a fixed amount of doses available since we were starting from zero and scaling up manufacturing. "Efficiency" isn't needed, scale and redundancy is.
Getting a better deal was the wrong question and wrong priority. Getting as many as possible as fast as possible should have been the priority.
Garbage In, Garbage Out. They started with the wrong priorities so the output was inevitable.
On the EU, this is a perceptive analysis of its problems from a journalist who is generally seen as pro-EU and critical of Brexit. For his pains he has had loads of abuse from Remainers
Excellent thread piece, Matt. Why you never done one before?
I agree with the main thrust of your argument. You shouldn't draw too many conclusions from the bare figures, especially as we don't know where it all ends yet. I do however think it is reasonable to pause over the current results and reflect that the UK's vaccination roll-out probably would almost certainly have gone less well had the country still been part of the EU.
This gives unreconstructed Europhiles like myself food for thought. My habit has been to mock Leavers over the absence of palpable benefits of leaving the EU. Now we appear to have a very tangible one.
Of course nobody could have foreseen this, but it would be dishonest of Remainers to deny these very real consequences. If it can be reasonably argued that they derive from the very nature of the EU, and therefore further benefits of leaving the EU are likely to accrue in due course, there will be a lot of humble pie to be eaten, not least on this site.
I might even have some myself.
That’s a fair argument, but it also need to incorporate the counter-factual of what the response might have been had the perpetually awkward and non communitaire UK remained part of the EU. I cannot see that we’d happily have acquiesced to the current EU scheme - and it’s quite conceivable we’d still have gone our own way.
We might even have persuaded the EU to have been more proactive.
I don't think that the EU scheme would have changed significantly. Ultimately the issue with it is that they were spending EU money and that means using it to invest in manufacturing is impossible without interminable arguments about which countries/companies receive the subsidies. It's why the EU took the approach it did, to avoid three day summits and one minute to midnight decisions as is usually the case with spending money.
Our whole approach would have been simply impossible within the confines of the EU and our scheme would have been pre-empted with the commission ruling that these deals are subject to state aid rules and not possible as they are reliant on huge subsidies for UK industry and it has given the UK a long term leg up on the rest of the EU for vaccine development and manufacturing for the next decade.
There is an exception to state aid rules in response to natural disasters. We could have ignored them if we so chose.
Doesn't the commission still need to give permission for this, I remember that Denmark and other EU countries were finding themselves up against the slowness of commission decision making early on for domestic economic support packages which had huge elements of state aid.
In theory, It’s rarely stopped France (for example) preempting its decisions, and in the context of a worldwide pandemic which has cost tens of trillions, the likelihood of the commission pursuing action would have been negligible. And would have caused a crisis all of its own had they done so. UvdL would have been more of a hissing and a byword than she is now.
As I said, our leaving has, IMO, changed the EU for the worse.
Excellent thread piece, Matt. Why you never done one before?
I agree with the main thrust of your argument. You shouldn't draw too many conclusions from the bare figures, especially as we don't know where it all ends yet. I do however think it is reasonable to pause over the current results and reflect that the UK's vaccination roll-out probably would almost certainly have gone less well had the country still been part of the EU.
This gives unreconstructed Europhiles like myself food for thought. My habit has been to mock Leavers over the absence of palpable benefits of leaving the EU. Now we appear to have a very tangible one.
Of course nobody could have foreseen this, but it would be dishonest of Remainers to deny these very real consequences. If it can be reasonably argued that they derive from the very nature of the EU, and therefore further benefits of leaving the EU are likely to accrue in due course, there will be a lot of humble pie to be eaten, not least on this site.
I might even have some myself.
That’s a fair argument, but it also need to incorporate the counter-factual of what the response might have been had the perpetually awkward and non communitaire UK remained part of the EU. I cannot see that we’d happily have acquiesced to the current EU scheme - and it’s quite conceivable we’d still have gone our own way.
We might even have persuaded the EU to have been more proactive.
I agree with all of this. The takeaway for me, as I said yesterday, is that the EU is fantastic at running an extremely effective free trade area. It’s trying to be a federal government in waiting though and is pants at that. It was less the vaccine cock up, any individual government could screw that up, as the Hungary situation. Orban is a dictator, Hungary is at best a semi-democracy, and the EU can/will do nothing while Poland is still there to veto any Art 7 proceedings. And visa versa. So it is an extremely less effective guarantor of democratic values on the Continent than I believed it to have been.
Interesting point, this. The EU as bulwark against political extremism is certainly in my locker as one of its many positives. And, yes, this argument falls if member states can be extreme and face no sanctions.
In which case, get rid of the political structures, turn the EU into a single market and free trade zone, and no more, and the UK can rejoin. Sorted
Or it shows the structures are not strictures and we ran away from a fictional bogeyman.
No. It actually reinforces something that sceptics have long said: the strictures restict nations like the United Kingdom that play by the rules (or indeed gold plate them) but do nothing against nations that flout and disregard the rules.
The lack of action against Hungary and Poland is nothing new. France has long ignored the rules whenever they don't suit her.
Since the UK is a nation that plays by the rules, see the histrionics when it was suggested we would not, being in an institution that relies on self restrain constrains us more than others.
I feel a sense of occasion here - because this is a big big moment.
On the EU, this is a perceptive analysis of its problems from a journalist who is generally seen as pro-EU and critical of Brexit. For his pains he has had loads of abuse from Remainers
As an aside, I'm very glad that the EU has no truck whatsoever with the evils of flag nationalism. UvdL must just have been touring a flag factory that day, or something.
Oh dear. More anti-vax nonsense, this time in the NHS.
Significant disparities in vaccine uptake among healthcare workers in England may undermine the rollout and its ability to bring the coronavirus pandemic under control, with far lower rates among black and south Asian staff, workers under 30, and those living in the most deprived areas, a scientific adviser to the government has said.
Doctors at the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS trust, which employs one of the largest and most diverse healthcare workforces in the country, raised the issue on Sunday after releasing the first public data on vaccination rates among UK healthcare workers.
Reading the piece, the disparities in terms of take-up are astonishing. Scandalous, in fact. As with the care homes, if the staff won't get vaccinated they jeopardise the welfare of the patients. And there's certainly no point in the Government putting out the kind of guilt tripping adverts, like the one that's just been playing on the TV as I've been typing, entreating the public to protect the NHS if large chunks of the NHS workforce won't bloody well protect themselves.
I mean, is medicine in this country to be governed by science, or by antique prejudices and bullshit shared on anti-social media? Not good enough.
I sense an interesting moment in the so called culture war coming...
"Then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel Is just the freight train coming your way"
On the EU, this is a perceptive analysis of its problems from a journalist who is generally seen as pro-EU and critical of Brexit. For his pains he has had loads of abuse from Remainers
As an aside, I'm very glad that the EU has no truck whatsoever with the evils of flag nationalism. UvdL must just have been touring a flag factory that day, or something.
She’s managed to get two EU flags JUST ON HER MASK
Klopp is EVS from 50/1 yesterday to be the next Prem manager to leave his job
He wouldn't run away from Liverpool like he ran away from Dortmund, would he?
His Mum just passed away and he couldn't go to the funeral, that must be tough. The rumour I heard was he was having time off to get over that, but I don't trust it really.
I was thinking of backing Mourinho as next one to go to be honest, so this has just stopped me doing that. Changing the formation to include more attacking players but still losing, and letting in 8 goals in 2 games, upsetting Alli and Bale, the ingredients are there. I can't imagine Tottenham fans are happy with the football they play under him, they have a reputation as a flair club, and if they aren't really progressing success wise either what's the point?
I'll tell you who won't be going. The Special One. David Moyes. He has got it rocking at West Ham. Pity no fans at Upton Park to see it. But over at your club - and mine sort of - it's not looking so great. The Arse are struggling and Arteta must be feeling under pressure. Least I hope he is. Bring back Wenger? It's not the worst idea in the world.
On the contrary, Arteta has got us playing really well since Christmas. For the first time in years I feel like we are legitimately looking like a good side. Even in defeat at Wolves and Villa we played some lovely stuff.
Saka is a superstar, ESR pretty damn good too.
Moyes has done a great job, he was very harshly sacked last time. Soucek was a fantastic signing
"Even in defeat at Wolves and Villa" ... these words have rather a bleak feel to me.
But, ok, I defer. I'm not watching till the fans are back.
Klopp is EVS from 50/1 yesterday to be the next Prem manager to leave his job
He wouldn't run away from Liverpool like he ran away from Dortmund, would he?
His Mum just passed away and he couldn't go to the funeral, that must be tough. The rumour I heard was he was having time off to get over that, but I don't trust it really.
I was thinking of backing Mourinho as next one to go to be honest, so this has just stopped me doing that. Changing the formation to include more attacking players but still losing, and letting in 8 goals in 2 games, upsetting Alli and Bale, the ingredients are there. I can't imagine Tottenham fans are happy with the football they play under him, they have a reputation as a flair club, and if they aren't really progressing success wise either what's the point?
I'll tell you who won't be going. The Special One. David Moyes. He has got it rocking at West Ham. Pity no fans at Upton Park to see it. But over at your club - and mine sort of - it's not looking so great. The Arse are struggling and Arteta must be feeling under pressure. Least I hope he is. Bring back Wenger? It's not the worst idea in the world.
On the contrary, Arteta has got us playing really well since Christmas. For the first time in years I feel like we are legitimately looking like a good side. Even in defeat at Wolves and Villa we played some lovely stuff.
Saka is a superstar, ESR pretty damn good too.
Moyes has done a great job, he was very harshly sacked last time. Soucek was a fantastic signing
"Even in defeat at Wolves and Villa" ... these words have rather a bleak feel to me.
