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If like me you thought your AstroZeneca jab was second best some good news – politicalbetting.com
If like me you thought your AstroZeneca jab was second best some good news – politicalbetting.com
Wasn’t happy with the negative press this excellent vaccine received at the start of the year. It wasn’t warranted, obviously overblown and now seems to be neck and neck with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in terms of efficacy.https://t.co/ZTYI7qPVXS https://t.co/mlSxujSWIV pic.twitter.com/fShCP8fcTR
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I really hope there is a vaccine bonus for our people. We deserve it for taking it to our
heartsarms with such gusto.Getting the whole world vaccinated seems a more laudable aim unless you want the big cruise ships to offer journeys for the vaccinated British only as Royal Caribbean has done with its Odyssey of the Seas ship which has been moved from Rome to Haifa and will do sailings only for Israeli citizens.
Khan gets a 5/10 from me.
Cases are now below 100 per 100k in every single local authority area in southern England except Luton, along with the whole of Wales and Northern Ireland. From a personal point of view, I'm also pleased to see that both of the MSOA counting areas in my little town have now gone blank, and so have both the places where my parents live. The big question now is whether or not the motheaten blue patches on the map start spreading again next week because of the schools, and whether or not this effect turns out to be temporary.
The deaths and hospitalisations keep on coming, but are at least down by 34% and 29% respectively this week relative to the previous one. Right now things are continuing to improve.
https://twitter.com/JoshBerryComedy/status/1346788740610592768?s=20
I mention this because - by and large - what a lot of firms want is someone who's had a couple of years to mature and get into working habits, and have something other than their degree to talk about.
I went Red Brick, rather than Oxbridge - I wanted 10 week terms, more fun as well as a very good degree - and I went Big4/niche consultancy, rather than McKinsey or US investment banking route because I didn't want to work all hours God sends. My wife is the same with niche mid-size law firms rather than the large US ones.
Basically, I want a good career and a good salary but I really can't be arsed with the very very top. I like my downtime.
I think J&J might turn out to be the best one as it only requires on jab.
Although I fully expect regardless of the brand we'll all require annual jabs.
But I'm glad I got the Pfizer one, I mean has AZN ever come up with a tablet like viagra, that's two humanity altering game changers from one company.
However, loads of firms have got graduate programmes, we shut ours down a year or so before I joined and apparently the company has no intention of bringing it back mainly for the reasons you say.
Presumably the next stage is a vaccine which offers 3-5 years of high immunity.
But it is indisputably true that getting as many first doses into arms as quickly as possible will have the biggest long term impact on the transmission of CV19 in a country.
(And there's a second reason why holding back second doses is wrong. Vaccine supply is only rising. Novavax, J&J and Moderna's European plant are all going to be available in the coming months, as well as big production increases from Pfizer and AstraZeneca. And you know... even if this is wrong - and it's not - then the difference between a 3-4 week gap and a 5-6 week one is going to be utterly negligible. Holding back second doses - and California is as guilty as Germany here - is stupid beyond belief.)
I, with my Cambridge philosophy degree, was definitely the outlier.
Whether we need to do it every year will be up for debate but I think the government won't want to take any risks this winter at all by relying on general t-cells rather than specific antibodies to fight mutations.
Imperial are working on a non-spike based vaccine which might become a good very long term immunity vaccine but it needs a lot more development.
Johnson’s biggest likely outlay is the result of what one Old Etonian school friend describes as “his pecker problem”. The friend recalls: “Boris has always had a problem keeping his pecker in his trousers. And that’s what so often has led him into trouble.”
Six children — those are the ones that are known about — by three women, plus two divorces and an imminent third wedding to pay for don’t come cheap.
Johnson is still believed to help support two of his four children with his second wife, Marina Wheeler, who are all now in their twenties after expensive private schools and universities.
Stephanie, aged 11, is Johnson’s fifth child, through his affair with Helen Macintyre, an art consultant, and Wilfred will be one next month.
Johnson’s first divorce, from Allegra Mostyn-Owen in 1993, was not costly and they had no children. But his divorce last year from Wheeler, a human rights QC, after 25 years together, was a different matter. Having separated in the summer of 2018 after Johnson met Symonds, it took them until February 2020 to reach a financial settlement.
