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I’d like to see betting markets on how many MPs and MSPs defect to Alba by the end of May – politica
I’d like to see betting markets on how many MPs and MSPs defect to Alba by the end of May – politicalbetting.com
Mr MacAskill says he intends to continue as an MP and will work with SNP group at Westminster. But he’s quit @theSNP to stand for new party. https://t.co/CZ01khrdfo
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Scotland needed a Mandela, instead of Nelson we got Winnie
"My hunch is that we won’t see that many defections at Holyrood because of the forthcoming election where it will take an astonishing level of chutzpah to fight an election under one party’s banner then defect to another shortly after being (re)elected, I think that level of chutzpah required is beyond most politicians these days."
Chutzpah is something no politician is ever short of.
https://www.politico.eu/article/irish-hospitals-vaccination-program-ended-after-it-gave-leftover-shots-to-elite-school/
Scotland 26,902 / 17,606
Wales 22,228 /11,920
Yet again that's a proportionately greater day for Wales than anywhere else.
After a strong start compared to the rest of the EU, Ireland has recently been falling well behind.
The problem there is how few doses there have been given out.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/28/jean-claude-juncker-and-dominic-cummings-unite-on-ursula-von-der-leyen-eu-stupid-vaccine-war
There is strategy behind the madness?
In Ireland they've taken three months to do about one-seventh of first doses. I know Max and RCS are confident that the tsunami of vaccine doses is approaching, but any young teacher in Ireland could be forgiven for doing the Maths and wondering what year they will have to wait for, rather than which week or month.
Oh, sorry.
I hope people don't mind me reposting this but it was my favourite episode of Question Time.
The pb conversation today has brought this to mind not least since two of the panellists have been mentioned on this thread.
Question Time on the Rushdie knighthood. Christopher Hitchens was a friend of Rushdie which might explain things a bit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hmv2sL2qkIM&t=782s
At least we can be comforted that the SCon scabies are once more relegated to irrelevance in the pecking..biting?..order.
And yes, I know it's probably far too long
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I tend to think that both vaccine hesitancy and it’s more acute cousin of antivaxxing tend to stem from fear of the unknown. Which is, to be fair, starting from a rational base: “they want to inject something into my body; I don’t know what it is or how it works…” which can easily mutate into fear.
Nothing insulting about that: fear is natural. When used properly, it can give caution and care (technically, my caution and care in pre-flighting my microlight stems from fear of what could happen if things went wrong).
So would it help if people had a better idea of what it involves? You see people saying “well, we don’t know what’s in them!” about the vaccines, when, in actual fact, the full details are not only well known to the MHRA, they’re published in the paperwork you receive on vaccination. It’s just that we (understandably) don’t understand the specifics.
We have to start with how the immune system works. Which is fantastically complicated, but from what I’ve seen it seems to simplify down to this:
Mode 1 – instant and indiscriminate
The Immune system has two modes of operation. The first, call it “mode 1” is what it does instantly on attack. It’s called “the innate immune system”; I’m calling it “Mode 1”, and it’s a general, all-purpose assault on whatever has invaded. Ideally, it will kill it off, but for more sophisticated attacks, it buys time for Mode 2.
Mode 1 is sort of like spraying the affected area with weed-killer. Killing off everything there with an all-purpose chemical warfare-style approach. Bad news for your cells in the area, but given how viruses can replicate exponentially, better to sacrifice a few cells than, well, all of them in the long run. It’s the bit where you feel really crappy, because, well, part of your body is now a battleground, your immune system is literally hurting yourself as well as the virus (which is also hurting you), but it’s doing it to prevent worse damage happening.
Mode 2 – slower, but targeted
While it’s spraying interferon, or interleukin, or whatever the technical names are, the scout components of Mode 2 (the adaptive immune system) are busily at work. They scope out the area to see what’s new and unrecognised, and they seize protein chains from it. Scurrying back, these helper T-cells engage the floating antibody factories that we call “B-cells” to try out production of tailored “antibodies” that are like floating gummi-bears; targeting some of these proteins in the hope of gumming up whatever the virus uses to enter your cells.