But, ok, I defer. I'm not watching till the fans are back.
We only lost at Wolves due to a red card. We’ve still got a long way to go to start challenging for the top four again, but there’s definitely something to work with.
There are a couple of comments I'd add to this piece:
1. You would expect older societies to do worse than younger ones. Simply lots of old people, means lots of people who can potentially die.
2. You need to look on a "deaths per 100k", or even an excess deaths metric. Otherwise you're just measuring different population sizes.
On vaccine availability, I'd note that the US (for example) is moving to a strategy of pretty much exclusive use of Pfizer and Modern. That means there are a lot of existing production of Novavax, AZ and J&J that will be available to the highest bidder. For that reason, I'd be very surprised if the EU had only received 300m doses by end June.
I think the EU will be probably 10-12 weeks behind the UK in getting rid of CV19. A serious deficit, to be sure, and I very much doubt they'll learn any lessons from it. But also not that long in the general scale of things.
Feels like an eternity if you are in a vulnerable group.
That is very true.
And it will feel like an eternity.
But I really can't emphasise enough how much the analysis above misses the tsunami of vaccine availability there will be.
Pfizer - just four weeks ago - said they would deliver 1.2 billion doses in 2021. They now say they can deliver 2 billion.
The Serum Institute of India is going to produce a further 2 billion doses of AstraZeneca and Novavax.
Moderna only ever sold about 60% of its billion doses of capacity for 2021, planning on selling additional doses to the highest bidder. (And in LA, the price of a pair of private Moderna jabs has fallen from $10,000 to a little bit less than $5,000 in the last three weeks - although it's worth noting there's a bit of a mark up un there.)
Novavax, CureVac, Valneva, Johnson & Johnson, etc., are all ramping up production.
There has also been massive over-ordering. Not just in the UK, but in the US as well. There is talk in the US of not approving the (90% effective) Novavax vaccine at all, as it simply isn't as efficacious as Moderna and Pfizer.
I suspect you will see governments in the EU making direct orders of vaccines, particularly of those where they are not bound by EU solidarity (i.e. buying vaccines from manufacturers where the EU didn't order). I also suspect you will see the EU announce increased orders, just as the US has announced bigger orders of Pfizer and Moderna.
It's worth remembering the UK only really started vaccinating people eight weeks ago, and look how far we've gone. Israel has done even better and has got to 60 doses per 100 people in the same time.
Once vaccine availability is not the problem (and that will happen much faster than people think), then arms will get jabbed.
Here's my proposition.
CV19 is considered 'practically' eliminated when cases per 100k fall to below 5 and stay there.
I think Israel will be there in early April. I think the UK will be there at the end of April. And I think the EU will be there in early to mid-July. (Now, there will EU countries full of vaccine refuseniks - like France - who might do worse, and there will be those who will do better.)
That's a 10 week or so gap between the UK and the EU. Happy to have some small bets with PBers if you like.
Well, you’re in agreement with the JP Morgan chap then.
One notion I had in my head before Christmas was that lockdown should release when case incidence was below 20-50 per 100k - on the scale where the country is currently averaged at 200 (?) .
Which was one of the thresholds we originally debated as a switch level between the original tiers 1 and 2, and then tier 2 turned out not to cause much reduction iirc, under conditions which existed then.
We then unlocked early and at a higher level.
Perhaps if we had waited until a lower incidence level that gives more reaction time to sit on it again before the incidence gets so savagely out of control -which is one repeated pattern seen in the UK.
I'm hoping that the vaccine will be providing an immunity buffer against any explosion into a 3rd wave, which on my numbers above will not be in place elsewhere in Europe for some time yet.
Mitigations are available in the very short term - adjusting vaccine strategy, or maintaining a strong lock down.
And in some places varied population density, household structure (1 person households in Sweden etc?), and demographics.
Yuge study of 600,000 vaccinees shows 94% drop in symptomatic infections, and no diminution of effect in over 70s. Not clear how many of these are first dose vs both dose cases.
@MattW - thanks and good first header. I hope the EU gets rolling on vaccination and I think they will.
I have seen no sign, in much of Europe, of a big distribution effort being setup. There has been some stuff in Germany... but without a coordinated supply chain and delivery system....
I guess I was speaking more in hope than anything else. I bet they do surprise on the upside, though, from this point. There'll have been some eurohands banged on eurotables and some euroheads banged together.
All of which have, of course, no real impact, given health is not an EU competence. Why on earth this was done EU wide I'll never known.
To use co-ordinated needs and buying power for a better deal and a more efficient and equitable overall result than would arise from the chaos of 27 countries ad hoc doing their own thing. No problem with the concept. It makes perfect sense. It was the execution and the people doing the executing. The crisis required a deviation from the usual MO of the EC. It required some commercial nous and financial risk taking rather than a traditional arms length value-for-money approach. They were unable to work like this - it's not how they roll or are meant to roll with OPM - and the production shortfalls exposed them. Horses for courses and this was a jumper running on the Lingfield AW flat track.
It makes no sense whatsoever. This isn't a Turkish bazaar needing a "better deal" nor is there a fixed amount of doses available since we were starting from zero and scaling up manufacturing. "Efficiency" isn't needed, scale and redundancy is.
Getting a better deal was the wrong question and wrong priority. Getting as many as possible as fast as possible should have been the priority.
Garbage In, Garbage Out. They started with the wrong priorities so the output was inevitable.
What a relief. Back to your usual "mile wide inch deep" tosh.
Excellent thread piece, Matt. Why you never done one before?
I agree with the main thrust of your argument. You shouldn't draw too many conclusions from the bare figures, especially as we don't know where it all ends yet. I do however think it is reasonable to pause over the current results and reflect that the UK's vaccination roll-out probably would almost certainly have gone less well had the country still been part of the EU.
This gives unreconstructed Europhiles like myself food for thought. My habit has been to mock Leavers over the absence of palpable benefits of leaving the EU. Now we appear to have a very tangible one.
Of course nobody could have foreseen this, but it would be dishonest of Remainers to deny these very real consequences. If it can be reasonably argued that they derive from the very nature of the EU, and therefore further benefits of leaving the EU are likely to accrue in due course, there will be a lot of humble pie to be eaten, not least on this site.
I might even have some myself.
That’s a fair argument, but it also need to incorporate the counter-factual of what the response might have been had the perpetually awkward and non communitaire UK remained part of the EU. I cannot see that we’d happily have acquiesced to the current EU scheme - and it’s quite conceivable we’d still have gone our own way.
We might even have persuaded the EU to have been more proactive.
I agree with all of this. The takeaway for me, as I said yesterday, is that the EU is fantastic at running an extremely effective free trade area. It’s trying to be a federal government in waiting though and is pants at that. It was less the vaccine cock up, any individual government could screw that up, as the Hungary situation. Orban is a dictator, Hungary is at best a semi-democracy, and the EU can/will do nothing while Poland is still there to veto any Art 7 proceedings. And visa versa. So it is an extremely less effective guarantor of democratic values on the Continent than I believed it to have been.
Interesting point, this. The EU as bulwark against political extremism is certainly in my locker as one of its many positives. And, yes, this argument falls if member states can be extreme and face no sanctions.
I think that one thing Brussels definitely needs is a far more mature / sceptical polity, especially amongst those groups that may have been rather starry-eyed about it.
I can understand that where moving into the EU has helped lock-in democratic models, as in post-communist Eastern Europe.
Perhaps it is time for a generational shift to the next level, some weaning to take place, and the setup in Brussels to adjust again.
Oh dear. More anti-vax nonsense, this time in the NHS.
Significant disparities in vaccine uptake among healthcare workers in England may undermine the rollout and its ability to bring the coronavirus pandemic under control, with far lower rates among black and south Asian staff, workers under 30, and those living in the most deprived areas, a scientific adviser to the government has said.
Doctors at the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS trust, which employs one of the largest and most diverse healthcare workforces in the country, raised the issue on Sunday after releasing the first public data on vaccination rates among UK healthcare workers.
Reading the piece, the disparities in terms of take-up are astonishing. Scandalous, in fact. As with the care homes, if the staff won't get vaccinated they jeopardise the welfare of the patients. And there's certainly no point in the Government putting out the kind of guilt tripping adverts, like the one that's just been playing on the TV as I've been typing, entreating the public to protect the NHS if large chunks of the NHS workforce won't bloody well protect themselves.
I mean, is medicine in this country to be governed by science, or by antique prejudices and bullshit shared on anti-social media? Not good enough.
There’s a desperate attempt to blame this on Whitey in Woke circles, because of a BAME folk memory of white ‘experiments’ on black/Asian people in the 1930s or whatever, creating a historic unease of racist needles
If that were the case, you’d expect the oldest BAME folk to be the most resistant. They’re not. As that article implicitly accepts, it’s young BAMEs believing bullshit spread on social media. Hindus believing the vaccine contains beef, Muslims pork, black people thinking it changes your DNA.
At some point we will have to get a bit tougher. If you want to work in social care, you have the jab. End of.
It’s striking how different the situation is in Europe, where anti vaxxing (in France and Germany, say) is much more of a white problem. I have a friend with a French mother and German step father, in their 60s. Living in Bavaria. Wealthy, middle class, highly educated. Complete anti vaxxers
@MattW - thanks and good first header. I hope the EU gets rolling on vaccination and I think they will.
I have seen no sign, in much of Europe, of a big distribution effort being setup. There has been some stuff in Germany... but without a coordinated supply chain and delivery system....
I guess I was speaking more in hope than anything else. I bet they do surprise on the upside, though, from this point. There'll have been some eurohands banged on eurotables and some euroheads banged together.