Word in legal circles is that Johnson was by then desperate to finalise the divorce, because Symonds was pregnant and he was determined not to announce the pregnancy until Wheeler, and their children, had been placated.
That gave his soon-to-be-ex-wife considerable leverage in the protracted negotiations, leading to what one QC who professes familiarity with the details describes as “one of the most devastatingly one-sided divorces in British legal history”.
It even gave Wheeler a considerable percentage of Johnson’s future lucrative earnings after he leaves office. Might it be no wonder then that Boris needs a leg-up with the home decor?
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-is-boris-johnson-so-skint-5jvvbgdxg
But it's a function of two things.
Firstly, how much the virus mutates.
Secondly, how quickly the immune system forgets.
On the first, the more people have (at least some) immunity, the less opportunity there is for the virus to mutate. It's no coincidence that the two most dangerous CV19 strains came from places (Brazil and SA) where the virus was essentially out of control. As vaccines get rolled out, the number of hosts declines, and so we should see less mutation in future.
On the second, we don't know yet. But we do know that for many viruses, the immune system has a *very* long memory. And this isn't a one-zero thing. You might catch it again, but the body's immune system will usually have some head start, because it's seen something like it before.
My guess is that we'll all have booster shots for a couple of years, and it will probably get bundled with the flu shot.
When he was married to Marina Wheeler, she brought the salary commensurate with a QC.
We should be amongst the highest uptake in the world.
My friend has five kids, he says the money isn't the issue, it's constant worrying about them.
Or the fact he's never had any peace and quiet since 2004.
Europe has managed to create
i) Supply problems (Late signing contracts, stingy on cash)
ii) Demand problems (Macron's comments et al)
iii) Diplomatic problems (Australia)
iv) Gone cap in hand to Biden.
Every day I would announce a date. And that date would be the one that anyone born before would be able to sign up for a vaccine appointment. So, you might start with 1/1/1940, and then 12/6/1940... etc.
I might even have them as walk ins.
You wouldn't get to choose your vaccine type (unless you had a history of anaphylaxis) when you could avoid the mRNA vaccines.
Super simple. I'd prioritise having as close to zero vaccine inventory as possible, and getting as many jabs into as many arms as possible.
At some point you'd need to have two dates (with the second date being the one from which people could get second doses).
https://youtu.be/xZT-IGErsJQ
It also doesn't help that Switzerland rejected authorization for the AstraZeneca jab, and it hasn't been authorised in America yet.
I don't think I'd have enjoyed it.
As so often, however, the historical comparisons work out rather nicely in Boris' favour:
http://www.andrewlownie.co.uk/authors/david-lough/books/no-more-champagne-churchill-and-his-money
Lough uses Churchill’s own most private records, many never researched before, to chronicle his family’s chronic shortage of money, his own extravagance and his recurring losses from gambling or trading in shares and currencies. Churchill tried to keep himself afloat by borrowing to the hilt, putting off bills and writing ‘all over the place’; when all else failed, he had to ask family or friends to come to the rescue. This they did on no fewer than six occasions unearthed by Lough, the last when Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940. Yet within five years he had taken advantage of his worldwide celebrity to transform his private fortunes with the same ruthlessness as he waged war, reaching 1945 with today’s equivalent of £3 million in the bank. His lucrative war memoirs were still to come.
Zero inventory. Maximum jabs in arms. Those have to be the priority.
https://twitter.com/john_lichfield/status/1368149700520579072
I've had a very interesting career: I've always worked on iconic major projects and programmes, from airports in the UK, Iraq, Russia and Saudi, the Olympics, National Grid, Crossrail, PoW restoration, NR GWR and Transpennine upgrade, and I'm currently looking at the UK Space Agency new UK satellite programme.
It hasn't made me rich, but it's always been interesting. I don't regret it.
https://twitter.com/john_lichfield/status/1368152875256459266?s=19
The guy who led the Prince of Wales carrier build is one of my clients at the moment actually.
It is clear the quietly update the backend of a new cohort. So when it is close to your turn, well worth trying to see if you can get an appointment.
In many teams, the junior analyst (i.e, me) was abused. They were tied to their desk basically doing all the grunt work for their bosses.