(1/5)
When things go wrong
With Covid, and without any inherent immunity (with “naïve” immune systems), you’ll take time to get Mode 2 into action, and while that’s happening, your Mode 1 and the virus are carrying out pitched warfare through your own system. And in some cases, Mode 2 takes quite a while to get going, for whatever reason (it’s worse the older you get).
In the unfortunate cases where Mode 1 itself is slow to swing into action, and then Mode 2 is slower still, the virus gets strong purchase and Mode 1 attacks get wider and wider-spread. And keep escalating while the laggard Mode 2 is trying to work out what to do. Turning whole swathes of your body into a blasted wasteland (usually starting in your lungs as that’s where the virus gets its first purchase, but if it managed to get further into your system, possibly other organs as well). And you get the severe cases, and even, sadly, deaths.
When things go right
When things go right, the B-cells are churning out antibodies that perfectly hook onto the spike the coronavirus uses to attack your cells. Rendering it inert and useless; your body is sterile ground for the virus without causing any damage to your system. This is “sterilising immunity”.
If some viruses get through (maybe through high viral loads), your patrolling killer T-cells are already in the area, and just when the virus thinks it’s getting somewhere, the cells it’s hijacked to reproduce itself go dark and offline. It can’t reproduce. You may have been asymptomatic, you may have been mildly ill if it managed to get going a bit before being fought back, but the amount of Mode 1 indiscriminate chemical warfare needed was minimal.
(2/5)
Or if you change the goalposts on the virus, and get the Mode 2 response ready before it even gets a chance to infect you.
Sometimes the antibody levels wane over time (because churning out loads of them forever when you’re not being attacked is unnecessary), but the recipes are still there in the B-cells, and your T-cells have the epitopes directly to hand. A fresh invasion can kick up a new Mode 2 response far faster than when you didn’t have all this ready, massivley reducing the chances of a worst-case serious illness.
Vaccines
This is our way of changing the game on the virus. We train the adaptive immune system before the virus hits, so that ideal response is not rare, or unlikely, but the common default.
There are multiple ways to do this. Most of us have vague memories of being told how the first vaccines were produced, using lighter and less dangerous versions of the actual viruses (cowpox instead of smallpox, for example). You could isolate the virus and pass it under unfavourable conditions until it liked those conditions better than humans – weakening it artificially – and then introduce it. Or you could grow the virus, and chemically kill it before introducing it, so it’s floating about in your system (all inert) but looks dodgy enough for your system to do something against it – because you could always be worried about the former way of doing things as you are, you know, literally infecting people with the actual virus, even if it’s weakened. If they have a compromised immune system, or you’ve got it a bit wrong, it’s bad news.
With the inactivated (killed) virus way of doing things, you needed an “adjuvant” – which is a chemical attached to effectively blare a trumpet that “YOU’RE BEING ATTACKED” and startle your immune system (both halves) into action.
(As an aside, it’s this adjuvant that causes the fluey negative side-effects. Your innate immune system, startled, swings into action briefly before concluding it’s all okay. In some people, it does it with less fanfare (without spilling its pint) and not causing you to feel crappy; in others, it gets more startled and goes a little overboard for a day or two).
(3/5)
These days, though, we can do it better and at even less risk. We have the adenovector vaccines (like Oxford/Astrazeneca, or the Johnson & Johnson, or the Sputnik) which take a chimpanzee adenovirus that doesn’t even infect humans, biologically castrate it anyway to turn any risk of replication from “deeply deeply implausible” to “just nope” and glue whatever bits of the virus you wish to vaccinate against to the outside. Basically, disguise it as the coronavirus (but the fake version simply cannot do any damage to you), with the spike protein on the outside, and pre-produced epitopes of the rest of it glued onto it.