All of which have, of course, no real impact, given health is not an EU competence. Why on earth this was done EU wide I'll never known.
Fear of division over vaccine supplies plus a power "push" (rather than grab) by Merkel
What she sees in von der Leyen, is very hard to understand. She has screwed up at least 2 cabinet posts in Germany. Which included mucking up procurement completely... and losing at lawfare with the supplying companies.
Would almost certainly have done better with nation state procurement; some nations would have probably over ordered and could have transferred to others in that event.
I could understand the EU pooling if they'd gone Dutch on improving production capacity. But they didnt....
I don't think the problem was the principle of EU ordering, it was the execution. The EU could have ordered from a dozen different suppliers, and paid for them to produce ahead of approval, and paid for expansion of facilities.
But they didn't for two reasons:
1. The EU's decision makers are a long way away from voters. There was no Bibi or Johnson that had to answer to voters and who realised that getting everyone vaccinated would be very popular.
2. The EU doesn't actually have a lot of money. It's total budget is only a little larger than Belgium's. It never had the financial resource to commit the €100bn or so that would be needed to really accelerate vaccine production for a bloc the size of the EU. This should have been admitted early on.
On the EU, this is a perceptive analysis of its problems from a journalist who is generally seen as pro-EU and critical of Brexit. For his pains he has had loads of abuse from Remainers
As I have mooted before, the west is dividing post Brexit, into the Anglosphere and the EU
I don't think it does to overplay this - the new administration obviously desires good relations with the EU, and it is ten times bigger than we are - but OTOH some people are also too negative about the whole Trump/Johnson comparison thing. Johnson is obviously not the same as Trump, and nor is the new President thick. The UK Government is very keen on the green agenda, and is hawkish on both Russia and China (during a period in which the EU has stitched up a chummy new trade agreement with the Chinese, and the Germans in particular are cosying up to Putin.) NordStream 2 is a notable problem because it circumvents existing land routes across various Eastern European states, and leaves Ukraine in particular increasingly vulnerable to further Russian aggression - something about which goody-two-shoes Merkel (let alone the new leader of the CDU) cares not one iota.
Fundamentally, Britain and the United States have a number of common interests. If we can work together on those then there is no reason why relations shouldn't be cordial.
Excellent thread piece, Matt. Why you never done one before?
I agree with the main thrust of your argument. You shouldn't draw too many conclusions from the bare figures, especially as we don't know where it all ends yet. I do however think it is reasonable to pause over the current results and reflect that the UK's vaccination roll-out probably would almost certainly have gone less well had the country still been part of the EU.
This gives unreconstructed Europhiles like myself food for thought. My habit has been to mock Leavers over the absence of palpable benefits of leaving the EU. Now we appear to have a very tangible one.
Of course nobody could have foreseen this, but it would be dishonest of Remainers to deny these very real consequences. If it can be reasonably argued that they derive from the very nature of the EU, and therefore further benefits of leaving the EU are likely to accrue in due course, there will be a lot of humble pie to be eaten, not least on this site.
I might even have some myself.
That’s a fair argument, but it also need to incorporate the counter-factual of what the response might have been had the perpetually awkward and non communitaire UK remained part of the EU. I cannot see that we’d happily have acquiesced to the current EU scheme - and it’s quite conceivable we’d still have gone our own way.
We might even have persuaded the EU to have been more proactive.
I agree with all of this. The takeaway for me, as I said yesterday, is that the EU is fantastic at running an extremely effective free trade area. It’s trying to be a federal government in waiting though and is pants at that. It was less the vaccine cock up, any individual government could screw that up, as the Hungary situation. Orban is a dictator, Hungary is at best a semi-democracy, and the EU can/will do nothing while Poland is still there to veto any Art 7 proceedings. And visa versa. So it is an extremely less effective guarantor of democratic values on the Continent than I believed it to have been.
Interesting point, this. The EU as bulwark against political extremism is certainly in my locker as one of its many positives. And, yes, this argument falls if member states can be extreme and face no sanctions.
What about the EU as a driver of political extremism by making the promises of moderate parties impossible to fulfil, and cocking up everything it touches while appearing to have liberals and centrists entirely in its pocket no matter how badly it fails, e.g. on austerity, or vaccines?
Yuge study of 600,000 vaccinees shows 94% drop in symptomatic infections, and no diminution of effect in over 70s. Not clear how many of these are first dose vs both dose cases.
Oh, the news from Israel is incredible. So long as they manage to vaccinate the refuseniks, then they are only six to eight weeks away from the end of Covid.
@MattW - thanks and good first header. I hope the EU gets rolling on vaccination and I think they will.
I have seen no sign, in much of Europe, of a big distribution effort being setup. There has been some stuff in Germany... but without a coordinated supply chain and delivery system....
I guess I was speaking more in hope than anything else. I bet they do surprise on the upside, though, from this point. There'll have been some eurohands banged on eurotables and some euroheads banged together.
All of which have, of course, no real impact, given health is not an EU competence. Why on earth this was done EU wide I'll never known.
Fear of division over vaccine supplies plus a power "push" (rather than grab) by Merkel
What she sees in von der Leyen, is very hard to understand. She has screwed up at least 2 cabinet posts in Germany. Which included mucking up procurement completely... and losing at lawfare with the supplying companies.
Would almost certainly have done better with nation state procurement; some nations would have probably over ordered and could have transferred to others in that event.
I could understand the EU pooling if they'd gone Dutch on improving production capacity. But they didnt....
I don't think the problem was the principle of EU ordering, it was the execution. The EU could have ordered from a dozen different suppliers, and paid for them to produce ahead of approval, and paid for expansion of facilities.
But they didn't for two reasons:
1. The EU's decision makers are a long way away from voters. There was no Bibi or Johnson that had to answer to voters and who realised that getting everyone vaccinated would be very popular.
2. The EU doesn't actually have a lot of money. It's total budget is only a little larger than Belgium's. It never had the financial resource to commit the €100bn or so that would be needed to really accelerate vaccine production for a bloc the size of the EU. This should have been admitted early on.
Having neither confidence nor supply, one could say.
Fundamental root and branch reform is needed for the sake all all citizens of EU nations.
On the EU, this is a perceptive analysis of its problems from a journalist who is generally seen as pro-EU and critical of Brexit. For his pains he has had loads of abuse from Remainers
The EU is fine with crises. The answer to the EU making a complete horlicks of everything is always that the problem is that the EU didn't have enough power, and a new treaty is needed to make sure the people who currently look like the lovechild of Frank Spencer and Basil Fawlty are a bigger factor in whether things go wrong next time.
On the EU, this is a perceptive analysis of its problems from a journalist who is generally seen as pro-EU and critical of Brexit. For his pains he has had loads of abuse from Remainers
As I have mooted before, the west is dividing post Brexit, into the Anglosphere and the EU
I don't think it does to overplay this - the new administration obviously desires good relations with the EU, and it is ten times bigger than we are
LOL.
Unintentional I'm sure but that's a classic example of overplaying. People tend to imagine the EU as bigger than it is, or the UK as smaller than it is.
In no metric is the EU ten times bigger than we are. By population there's six times bigger, by GDP they're five times bigger.
When it comes to realistic military projection power we're probably half their size - and can actually act as one voice.
That's why the UK can be a significant and dependable ally for America. We are a large country still, not a superpower but not tiny either, a genuine power still.
Oh dear. More anti-vax nonsense, this time in the NHS.
Significant disparities in vaccine uptake among healthcare workers in England may undermine the rollout and its ability to bring the coronavirus pandemic under control, with far lower rates among black and south Asian staff, workers under 30, and those living in the most deprived areas, a scientific adviser to the government has said.
Doctors at the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS trust, which employs one of the largest and most diverse healthcare workforces in the country, raised the issue on Sunday after releasing the first public data on vaccination rates among UK healthcare workers.
Reading the piece, the disparities in terms of take-up are astonishing. Scandalous, in fact. As with the care homes, if the staff won't get vaccinated they jeopardise the welfare of the patients. And there's certainly no point in the Government putting out the kind of guilt tripping adverts, like the one that's just been playing on the TV as I've been typing, entreating the public to protect the NHS if large chunks of the NHS workforce won't bloody well protect themselves.
I mean, is medicine in this country to be governed by science, or by antique prejudices and bullshit shared on anti-social media? Not good enough.
There’s a desperate attempt to blame this on Whitey in Woke circles, because of a BAME folk memory of white ‘experiments’ on black/Asian people in the 1930s or whatever, creating a historic unease of racist needles
If that were the case, you’d expect the oldest BAME folk to be the most resistant. They’re not. As that article implicitly accepts, it’s young BAMEs believing bullshit spread on social media. Hindus believing the vaccine contains beef, Muslims pork, black people thinking it changes your DNA.
At some point we will have to get a bit tougher. If you want to work in social care, you have the jab. End of.
It’s striking how different the situation is in Europe, where anti vaxxing (in France and Germany, say) is much more of a white problem. I have a friend with a French mother and German step father, in their 60s. Living in Bavaria. Wealthy, middle class, highly educated. Complete anti vaxxers
But it's DOCTORS buying this bullshit
"One of the most striking results in the study, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, came from an analysis of vaccination status by occupation. While uptake was highest – at 73% – in those in administrative and executive roles, doctors had the lowest rate of vaccination, at only 57%. The study notes that doctors are the only staff group at the NHS trust in which minority ethnic individuals form the majority."
How do they have any faith in any of the other 10s of 1000s of drugs they prescribe? Or don't they?
Oh dear. More anti-vax nonsense, this time in the NHS.
