Chile is over 50 doses per 100 people in terms of vaccinations. That's actually ahead of us... They're either using Sinovac in a suboptimal manner or Sinovac is less effective than Astra/Pfizer.
Probably a bit of both.
It's a bit misleading to say they're ahead of us. We have significantly more people with at least one dose.
Sure, but they've still used more vaccinations total - if they'd gone with a 12 week strategy for Sinovac they might be doing better.
Chile is over 50 doses per 100 people in terms of vaccinations. That's actually ahead of us... They're either using Sinovac in a suboptimal manner or Sinovac is less effective than Astra/Pfizer.
Probably a bit of both.
Sinovac is bollocks. You don't create a successful vaccine then the Chinese government come along and have the top two officials removed a few weeks later.
Show your papers or you can't go to the Docs, the supermarkets, or the pub.
Ministers are discussing drawing up a list of “essential” places, including hospitals, GP surgeries and supermarkets, where vaccination passports would not be used, as Boris Johnson prepares to announce next week whether they will become a feature of British life.
Covid status certificates, available to those who have been vaccinated, recently tested negative or who have developed antibodies after contracting the virus, are being taken increasingly seriously at the top of government as a way of aiding the unlocking of the economy.
Just over five weeks ago Johnson announced that Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office minister, would lead a review of the issue. While he was not expected to report until mid-June, the prime minister is expected to provide a “high-level direction of travel” update on certificates on Monday. If he says that he sees a role for passports, the Gove review will continue to June, focusing on solving practical difficulties.
40 Tory rebels needed to overturn the government majority.
Just the start ... it always has been.
Expect digital ID cards too. The consultation on that has already gone through.
Then comes a Chinese-style social credit system. The government has been working on that for around two years.
Think of the future UK population as a herd of 67 M electronically-tagged sheep.
A year ago, anyone who suggested that this might be on the cards was a 'mad conspiracy theorist'.
Watch recent interviews given by Nick Hudson in which he demolishes most of the policies adopted since Mar. 2020. All developed countries had detailed plans for dealing with epidemics, based on successful past experience. They then tore them up, almost all at once. Funny, that.
40 Tory rebels needed to overturn the government majority.
Just the start ... it always has been.
Expect digital ID cards too. The consultation on that has already gone through.
Then comes a Chinese-style social credit system. The government has been working on that for around two years.
Think of the future UK population as a herd of 67 M electronically-tagged sheep.
A year ago, anyone who suggested that this might be on the cards was a 'mad conspiracy theorist'.
Watch recent interviews given by Nick Hudson in which he demolishes most of the policies adopted since Mar. 2020. All developed countries had detailed plans for dealing with epidemics, based on successful past experience. They then tore them up, almost all at once. Funny, that.
I think Dan is half-right here. I don't think Starmer will oppose it, exactly; more likely he'll cavil and mumble, and as usual end up half-supporting it in a way which pleases no-one:
I think Dan is half-right here. I don't think Starmer will oppose it, exactly; more likely he'll cavil and mumble, and as usual end up half-supporting it in a way which pleases no-one:
Show your papers or you can't go to the Docs, the supermarkets, or the pub.
Ministers are discussing drawing up a list of “essential” places, including hospitals, GP surgeries and supermarkets, where vaccination passports would not be used, as Boris Johnson prepares to announce next week whether they will become a feature of British life.
Covid status certificates, available to those who have been vaccinated, recently tested negative or who have developed antibodies after contracting the virus, are being taken increasingly seriously at the top of government as a way of aiding the unlocking of the economy.
Just over five weeks ago Johnson announced that Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office minister, would lead a review of the issue. While he was not expected to report until mid-June, the prime minister is expected to provide a “high-level direction of travel” update on certificates on Monday. If he says that he sees a role for passports, the Gove review will continue to June, focusing on solving practical difficulties.
Take that list of "essential" places, subtract the GPs and add in elderly care homes, and you obtain a list of those locations in which the bulk of infection has probably taken place. Which just goes, once again, to show that the argument that we somehow need to show our papers everywhere else in order to squash the Plague is a fiction.
Once we're all jabbed then the epidemic in Britain is finished. It's most of the way to being finished already. Papers are nothing to do with public health and everything to do with control.