(NB – I think they don’t actually use glue…)
This gets introduced (together with that adjuvant to alert your immune system), and away you go.
Or you can just introduce the spike protein and the epitopes attached to smaller particles – protein-based vaccines, like Novavax. Plus that adjuvant.
Or, using music analogues, now we’ve gone from wax cylinders (similar viruses) through vinyl (attenuated viruses) and tape (dead viruses) to CDs (adenovectors) and minidiscs (protein-based), to just sending in the information itself. The mp3 version – RNA vaccines – that just use the messaging system to tell the immune system what’s happening and what to look out for. While the safety profile of this was great, there were questions on whether it would actually be efficacious. Questions answered by November last year in the “hell, yeah!” results.
Although some people see the “mRNA” bit, decide it looks a lot like “DNA”, remember that’s something to do with genetics, and decide you’re genetically modifying your cells. Which is completely untrue – the mRNA can’t live long, can’t change you – it’s just messenger nucleic acids. That’s literally what the “m” stands for. Literally the only thing they worry about is that the lipids they use can, in rare circumstances, cause an allergic reaction to people very susceptible to allergens (and they’re on the lookout for that).
(4/5)
So, that’s what’s in them and how they work. In the Oxford/Astrazeneca one, it’s that adenovector, in lipids (fats, basically) with a couple of amino acids, sucrose (literally sugar), sodium chloride (literally salt, to make it similar to your body salt levels, I guess), water, an adjuvant, and an emulsifier to mix it together (you’ve already consumed plenty of that emulsifier, I’d guess, it’s used in plenty of foods and cosmetics).
The vaccines change the goalposts on the virus by causing the Mode 2 adaptive system to be ready before infection. The virus may think that’s being unfair, but who cares about being fair to a virus?
If antibodies are circulating at a high enough level, the virus gets nowhere and you are a sterile environment to it. No infection, no transmission; tough to be a virus today. If these have dropped a bit, or if the virus manages to mutate the spike a bit to make the antibodies less effective, it may get into cells again, but with all the epitopes the T-cells have available, it’ll have a massive challenge getting further than either asymptomatic infection or the sniffle stage. And your B-cells will be adapting the recipe pretty quickly. Goodbye virus pretty quickly, and without building to high viral loads or hanging around very long, its opportunities to spread beyond you get sharply curtailed.
The Oxford/Astrazeneca vaccine is an “adenovector” version (as are Johnson & Johnson, and Sputnik) that puts a counterfeit into you that so resembles the virus (but without the bad bits) that your Mode 2 system gets ready. The Novavax uses a protein-based version, and Pfizer and Moderna are the mp3 version. And as they’ve been carefully designed to present the perfect proteins for a really good response (including a mix of epitopes and different views of the spike), your B-cells don’t have much trial-and-error to do; they’ll have a certified effective output immediately, as will your T-cells.
The reason you may feel crappy for a while is the adjuvant which blares the alarm and causes your Mode 1 immunity to briefly kick in.
That’s about it. Oh, and these vaccines were all trialed in depth to see if the immune system (or the rest of your body) went ‘tilt’ for some reason (immune systems are complex) and passed in-depth safety trials. And as the immune response is pretty quick, it’s very rare for a bad side-effect to materialise months or years down the line – because it makes changes quickly or not at all. Not impossible, of course – the immune system is very complex – but I’ve not seen any immunologist worry about it due to how hugely unlikely it is. Compared to the chances of long-term bad side effects from the virus itself, it’s hardly even on the same planet.
(5/5)
I saw this and thought, really, come on, £2/hr....and of course its horseshit. I actually think the likes of Deliveroo approach is unfair in the sense of it is quite opaque how much you will make given it is a combination of different amounts per order, different multiplers and bonus "quests"...but campaigners don't do themselves any favours with repeating total bollocks.