Significant disparities in vaccine uptake among healthcare workers in England may undermine the rollout and its ability to bring the coronavirus pandemic under control, with far lower rates among black and south Asian staff, workers under 30, and those living in the most deprived areas, a scientific adviser to the government has said.
Doctors at the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS trust, which employs one of the largest and most diverse healthcare workforces in the country, raised the issue on Sunday after releasing the first public data on vaccination rates among UK healthcare workers.
Reading the piece, the disparities in terms of take-up are astonishing. Scandalous, in fact. As with the care homes, if the staff won't get vaccinated they jeopardise the welfare of the patients. And there's certainly no point in the Government putting out the kind of guilt tripping adverts, like the one that's just been playing on the TV as I've been typing, entreating the public to protect the NHS if large chunks of the NHS workforce won't bloody well protect themselves.
I mean, is medicine in this country to be governed by science, or by antique prejudices and bullshit shared on anti-social media? Not good enough.
There’s a desperate attempt to blame this on Whitey in Woke circles, because of a BAME folk memory of white ‘experiments’ on black/Asian people in the 1930s or whatever, creating a historic unease of racist needles
If that were the case, you’d expect the oldest BAME folk to be the most resistant. They’re not. As that article implicitly accepts, it’s young BAMEs believing bullshit spread on social media. Hindus believing the vaccine contains beef, Muslims pork, black people thinking it changes your DNA.
At some point we will have to get a bit tougher. If you want to work in social care, you have the jab. End of.
It’s striking how different the situation is in Europe, where anti vaxxing (in France and Germany, say) is much more of a white problem. I have a friend with a French mother and German step father, in their 60s. Living in Bavaria. Wealthy, middle class, highly educated. Complete anti vaxxers
But it's DOCTORS buying this bullshit
"One of the most striking results in the study, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, came from an analysis of vaccination status by occupation. While uptake was highest – at 73% – in those in administrative and executive roles, doctors had the lowest rate of vaccination, at only 57%. The study notes that doctors are the only staff group at the NHS trust in which minority ethnic individuals form the majority."
How do they have any faith in any of the other 10s of 1000s of drugs they prescribe? Or don't they?
Yes I find that particular stat utterly confounding. Maybe these are religious objections?
@MattW - thanks and good first header. I hope the EU gets rolling on vaccination and I think they will.
I have seen no sign, in much of Europe, of a big distribution effort being setup. There has been some stuff in Germany... but without a coordinated supply chain and delivery system....
I guess I was speaking more in hope than anything else. I bet they do surprise on the upside, though, from this point. There'll have been some eurohands banged on eurotables and some euroheads banged together.
All of which have, of course, no real impact, given health is not an EU competence. Why on earth this was done EU wide I'll never known.
To use co-ordinated needs and buying power for a better deal and a more efficient and equitable overall result than would arise from the chaos of 27 countries ad hoc doing their own thing. No problem with the concept. It makes perfect sense. It was the execution and the people doing the executing. The crisis required a deviation from the usual MO of the EC. It required some commercial nous and financial risk taking rather than a traditional arms length value-for-money approach. They were unable to work like this - it's not how they roll or are meant to roll with OPM - and the production shortfalls exposed them. Horses for courses and this was a jumper running on the Lingfield AW flat track.
It makes no sense whatsoever. This isn't a Turkish bazaar needing a "better deal" nor is there a fixed amount of doses available since we were starting from zero and scaling up manufacturing. "Efficiency" isn't needed, scale and redundancy is.
Getting a better deal was the wrong question and wrong priority. Getting as many as possible as fast as possible should have been the priority.
Garbage In, Garbage Out. They started with the wrong priorities so the output was inevitable.
What a relief. Back to your usual "mile wide inch deep" tosh.
It's not tosh. Which do you think was the right priority for the vaccines:
1. Investing to get as much manufacturing capacity on stream as fast as possible. 2. Haggling for months to negotiate a better deal.
Oh dear. More anti-vax nonsense, this time in the NHS.
Significant disparities in vaccine uptake among healthcare workers in England may undermine the rollout and its ability to bring the coronavirus pandemic under control, with far lower rates among black and south Asian staff, workers under 30, and those living in the most deprived areas, a scientific adviser to the government has said.
Doctors at the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS trust, which employs one of the largest and most diverse healthcare workforces in the country, raised the issue on Sunday after releasing the first public data on vaccination rates among UK healthcare workers.
Reading the piece, the disparities in terms of take-up are astonishing. Scandalous, in fact. As with the care homes, if the staff won't get vaccinated they jeopardise the welfare of the patients. And there's certainly no point in the Government putting out the kind of guilt tripping adverts, like the one that's just been playing on the TV as I've been typing, entreating the public to protect the NHS if large chunks of the NHS workforce won't bloody well protect themselves.
I mean, is medicine in this country to be governed by science, or by antique prejudices and bullshit shared on anti-social media? Not good enough.
I sense an interesting moment in the so called culture war coming...
"Then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel Is just the freight train coming your way"
It's extremely dangerous. What made me so cross reading that was we're all being told we have to sit at home for months on end to "protect the NHS" *and* there are millions of people - most of the population, in fact - behind healthcare workers in the priority queue, including everyone under 80 and all the shielded people, who are longing for these inoculations. And then there are all these bloody doctors and nurses who are saying they won't have their jabs because of the Tuskegee Experiment, or because some juju man on WhatsApp says the virus is not real and the vaccines stop you making babies, or because cousin Alice says that her mate told her that it can be treated successfully with traditional herbs, or whatever the Hell the excuse is.
It's outrageous, and we all know where it will end. The further we get into the epidemic, the larger the percentage of the dead will be comprised of non-white people, and the howling about institutional racism will get louder and louder and louder. It won't be the fault of the refuseniks and the people who put them up to it, it'll be the fault of society in general, and the Government in particular, for being racist. Well, forgive me if I don't buy it.
If we're all expected to suffer because the science says that we must, then that certainly includes health and care workers. The ones who won't accept the vaccines should be ashamed of themselves.
On the EU, this is a perceptive analysis of its problems from a journalist who is generally seen as pro-EU and critical of Brexit. For his pains he has had loads of abuse from Remainers
@MattW - thanks and good first header. I hope the EU gets rolling on vaccination and I think they will.
I have seen no sign, in much of Europe, of a big distribution effort being setup. There has been some stuff in Germany... but without a coordinated supply chain and delivery system....
I guess I was speaking more in hope than anything else. I bet they do surprise on the upside, though, from this point. There'll have been some eurohands banged on eurotables and some euroheads banged together.
All of which have, of course, no real impact, given health is not an EU competence. Why on earth this was done EU wide I'll never known.
Fear of division over vaccine supplies plus a power "push" (rather than grab) by Merkel
What she sees in von der Leyen, is very hard to understand. She has screwed up at least 2 cabinet posts in Germany. Which included mucking up procurement completely... and losing at lawfare with the supplying companies.
Would almost certainly have done better with nation state procurement; some nations would have probably over ordered and could have transferred to others in that event.
I could understand the EU pooling if they'd gone Dutch on improving production capacity. But they didnt....
I don't think the problem was the principle of EU ordering, it was the execution. The EU could have ordered from a dozen different suppliers, and paid for them to produce ahead of approval, and paid for expansion of facilities.
But they didn't for two reasons:
1. The EU's decision makers are a long way away from voters. There was no Bibi or Johnson that had to answer to voters and who realised that getting everyone vaccinated would be very popular.
2. The EU doesn't actually have a lot of money. It's total budget is only a little larger than Belgium's. It never had the financial resource to commit the €100bn or so that would be needed to really accelerate vaccine production for a bloc the size of the EU. This should have been admitted early on.
Having neither confidence nor supply, one could say.
Fundamental root and branch reform is needed for the sake all all citizens of EU nations.
Recent statements from the EC have tried to draw a division between EU purchase and Distribution being a national competence.
I'm not going to try and call the mix between that being an attempt to draw a line where the EC want to division to be on EU influence on healthcare and managing any potential fallout. I think it is probably mixed, and it is inevitably mixed.
Oh dear. More anti-vax nonsense, this time in the NHS.
Significant disparities in vaccine uptake among healthcare workers in England may undermine the rollout and its ability to bring the coronavirus pandemic under control, with far lower rates among black and south Asian staff, workers under 30, and those living in the most deprived areas, a scientific adviser to the government has said.
Doctors at the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS trust, which employs one of the largest and most diverse healthcare workforces in the country, raised the issue on Sunday after releasing the first public data on vaccination rates among UK healthcare workers.
Reading the piece, the disparities in terms of take-up are astonishing. Scandalous, in fact. As with the care homes, if the staff won't get vaccinated they jeopardise the welfare of the patients. And there's certainly no point in the Government putting out the kind of guilt tripping adverts, like the one that's just been playing on the TV as I've been typing, entreating the public to protect the NHS if large chunks of the NHS workforce won't bloody well protect themselves.
I mean, is medicine in this country to be governed by science, or by antique prejudices and bullshit shared on anti-social media? Not good enough.
There’s a desperate attempt to blame this on Whitey in Woke circles, because of a BAME folk memory of white ‘experiments’ on black/Asian people in the 1930s or whatever, creating a historic unease of racist needles
If that were the case, you’d expect the oldest BAME folk to be the most resistant. They’re not. As that article implicitly accepts, it’s young BAMEs believing bullshit spread on social media. Hindus believing the vaccine contains beef, Muslims pork, black people thinking it changes your DNA.
At some point we will have to get a bit tougher. If you want to work in social care, you have the jab. End of.