My bosses - by contrast - gave a shit about my professional development and from day one took me to meet investors and company management, and helped me along. I remain good friends with them both to this day.
So while most junior analysts left after two years to go and do an MBA, I was promoted to Associate, and then left with one of my bosses to start a business with him a few years later.
Was it hard work? Yes, sure. I worked until 7 or 8 most days, and was often in on Sundays.
But it was also fun, and I got to meet lots of interesting people and do interesting things.
BBC News - Jack Dorsey: Bids reach $2.5m for Twitter co-founder's first post
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-56307153
Maybe Stanley Johnson was remiss in advising Alexander of this nugget of reality during his "birds and bees" discussion.
Yet it is hated.
So why do some think that very narrow Wealth Taxes will work, or be acceptable to the general populus?
The only place afaik that raises genuinely significant amounts through a Wealth Tax is Switzerland, and that does it by application to a significant proportion of the population, and raises about 4% of tax revenue. All the narrow wealth taxes in Europe (France, Spain, Norway iirc) only raise around 1% of tax revenue at best.
IHT raises £5bn a year, which is 0.7% of tax reveue. Ish.
I won't engage with the "Independent Schools can't ever help Equality of Opportunity" bollocks, because it is even more bollocks currently than it has been in the past. Anyone thinking that first needs to move their head out of 1893.
Have a nice evening.
Personally I prefer a gross assets levy, as it would discourage people from leveraging up.
Twelve months on from Europe’s first coronavirus lockdown, restrictions still dominate life in Italian city"
https://www.ft.com/content/881fac79-5515-421d-be60-3e1c3a74673e
Net Wealth Taxes
Norway levies a net wealth tax of 0.85 percent on individuals’ wealth stocks exceeding NOK1.5 million (€152,000 or US $170,000), with 0.7 percent going to municipalities and 0.15 percent to the central government. Norway’s net wealth tax dates to 1892. Under COVID-19-related measures, individual business owners and shareholders who realize a loss in 2020 are eligible for a one-year deferred payment of the wealth tax.
Spain’s net wealth tax is a progressive tax ranging from 0.2 percent to 3.75 percent on wealth stocks above €700,000 ($784,000; lower in some regions), with rates varying substantially across Spain’s autonomous regions (Madrid offers a 100 percent relief). Spanish residents are subject to the tax on a worldwide basis while nonresidents pay the tax only on assets located in Spain.
Switzerland levies its net wealth tax at the cantonal level and covers worldwide assets (except real estate and permanent establishments located abroad). The tax rates and allowances vary significantly across cantons. The Swiss net wealth tax was first implemented in 1840.
There is a lot of interesting work around.
Then she got a permanent job in their legal department (she has a law degree). Suffice to say it ended with a stint at a psychiatric unit. If I had known just how badly she had been treated by the scum that work in that department, I'd taken matters into my own hands.
There's a thing called the IST, which is 0.5-1.5% on assets over approx 1m Euro, and brings in about 2bn Euro per year.
It was Monsieur Hollande's who brought in a 75% Supertax on income over 1m Euro as a great white hope, which went flipperty-flapperty-flop when they all started leaving. Any 1970s footballer could have told him that. Raised about £100m a year before they killed it.
Mons. Hollande was the invisible French President with the ginormous forehead who was caught going to to see his mistress on a moped.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/06/struggling-eu-urges-us-agree-export-covid-vaccines/
Wealth Tax
It was abolished by the French government in September 2017.
Wealth Tax (solidarity tax on wealth), in French impôt de solidarité sur la fortune (ISF) was an annual tax payable by individuals the net value of whose wealth exceeds a certain amount.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_France#Taxes_on_wealth
OK, being wary of new variants etc., but surely at some point we will have vaccinated a sufficient proportion that they will feel the can breathe a sigh of relief, and presumably that fraction is not 100% of all UK adults?
Oh and the fact he's a terrible negotiator.
https://twitter.com/aslavitt46/status/1368271851735158789
I mean who would trust the word of Boris Johnson, much better to get it down in writing via a court order.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/mar/06/laurence-fox-joins-london-mayoral-race-on-anti-lockdown-ticket
What's the over/under for his share?