If somebody was really only getting £2/hr, they wouldn't be doing this, would they...like come on.
What the BIJ idiots don't understand is a) log in / out of an app doesn't equal time working and b) most people deliver for multiple apps at the same time, so they are logged in, but actively rejecting jobs from one as they are busy on a different job.
The push for a guaranteed minimum wage might actually cut pay if you can't multi-app, which I think might be the solution these companies go down.
The batsmen are already a third of the way to the target. Will take months for the EU programme to get to a third done.
France’s vaccination rollout will have caught up with the UK’s “in a few weeks”, the country’s president Emmanuel Macron has said amid tensions over vaccine supplies.
At present, 11.45% of French people have received at least one vaccine, compared with 43.79% of Britons.
However, Macron told Le Journal du Dimanche newspaper that France had significantly stepped up the pace of its vaccine drive and said the UK’s rollout would slow down soon.
“In a few weeks we will have completely caught up with the British, who will meanwhile be increasingly dependent on us to vaccinate their population,” he said, referring to AstraZeneca supplies produced in the EU.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2021/mar/28/coronavirus-live-news-germany-risks-losing-control-of-covid-brazil-deaths-top-3000-for-second-day?page=with:block-606084398f08774d1beac794#block-606084398f08774d1beac794
But that prediction is implausible to say the least.
https://twitter.com/HugoGye/status/1376172470978420736 By Hugo's count
Does Dinesh Karthik post on PB?
Fat lady is warming up her vocal chords.
The creatures outside looked from Macron to Le Pen, and from Le Pen to Macron, and from Macron to Le Pen again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I always wondered how they would cope with the colour coding scheme used to label component values. It goes something like black(0), brown(1), red (2), orange, yellow, green, blue, ... white (I can't remember the bits in the middle)
eh?
When he started the job, how many had been actually vaccinated?
There may have been a well worked out theory plan, but the Germans had a very well worked out plan (see today's Observer) and they are failing.
Dare i suggest that the UK government might be deliberately feeding/"leaking" them faulty information to confuse them? (and possibly keep them from targeting Pfizer...). After all if we are on the sly utilising double agents to secretly tell them that we are getting all our AZ from Europe, when we really aren't getting any, then it prevents them looking elsewhere for export bans. It would certainly explain a lot of their increasingly bizarre statements and public behaviour.
Whilst the UK keeps rocketing on setting new records for first doses, giving very little indication whatsoever that we need to hold them back for second doses.
With so many wickets having been thrown away, India will walk it.
Is it that their healthcare system has done better than the NHS?
Or have the demographics of the cases been different?
European politicians seem to be under the impression that every individual not getting their second dose within 12 weeks will, at a minimum, be totally unprotected at that point, and are making it sound almost as if they will simply drop dead!
Whereas in reality it's a sliding level of declining protection (although it appears far more in the case of Pfizer, rather than AZ). And once the second dose is in, the booster is there. European politicians seem to think that if you miss the second dose you need to have two more.
Basically the only figure that you can trust for cross country comparisons will be excess deaths.
Its very puzzling, France genuinely seems to have a much lower CFR than the UK and I've no idea why.
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/excess-mortality-across-countries-in-2020/
I would wonder if it’s the climate meaning they spend more time outdoors, but that hasn’t helped Italy or Spain.
Our case rates/deaths/hospitalisations are all super low which is great. Our vaccine programme is heading to the moon.
Meanwhile we point our fingers and laugh at the EU countries with their spiralling case rates and new lockdowns.
However. We have been locked down for three months. Nothing open. Nothing allowed. Virtually. I don't think this has been the case in most of Europe.
Vaccine efficacy is somewhere over 90%. That means that when we come out of lockdown, plenty of people will get this disease.
The two things that are giving me some degree of comfort are Israel and schools having been back without an explosion of cases.
Obesity could explain it, they're the least obese OECD nation with the UK one of the most.