It’s striking how different the situation is in Europe, where anti vaxxing (in France and Germany, say) is much more of a white problem. I have a friend with a French mother and German step father, in their 60s. Living in Bavaria. Wealthy, middle class, highly educated. Complete anti vaxxers
But it's DOCTORS buying this bullshit
"One of the most striking results in the study, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, came from an analysis of vaccination status by occupation. While uptake was highest – at 73% – in those in administrative and executive roles, doctors had the lowest rate of vaccination, at only 57%. The study notes that doctors are the only staff group at the NHS trust in which minority ethnic individuals form the majority."
How do they have any faith in any of the other 10s of 1000s of drugs they prescribe? Or don't they?
Yes I find that particular stat utterly confounding. Maybe these are religious objections?
Or people who have already had the pox and are sure the yhave had it, so can afford to wait a bit?
On the EU, this is a perceptive analysis of its problems from a journalist who is generally seen as pro-EU and critical of Brexit. For his pains he has had loads of abuse from Remainers
As I have mooted before, the west is dividing post Brexit, into the Anglosphere and the EU
I don't think it does to overplay this - the new administration obviously desires good relations with the EU, and it is ten times bigger than we are - but OTOH some people are also too negative about the whole Trump/Johnson comparison thing. Johnson is obviously not the same as Trump, and nor is the new President thick. The UK Government is very keen on the green agenda, and is hawkish on both Russia and China (during a period in which the EU has stitched up a chummy new trade agreement with the Chinese, and the Germans in particular are cosying up to Putin.) NordStream 2 is a notable problem because it circumvents existing land routes across various Eastern European states, and leaves Ukraine in particular increasingly vulnerable to further Russian aggression - something about which goody-two-shoes Merkel (let alone the new leader of the CDU) cares not one iota.
Fundamentally, Britain and the United States have a number of common interests. If we can work together on those then there is no reason why relations shouldn't be cordial.
Point of order, the EU is ~5x the GDP of the UK and around 7x the population. The numbers don't stack up for the EU as much as most think, especially wrt to foreign policy.
On the EU, this is a perceptive analysis of its problems from a journalist who is generally seen as pro-EU and critical of Brexit. For his pains he has had loads of abuse from Remainers
As I have mooted before, the west is dividing post Brexit, into the Anglosphere and the EU
I don't think it does to overplay this - the new administration obviously desires good relations with the EU, and it is ten times bigger than we are
LOL.
Unintentional I'm sure but that's a classic example of overplaying. People tend to imagine the EU as bigger than it is, or the UK as smaller than it is.
In no metric is the EU ten times bigger than we are. By population there's six times bigger, by GDP they're five times bigger.
When it comes to realistic military projection power we're probably half their size - and can actually act as one voice.
That's why the UK can be a significant and dependable ally for America. We are a large country still, not a superpower but not tiny either, a genuine power still.
Bit of a ‘no way is BJ 5ft 9ins tall, he’s AT LEAST 5ft 9 and 1/4ins’ vibe..
Oh dear. More anti-vax nonsense, this time in the NHS.
Significant disparities in vaccine uptake among healthcare workers in England may undermine the rollout and its ability to bring the coronavirus pandemic under control, with far lower rates among black and south Asian staff, workers under 30, and those living in the most deprived areas, a scientific adviser to the government has said.
Doctors at the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS trust, which employs one of the largest and most diverse healthcare workforces in the country, raised the issue on Sunday after releasing the first public data on vaccination rates among UK healthcare workers.
Reading the piece, the disparities in terms of take-up are astonishing. Scandalous, in fact. As with the care homes, if the staff won't get vaccinated they jeopardise the welfare of the patients. And there's certainly no point in the Government putting out the kind of guilt tripping adverts, like the one that's just been playing on the TV as I've been typing, entreating the public to protect the NHS if large chunks of the NHS workforce won't bloody well protect themselves.
I mean, is medicine in this country to be governed by science, or by antique prejudices and bullshit shared on anti-social media? Not good enough.
There’s a desperate attempt to blame this on Whitey in Woke circles, because of a BAME folk memory of white ‘experiments’ on black/Asian people in the 1930s or whatever, creating a historic unease of racist needles
If that were the case, you’d expect the oldest BAME folk to be the most resistant. They’re not. As that article implicitly accepts, it’s young BAMEs believing bullshit spread on social media. Hindus believing the vaccine contains beef, Muslims pork, black people thinking it changes your DNA.
At some point we will have to get a bit tougher. If you want to work in social care, you have the jab. End of.
It’s striking how different the situation is in Europe, where anti vaxxing (in France and Germany, say) is much more of a white problem. I have a friend with a French mother and German step father, in their 60s. Living in Bavaria. Wealthy, middle class, highly educated. Complete anti vaxxers
But it's DOCTORS buying this bullshit
"One of the most striking results in the study, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, came from an analysis of vaccination status by occupation. While uptake was highest – at 73% – in those in administrative and executive roles, doctors had the lowest rate of vaccination, at only 57%. The study notes that doctors are the only staff group at the NHS trust in which minority ethnic individuals form the majority."
How do they have any faith in any of the other 10s of 1000s of drugs they prescribe? Or don't they?
Yes I find that particular stat utterly confounding. Maybe these are religious objections?
That's interesting.
Professionals closest to the frontline can be conservative. As a Type I diabetic with a big astigmatism in one eye I am always keeping a watch on laser treatment, as it could save me quite a chunk on complex glasses. But of course there is a big downside.
Optometrists still wearing glasses rather than taking up laser eye treatment is always an interesting watch.
Oh dear. More anti-vax nonsense, this time in the NHS.
Significant disparities in vaccine uptake among healthcare workers in England may undermine the rollout and its ability to bring the coronavirus pandemic under control, with far lower rates among black and south Asian staff, workers under 30, and those living in the most deprived areas, a scientific adviser to the government has said.
Doctors at the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS trust, which employs one of the largest and most diverse healthcare workforces in the country, raised the issue on Sunday after releasing the first public data on vaccination rates among UK healthcare workers.
Reading the piece, the disparities in terms of take-up are astonishing. Scandalous, in fact. As with the care homes, if the staff won't get vaccinated they jeopardise the welfare of the patients. And there's certainly no point in the Government putting out the kind of guilt tripping adverts, like the one that's just been playing on the TV as I've been typing, entreating the public to protect the NHS if large chunks of the NHS workforce won't bloody well protect themselves.
I mean, is medicine in this country to be governed by science, or by antique prejudices and bullshit shared on anti-social media? Not good enough.
I sense an interesting moment in the so called culture war coming...
"Then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel Is just the freight train coming your way"
It's extremely dangerous. What made me so cross reading that was we're all being told we have to sit at home for months on end to "protect the NHS" *and* there are millions of people - most of the population, in fact - behind healthcare workers in the priority queue, including everyone under 80 and all the shielded people, who are longing for these inoculations. And then there are all these bloody doctors and nurses who are saying they won't have their jabs because of the Tuskegee Experiment, or because some juju man on WhatsApp says the virus is not real and the vaccines stop you making babies, or because cousin Alice says that her mate told her that it can be treated successfully with traditional herbs, or whatever the Hell the excuse is.
It's outrageous, and we all know where it will end. The further we get into the epidemic, the larger the percentage of the dead will be comprised of non-white people, and the howling about institutional racism will get louder and louder and louder. It won't be the fault of the refuseniks and the people who put them up to it, it'll be the fault of society in general, and the Government in particular, for being racist. Well, forgive me if I don't buy it.
If we're all expected to suffer because the science says that we must, then that certainly includes health and care workers. The ones who won't accept the vaccines should be ashamed of themselves.
What you might find interesting is the lack of publication of the memes/anti-vax propaganda in question.
Oh dear. More anti-vax nonsense, this time in the NHS.
Significant disparities in vaccine uptake among healthcare workers in England may undermine the rollout and its ability to bring the coronavirus pandemic under control, with far lower rates among black and south Asian staff, workers under 30, and those living in the most deprived areas, a scientific adviser to the government has said.
Doctors at the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS trust, which employs one of the largest and most diverse healthcare workforces in the country, raised the issue on Sunday after releasing the first public data on vaccination rates among UK healthcare workers.
Reading the piece, the disparities in terms of take-up are astonishing. Scandalous, in fact. As with the care homes, if the staff won't get vaccinated they jeopardise the welfare of the patients. And there's certainly no point in the Government putting out the kind of guilt tripping adverts, like the one that's just been playing on the TV as I've been typing, entreating the public to protect the NHS if large chunks of the NHS workforce won't bloody well protect themselves.
I mean, is medicine in this country to be governed by science, or by antique prejudices and bullshit shared on anti-social media? Not good enough.
I sense an interesting moment in the so called culture war coming...
"Then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel Is just the freight train coming your way"
It's extremely dangerous. What made me so cross reading that was we're all being told we have to sit at home for months on end to "protect the NHS" *and* there are millions of people - most of the population, in fact - behind healthcare workers in the priority queue, including everyone under 80 and all the shielded people, who are longing for these inoculations. And then there are all these bloody doctors and nurses who are saying they won't have their jabs because of the Tuskegee Experiment, or because some juju man on WhatsApp says the virus is not real and the vaccines stop you making babies, or because cousin Alice says that her mate told her that it can be treated successfully with traditional herbs, or whatever the Hell the excuse is.
It's outrageous, and we all know where it will end. The further we get into the epidemic, the larger the percentage of the dead will be comprised of non-white people, and the howling about institutional racism will get louder and louder and louder. It won't be the fault of the refuseniks and the people who put them up to it, it'll be the fault of society in general, and the Government in particular, for being racist. Well, forgive me if I don't buy it.
If we're all expected to suffer because the science says that we must, then that certainly includes health and care workers. The ones who won't accept the vaccines should be ashamed of themselves.
What you might find interesting is the lack of publication of the memes/anti-vax propaganda in question.
On the EU, this is a perceptive analysis of its problems from a journalist who is generally seen as pro-EU and critical of Brexit. For his pains he has had loads of abuse from Remainers
As I have mooted before, the west is dividing post Brexit, into the Anglosphere and the EU
I don't think it does to overplay this - the new administration obviously desires good relations with the EU, and it is ten times bigger than we are - but OTOH some people are also too negative about the whole Trump/Johnson comparison thing. Johnson is obviously not the same as Trump, and nor is the new President thick. The UK Government is very keen on the green agenda, and is hawkish on both Russia and China (during a period in which the EU has stitched up a chummy new trade agreement with the Chinese, and the Germans in particular are cosying up to Putin.) NordStream 2 is a notable problem because it circumvents existing land routes across various Eastern European states, and leaves Ukraine in particular increasingly vulnerable to further Russian aggression - something about which goody-two-shoes Merkel (let alone the new leader of the CDU) cares not one iota.
Fundamentally, Britain and the United States have a number of common interests. If we can work together on those then there is no reason why relations shouldn't be cordial.
Point of order, the EU is ~5x the GDP of the UK and around 7x the population. The numbers don't stack up for the EU as much as most think, especially wrt to foreign policy.
I think one of the more interesting things wrt EU is how will the self-perception be affected as it changes from "the world's largest free trade area" to number 4 or 5 amongst near-equals.
Oh dear. More anti-vax nonsense, this time in the NHS.
Significant disparities in vaccine uptake among healthcare workers in England may undermine the rollout and its ability to bring the coronavirus pandemic under control, with far lower rates among black and south Asian staff, workers under 30, and those living in the most deprived areas, a scientific adviser to the government has said.
Doctors at the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS trust, which employs one of the largest and most diverse healthcare workforces in the country, raised the issue on Sunday after releasing the first public data on vaccination rates among UK healthcare workers.
Reading the piece, the disparities in terms of take-up are astonishing. Scandalous, in fact. As with the care homes, if the staff won't get vaccinated they jeopardise the welfare of the patients. And there's certainly no point in the Government putting out the kind of guilt tripping adverts, like the one that's just been playing on the TV as I've been typing, entreating the public to protect the NHS if large chunks of the NHS workforce won't bloody well protect themselves.
I mean, is medicine in this country to be governed by science, or by antique prejudices and bullshit shared on anti-social media? Not good enough.
I sense an interesting moment in the so called culture war coming...
"Then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel Is just the freight train coming your way"
It's extremely dangerous. What made me so cross reading that was we're all being told we have to sit at home for months on end to "protect the NHS" *and* there are millions of people - most of the population, in fact - behind healthcare workers in the priority queue, including everyone under 80 and all the shielded people, who are longing for these inoculations. And then there are all these bloody doctors and nurses who are saying they won't have their jabs because of the Tuskegee Experiment, or because some juju man on WhatsApp says the virus is not real and the vaccines stop you making babies, or because cousin Alice says that her mate told her that it can be treated successfully with traditional herbs, or whatever the Hell the excuse is.
It's outrageous, and we all know where it will end. The further we get into the epidemic, the larger the percentage of the dead will be comprised of non-white people, and the howling about institutional racism will get louder and louder and louder. It won't be the fault of the refuseniks and the people who put them up to it, it'll be the fault of society in general, and the Government in particular, for being racist. Well, forgive me if I don't buy it.
If we're all expected to suffer because the science says that we must, then that certainly includes health and care workers. The ones who won't accept the vaccines should be ashamed of themselves.
What you might find interesting is the lack of publication of the memes/anti-vax propaganda in question.
Having seen a few examples, I can understand why.
Links?
I was shown a few things. Basically QAnnon grade fuckwittery.
On the EU, this is a perceptive analysis of its problems from a journalist who is generally seen as pro-EU and critical of Brexit. For his pains he has had loads of abuse from Remainers
As I have mooted before, the west is dividing post Brexit, into the Anglosphere and the EU
That photo would rate a special supplement if it was Boris instead of Angela. Even the one taken by his own photographer of him on the phone (apparently) to the great leader occupied the Telegraph for the better part of a week.
That's why the UK can be a significant and dependable ally for America. We are a large country still, not a superpower but not tiny either, a genuine power still.
I find this sort of thing reads oddly. Most of our posters (including Phillip) ARE British. Why are we speculating on whether Britain can be a significant and dependable ally for America, rather than whether America can be a significant and dependable ally for us? What is the benefit from this longed-for status of being 'a significant and dependable ally for America'?
We were a significant and dependable ally in Iraq, and I seem to remember the outcome there being that more repair contracts were awarded by America to Dutch companies than to British ones. Is just being noticed by them for a minute reward enough?
It's strange - I put it down to too much American television blurring peoples' mental boundaries.
@MattW - thanks and good first header. I hope the EU gets rolling on vaccination and I think they will.
I have seen no sign, in much of Europe, of a big distribution effort being setup. There has been some stuff in Germany... but without a coordinated supply chain and delivery system....
I guess I was speaking more in hope than anything else. I bet they do surprise on the upside, though, from this point. There'll have been some eurohands banged on eurotables and some euroheads banged together.
All of which have, of course, no real impact, given health is not an EU competence. Why on earth this was done EU wide I'll never known.
Fear of division over vaccine supplies plus a power "push" (rather than grab) by Merkel
What she sees in von der Leyen, is very hard to understand. She has screwed up at least 2 cabinet posts in Germany. Which included mucking up procurement completely... and losing at lawfare with the supplying companies.
Would almost certainly have done better with nation state procurement; some nations would have probably over ordered and could have transferred to others in that event.
I could understand the EU pooling if they'd gone Dutch on improving production capacity. But they didnt....
I don't think the problem was the principle of EU ordering, it was the execution. The EU could have ordered from a dozen different suppliers, and paid for them to produce ahead of approval, and paid for expansion of facilities.
But they didn't for two reasons:
1. The EU's decision makers are a long way away from voters. There was no Bibi or Johnson that had to answer to voters and who realised that getting everyone vaccinated would be very popular.
2. The EU doesn't actually have a lot of money. It's total budget is only a little larger than Belgium's. It never had the financial resource to commit the €100bn or so that would be needed to really accelerate vaccine production for a bloc the size of the EU. This should have been admitted early on.
The EU has a lot less money to throw around since we left.
On the EU, this is a perceptive analysis of its problems from a journalist who is generally seen as pro-EU and critical of Brexit. For his pains he has had loads of abuse from Remainers
As I have mooted before, the west is dividing post Brexit, into the Anglosphere and the EU
I don't think it does to overplay this - the new administration obviously desires good relations with the EU, and it is ten times bigger than we are - but OTOH some people are also too negative about the whole Trump/Johnson comparison thing. Johnson is obviously not the same as Trump, and nor is the new President thick. The UK Government is very keen on the green agenda, and is hawkish on both Russia and China (during a period in which the EU has stitched up a chummy new trade agreement with the Chinese, and the Germans in particular are cosying up to Putin.) NordStream 2 is a notable problem because it circumvents existing land routes across various Eastern European states, and leaves Ukraine in particular increasingly vulnerable to further Russian aggression - something about which goody-two-shoes Merkel (let alone the new leader of the CDU) cares not one iota.
Fundamentally, Britain and the United States have a number of common interests. If we can work together on those then there is no reason why relations shouldn't be cordial.
Point of order, the EU is ~5x the GDP of the UK and around 7x the population. The numbers don't stack up for the EU as much as most think, especially wrt to foreign policy.
I think one of the more interesting things wrt EU is how will the self-perception be affected as it changes from "the world's largest free trade area" to number 4 or 5 amongst near-equals.
Near equals?
Er, the EU - post Brexit and mid-Covid - is already dwarfed by the RECP in the Pacific.
At the moment the EU is about 10-15% of global GDP (it’s hard to be precise amidst the volatility). The RECP is about 30% of global GDP - vastly bigger and growing faster.
On the EU, this is a perceptive analysis of its problems from a journalist who is generally seen as pro-EU and critical of Brexit. For his pains he has had loads of abuse from Remainers
As I have mooted before, the west is dividing post Brexit, into the Anglosphere and the EU
I don't think it does to overplay this - the new administration obviously desires good relations with the EU, and it is ten times bigger than we are
LOL.
Unintentional I'm sure but that's a classic example of overplaying. People tend to imagine the EU as bigger than it is, or the UK as smaller than it is.
In no metric is the EU ten times bigger than we are. By population there's six times bigger, by GDP they're five times bigger.
When it comes to realistic military projection power we're probably half their size - and can actually act as one voice.
That's why the UK can be a significant and dependable ally for America. We are a large country still, not a superpower but not tiny either, a genuine power still.
Sorry, that's me typing before engaging brain and using excessively large round numbers. I do appreciate that the population of the EU27 is not 670 million.
@MattW - thanks and good first header. I hope the EU gets rolling on vaccination and I think they will.
I have seen no sign, in much of Europe, of a big distribution effort being setup. There has been some stuff in Germany... but without a coordinated supply chain and delivery system....
I guess I was speaking more in hope than anything else. I bet they do surprise on the upside, though, from this point. There'll have been some eurohands banged on eurotables and some euroheads banged together.
All of which have, of course, no real impact, given health is not an EU competence. Why on earth this was done EU wide I'll never known.
Fear of division over vaccine supplies plus a power "push" (rather than grab) by Merkel
What she sees in von der Leyen, is very hard to understand. She has screwed up at least 2 cabinet posts in Germany. Which included mucking up procurement completely... and losing at lawfare with the supplying companies.
Would almost certainly have done better with nation state procurement; some nations would have probably over ordered and could have transferred to others in that event.
I could understand the EU pooling if they'd gone Dutch on improving production capacity. But they didnt....
I don't think the problem was the principle of EU ordering, it was the execution. The EU could have ordered from a dozen different suppliers, and paid for them to produce ahead of approval, and paid for expansion of facilities.
But they didn't for two reasons:
1. The EU's decision makers are a long way away from voters. There was no Bibi or Johnson that had to answer to voters and who realised that getting everyone vaccinated would be very popular.
2. The EU doesn't actually have a lot of money. It's total budget is only a little larger than Belgium's. It never had the financial resource to commit the €100bn or so that would be needed to really accelerate vaccine production for a bloc the size of the EU. This should have been admitted early on.
The EU has a lot less money to throw around since we left.
It's not just that. In total, the EU spends about €150bn/year and it doesn't have the discretion the UK (or other sovereign states) have around running a deficit. Simply, it can't spend €50bn on vaccine production, without cutting spending in other areas.
It was therefore uniquely poorly positioned to fill the role it took, and it combined that with having "leaders" who failed to notice this and who were not directly answerable to voters.
For the EU's sake, the parliament should get rid of UvdL and the vaccine lady.
@MattW - thanks and good first header. I hope the EU gets rolling on vaccination and I think they will.
I have seen no sign, in much of Europe, of a big distribution effort being setup. There has been some stuff in Germany... but without a coordinated supply chain and delivery system....
I guess I was speaking more in hope than anything else. I bet they do surprise on the upside, though, from this point. There'll have been some eurohands banged on eurotables and some euroheads banged together.
All of which have, of course, no real impact, given health is not an EU competence. Why on earth this was done EU wide I'll never known.
Fear of division over vaccine supplies plus a power "push" (rather than grab) by Merkel
What she sees in von der Leyen, is very hard to understand. She has screwed up at least 2 cabinet posts in Germany. Which included mucking up procurement completely... and losing at lawfare with the supplying companies.
Would almost certainly have done better with nation state procurement; some nations would have probably over ordered and could have transferred to others in that event.
I could understand the EU pooling if they'd gone Dutch on improving production capacity. But they didnt....
I don't think the problem was the principle of EU ordering, it was the execution. The EU could have ordered from a dozen different suppliers, and paid for them to produce ahead of approval, and paid for expansion of facilities.
But they didn't for two reasons:
1. The EU's decision makers are a long way away from voters. There was no Bibi or Johnson that had to answer to voters and who realised that getting everyone vaccinated would be very popular.
2. The EU doesn't actually have a lot of money. It's total budget is only a little larger than Belgium's. It never had the financial resource to commit the €100bn or so that would be needed to really accelerate vaccine production for a bloc the size of the EU. This should have been admitted early on.
The EU has a lot less money to throw around since we left.
It's almost as if we took the money we were paying the EU and, er, spent it on the NHS instead...
On the EU, this is a perceptive analysis of its problems from a journalist who is generally seen as pro-EU and critical of Brexit. For his pains he has had loads of abuse from Remainers
As I have mooted before, the west is dividing post Brexit, into the Anglosphere and the EU
I don't think it does to overplay this - the new administration obviously desires good relations with the EU, and it is ten times bigger than we are
LOL.
Unintentional I'm sure but that's a classic example of overplaying. People tend to imagine the EU as bigger than it is, or the UK as smaller than it is.
In no metric is the EU ten times bigger than we are. By population there's six times bigger, by GDP they're five times bigger.
When it comes to realistic military projection power we're probably half their size - and can actually act as one voice.
That's why the UK can be a significant and dependable ally for America. We are a large country still, not a superpower but not tiny either, a genuine power still.
Sorry, that's me typing before engaging brain and using excessively large round numbers. I do appreciate that the population of the EU27 is not 670 million.
What about surface area? At a guess I would say that the EU is more than ten times as big as the UK.
On the EU, this is a perceptive analysis of its problems from a journalist who is generally seen as pro-EU and critical of Brexit. For his pains he has had loads of abuse from Remainers
As I have mooted before, the west is dividing post Brexit, into the Anglosphere and the EU
I don't think it does to overplay this - the new administration obviously desires good relations with the EU, and it is ten times bigger than we are - but OTOH some people are also too negative about the whole Trump/Johnson comparison thing. Johnson is obviously not the same as Trump, and nor is the new President thick. The UK Government is very keen on the green agenda, and is hawkish on both Russia and China (during a period in which the EU has stitched up a chummy new trade agreement with the Chinese, and the Germans in particular are cosying up to Putin.) NordStream 2 is a notable problem because it circumvents existing land routes across various Eastern European states, and leaves Ukraine in particular increasingly vulnerable to further Russian aggression - something about which goody-two-shoes Merkel (let alone the new leader of the CDU) cares not one iota.
Fundamentally, Britain and the United States have a number of common interests. If we can work together on those then there is no reason why relations shouldn't be cordial.
Point of order, the EU is ~5x the GDP of the UK and around 7x the population. The numbers don't stack up for the EU as much as most think, especially wrt to foreign policy.
I think one of the more interesting things wrt EU is how will the self-perception be affected as it changes from "the world's largest free trade area" to number 4 or 5 amongst near-equals.
Near equals?
Er, the EU - post Brexit and mid-Covid - is already dwarfed by the RECP in the Pacific.
At the moment the EU is about 10-15% of global GDP (it’s hard to be precise amidst the volatility). The RECP is about 30% of global GDP - vastly bigger and growing faster.
Comments
Who was it who suggested the other day that there should be a public holiday to celebrate when the vaccination campaign has been completed? I think that's a good idea. We don't have enough public holidays in this country anyway: one paltry bank holiday between late May and Christmas. It's stingy.
Also, yet ANOTHER away win in the 6N. The lack of home crowds is really telling.
And to TSE for the typo-hunt.
Regardless, it might be rather nice to have a national day that's for everyone to enjoy. Religious festivals and the current menu of welcome but rather soulless bank holidays don't really cut it.
It is one of the clearest areas where we need to be talking about transfer of Best Practice, but we only to that by comparing data.
We know the Germany did well by dint of having more in place regional labs that could catch wave one, and the UK by having various national databases in place
built as far back as the Blair era. Including ones that people like me may well have objected to on Civil Liberties grounds.
I think one point for the EU now is that the UK has learnt the consequences of the UK variant over Christmas with a large number of unnecessary deaths (10-15k?) - others now know that that is coming.
Personally I hope that there is a benefit to be gained by some EU countries adjusting strategy on dose intervals, and as data comes in from UK I hope that some will do so.
What she sees in von der Leyen, is very hard to understand. She has screwed up at least 2 cabinet posts in Germany. Which included mucking up procurement completely... and losing at lawfare with the supplying companies.
Cable completely snapped free of the wall and swinging wildly. Fixed by 3.
Thanks to Northern Power. Don't know how much these guys are paid to be on our roof in a gale on a Sunday putting new cabling in, but they sure do earn it.
WW was always analytical with the aim of presenting a case, whereas my perception of AR and PB are that it is far more about throwing a stone into a pool to generate comments.
Tx for the comment.
An insane idea but one that was almost inevitable given that the answer ‘more Europe’, despite often being a terrible idea (cf the euro) is woven into the DNA of everything the EU does - as Brexiteers have been pointing out for decades.
I could understand the EU pooling if they'd gone Dutch on improving production capacity. But they didnt....
England numbers are still cratering but in cases per head of population there is still far more happening in England. In the last 7 days Scotland has recorded 107 cases per 100,000 whilst England has had 167 per 100,000 (The ONS estimates are England 1 in 80 people, Scotland 1 in 150).
My fear is that once England gets down to current Scotland level of infections it too will level off. That the level of restrictions we have can get down to a steady state there but not lower.
It is why I think Scottish School opening on the 22nd of Feb is a busted flush. Opening the schools will push R higher and R is currently 1 in Scotland. You can't take an action that puts R above 1, that's a slow motion suicide note.
EDIT: I see that Kent is at 105 per 100k, the same level as Scotland. A good candidate to see if it "Does a Scotland" and levels off.
Any idea why that is? Is there not as much testing and tracing going on?
EU are generating roudnup reports every week or two:
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/news-events/covid-19-monitoring-vaccination-progress-europe
That has much interesting information within. They are still struggling with this like sequencing, and distribution is clearly not as regular across countries as would be ideal.
There are perhaps some problems with having an extra tier of governance at EU level, but there may also be benefits. Time will tell.
https://twitter.com/lukemcgee/status/1360882281527840768?s=21
Saka is a superstar, ESR pretty damn good too.
Moyes has done a great job, he was very harshly sacked last time. Soucek was a fantastic signing
In a closed system NPIs will have a constant R so as long as people aren't breaking the rules I don't see why the R will have trended to 1 other than having to accommodate a more transmissive variant into the overall figures.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/the-pandemic-could-be-effectively-over-by-april-j-p-morgan-says-heres-why-51613163599
The SII in India, for example, who were onto AZ early (deal signed in June 2020) had some tens of millions of doses manufactured before the end of 2020.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/healthcare/biotech/pharmaceuticals/astrazeneca-serum-institute-of-india-sign-licensing-deal-for-1-billion-doses-of-oxford-vaccine/articleshow/76202016.cms
That has not hindered the build-up here.
And it will feel like an eternity.
But I really can't emphasise enough how much the analysis above misses the tsunami of vaccine availability there will be.
Pfizer - just four weeks ago - said they would deliver 1.2 billion doses in 2021. They now say they can deliver 2 billion.
The Serum Institute of India is going to produce a further 2 billion doses of AstraZeneca and Novavax.
Moderna only ever sold about 60% of its billion doses of capacity for 2021, planning on selling additional doses to the highest bidder. (And in LA, the price of a pair of private Moderna jabs has fallen from $10,000 to a little bit less than $5,000 in the last three weeks - although it's worth noting there's a bit of a mark up un there.)
Novavax, CureVac, Valneva, Johnson & Johnson, etc., are all ramping up production.
There has also been massive over-ordering. Not just in the UK, but in the US as well. There is talk in the US of not approving the (90% effective) Novavax vaccine at all, as it simply isn't as efficacious as Moderna and Pfizer.
I suspect you will see governments in the EU making direct orders of vaccines, particularly of those where they are not bound by EU solidarity (i.e. buying vaccines from manufacturers where the EU didn't order). I also suspect you will see the EU announce increased orders, just as the US has announced bigger orders of Pfizer and Moderna.
It's worth remembering the UK only really started vaccinating people eight weeks ago, and look how far we've gone. Israel has done even better and has got to 60 doses per 100 people in the same time.
Once vaccine availability is not the problem (and that will happen much faster than people think), then arms will get jabbed.
Here's my proposition.
CV19 is considered 'practically' eliminated when cases per 100k fall to below 5 and stay there.
I think Israel will be there in early April. I think the UK will be there at the end of April. And I think the EU will be there in early to mid-July. (Now, there will EU countries full of vaccine refuseniks - like France - who might do worse, and there will be those who will do better.)
That's a 10 week or so gap between the UK and the EU. Happy to have some small bets with PBers if you like.
That's my story, and no one can disprove it.
Anyone remember their foray into polling in 2017?
*JP Morgan's CDS pricing model (published as the standard through ISDA) had a couple of basic maths errors.
Ignoring the most recent couple of days (incomplete), the 7-day total to the 10th was 5,764 while the 7-day total to the 3rd was 6,743 (with a uniform decline between those numbers)
The lack of action against Hungary and Poland is nothing new. France has long ignored the rules whenever they don't suit her.
Since the UK is a nation that plays by the rules, see the histrionics when it was suggested we would not, being in an institution that relies on self restrain constrains us more than others.
The lowest Sunday stats for aaaaaaaages?
Significant disparities in vaccine uptake among healthcare workers in England may undermine the rollout and its ability to bring the coronavirus pandemic under control, with far lower rates among black and south Asian staff, workers under 30, and those living in the most deprived areas, a scientific adviser to the government has said.
Doctors at the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS trust, which employs one of the largest and most diverse healthcare workforces in the country, raised the issue on Sunday after releasing the first public data on vaccination rates among UK healthcare workers.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/14/vaccine-rollout-caution-some-health-workers-england
Reading the piece, the disparities in terms of take-up are astonishing. Scandalous, in fact. As with the care homes, if the staff won't get vaccinated they jeopardise the welfare of the patients. And there's certainly no point in the Government putting out the kind of guilt tripping adverts, like the one that's just been playing on the TV as I've been typing, entreating the public to protect the NHS if large chunks of the NHS workforce won't bloody well protect themselves.
I mean, is medicine in this country to be governed by science, or by antique prejudices and bullshit shared on anti-social media? Not good enough.
The problem was that a lot of people like using "The EU" as their method of pushing agendas. Rather like the misuse of Health and Safety by morons*.
*Who should be blindfolded. And left to wander in buildings full of live, exposed wires and unguarded, empty elevator shafts....
Getting a better deal was the wrong question and wrong priority. Getting as many as possible as fast as possible should have been the priority.
Garbage In, Garbage Out. They started with the wrong priorities so the output was inevitable.
https://twitter.com/erikbrattberg/status/1360814989326614529?s=21
As I have mooted before, the west is dividing post Brexit, into the Anglosphere and the EU
It’s rarely stopped France (for example) preempting its decisions, and in the context of a worldwide pandemic which has cost tens of trillions, the likelihood of the commission pursuing action would have been negligible.
And would have caused a crisis all of its own had they done so. UvdL would have been more of a hissing and a byword than she is now.
As I said, our leaving has, IMO, changed the EU for the worse.
Yep. Good point.
https://twitter.com/DickKingSmith/status/1335237496981041153
"Then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel
Is just the freight train coming your way"
But, ok, I defer. I'm not watching till the fans are back.
Interesting thought.
One notion I had in my head before Christmas was that lockdown should release when case incidence was below 20-50 per 100k - on the scale where the country is currently averaged at 200 (?) .
Which was one of the thresholds we originally debated as a switch level between the original tiers 1 and 2, and then tier 2 turned out not to cause much reduction iirc, under conditions which existed then.
We then unlocked early and at a higher level.
Perhaps if we had waited until a lower incidence level that gives more reaction time to sit on it again before the incidence gets so savagely out of control -which is one repeated pattern seen in the UK.
I'm hoping that the vaccine will be providing an immunity buffer against any explosion into a 3rd wave, which on my numbers above will not be in place elsewhere in Europe for some time yet.
Mitigations are available in the very short term - adjusting vaccine strategy, or maintaining a strong lock down.
And in some places varied population density, household structure (1 person households in Sweden etc?), and demographics.
Time will tell.
Yuge study of 600,000 vaccinees shows 94% drop in symptomatic infections, and no diminution of effect in over 70s. Not clear how many of these are first dose vs both dose cases.
I can understand that where moving into the EU has helped lock-in democratic models, as in post-communist Eastern Europe.
Perhaps it is time for a generational shift to the next level, some weaning to take place, and the setup in Brussels to adjust again.
If that were the case, you’d expect the oldest BAME folk to be the most resistant. They’re not. As that article implicitly accepts, it’s young BAMEs believing bullshit spread on social media. Hindus believing the vaccine contains beef, Muslims pork, black people thinking it changes your DNA.
At some point we will have to get a bit tougher. If you want to work in social care, you have the jab. End of.
It’s striking how different the situation is in Europe, where anti vaxxing (in France and Germany, say) is much more of a white problem. I have a friend with a French mother and German step father, in their 60s. Living in Bavaria. Wealthy, middle class, highly educated. Complete anti vaxxers
But they didn't for two reasons:
1. The EU's decision makers are a long way away from voters. There was no Bibi or Johnson that had to answer to voters and who realised that getting everyone vaccinated would be very popular.
2. The EU doesn't actually have a lot of money. It's total budget is only a little larger than Belgium's. It never had the financial resource to commit the €100bn or so that would be needed to really accelerate vaccine production for a bloc the size of the EU. This should have been admitted early on.
Fundamentally, Britain and the United States have a number of common interests. If we can work together on those then there is no reason why relations shouldn't be cordial.
Fundamental root and branch reform is needed for the sake all all citizens of EU nations.
Unintentional I'm sure but that's a classic example of overplaying. People tend to imagine the EU as bigger than it is, or the UK as smaller than it is.
In no metric is the EU ten times bigger than we are. By population there's six times bigger, by GDP they're five times bigger.
When it comes to realistic military projection power we're probably half their size - and can actually act as one voice.
That's why the UK can be a significant and dependable ally for America. We are a large country still, not a superpower but not tiny either, a genuine power still.
"One of the most striking results in the study, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, came from an analysis of vaccination status by occupation. While uptake was highest – at 73% – in those in administrative and executive roles, doctors had the lowest rate of vaccination, at only 57%. The study notes that doctors are the only staff group at the NHS trust in which minority ethnic individuals form the majority."
How do they have any faith in any of the other 10s of 1000s of drugs they prescribe? Or don't they?
1. Investing to get as much manufacturing capacity on stream as fast as possible.
2. Haggling for months to negotiate a better deal.
It's outrageous, and we all know where it will end. The further we get into the epidemic, the larger the percentage of the dead will be comprised of non-white people, and the howling about institutional racism will get louder and louder and louder. It won't be the fault of the refuseniks and the people who put them up to it, it'll be the fault of society in general, and the Government in particular, for being racist. Well, forgive me if I don't buy it.
If we're all expected to suffer because the science says that we must, then that certainly includes health and care workers. The ones who won't accept the vaccines should be ashamed of themselves.
I'm not going to try and call the mix between that being an attempt to draw a line where the EC want to division to be on EU influence on healthcare and managing any potential fallout. I think it is probably mixed, and it is inevitably mixed.
Professionals closest to the frontline can be conservative. As a Type I diabetic with a big astigmatism in one eye I am always keeping a watch on laser treatment, as it could save me quite a chunk on complex glasses. But of course there is a big downside.
Optometrists still wearing glasses rather than taking up laser eye treatment is always an interesting watch.
Having seen a few examples, I can understand why.
Sorry, no links.
We were a significant and dependable ally in Iraq, and I seem to remember the outcome there being that more repair contracts were awarded by America to Dutch companies than to British ones. Is just being noticed by them for a minute reward enough?
It's strange - I put it down to too much American television blurring peoples' mental boundaries.
Near equals?
Er, the EU - post Brexit and mid-Covid - is already dwarfed by the RECP in the Pacific.
At the moment the EU is about 10-15% of global GDP (it’s hard to be precise amidst the volatility). The RECP is about 30% of global GDP - vastly bigger and growing faster.
It was therefore uniquely poorly positioned to fill the role it took, and it combined that with having "leaders" who failed to notice this and who were not directly answerable to voters.
For the EU's sake, the parliament should get rid of UvdL and the vaccine lady.