Show your papers or you can't go to the Docs, the supermarkets, or the pub.
Ministers are discussing drawing up a list of “essential” places, including hospitals, GP surgeries and supermarkets, where vaccination passports would not be used, as Boris Johnson prepares to announce next week whether they will become a feature of British life.
Covid status certificates, available to those who have been vaccinated, recently tested negative or who have developed antibodies after contracting the virus, are being taken increasingly seriously at the top of government as a way of aiding the unlocking of the economy.
Just over five weeks ago Johnson announced that Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office minister, would lead a review of the issue. While he was not expected to report until mid-June, the prime minister is expected to provide a “high-level direction of travel” update on certificates on Monday. If he says that he sees a role for passports, the Gove review will continue to June, focusing on solving practical difficulties.
Take that list of "essential" places, subtract the GPs and add in elderly care homes, and you obtain a list of those locations in which the bulk of infection has probably taken place. Which just goes, once again, to show that the argument that we somehow need to show our papers everywhere else in order to squash the Plague is a fiction.
Once we're all jabbed then the epidemic in Britain is finished. It's most of the way to being finished already. Papers are nothing to do with public health and everything to do with control.
Before everyone has been offered a vaccine, discriminatory against the young. After. Totally unnecessary.
Chile is over 50 doses per 100 people in terms of vaccinations. That's actually ahead of us... They're either using Sinovac in a suboptimal manner or Sinovac is less effective than Astra/Pfizer.
Probably a bit of both.
Sinovac is bollocks. You don't create a successful vaccine then the Chinese government come along and have the top two officials removed a few weeks later.
Even were Chile using the same mix of vaccines as ourselves, they'd be seeing far less suppression at the moment on account that a far greater proportion of their whole vaccination program has happened in the last couple of weeks, so immunity hasn't fully kicked in for many. Any effect from lower efficacy of Sinovac is on top of that.
Total Covid patients in UK hospitals now down below 4,000. Deaths down nearly 40% in a week, now averaging about 45 per day for the last seven days and in steep and continuous decline. Vaccine 1st dose coverage approaching 60% of all adults. There are still pockets of the country where the Plague is somewhat more prevalent than elsewhere, but by and large things seem to be going reasonably well.
""Covid is not going to go away," he said. "You've got to work out what's a rational policy to this and here I would differentiate quite a lot between a pandemic environment and what you get with seasonal flu.
"Every year, somewhere between 7,000 and 9,000 citizens die of flu, most of them very elderly, and every few years you get a bad flu year where 20,000 to 25,000 die of it. The last time we had that was three years ago and no one noticed it.
"So it is clear we are going to have to manage it, at some point, rather like we manage the flu. Here is a seasonal, very dangerous disease that kills thousands of people and society has chosen a particular way round it.""
I'm still yet to see a compelling reason for vaccine passports, even on planes and cruise ships.
If I'm vaccinated, why do I care if everyone else is vaccinated or not? I have essentially 100% protection from COVID.
If I'm unvaccinated, well I can't access the service.
So who actually benefits?
Completely agree, but I wonder if the government is thinking ahead? Say we hit the autumn/winter and there are a not insignificant number of COVID deaths and that most of them are from ethnic minorities. Perhaps the government wants to be able to say they've done everything they can to encourage vaccinations.
Worth noting they are now getting 0.5% of the population vaccinated (i.e. getting a single dose) per day. Well before the uk, of course, but a significant acceleration on where they were a month ago.
Total Covid patients in UK hospitals now down below 4,000. Deaths down nearly 40% in a week, now averaging about 45 per day for the last seven days and in steep and continuous decline. Vaccine 1st dose coverage approaching 60% of all adults. There are still pockets of the country where the Plague is somewhat more prevalent than elsewhere, but by and large things seem to be going reasonably well.
@Gardenwalker very interesting video. Thank you for that.
Indeed. The question it raised in my mind, if the US is becoming Pacific-facing and the EU Eurasia-facing, is not so much how awkward that is for the UK, but rather that it presents us an opportunity not to be so defence-focused and to reshuffle our expectations of the economic vs military nature of our power and priorities.
If we are no longer at the centre of the battle zone, why do we need to find a place in a battle zone?
From what we read this morning, vaxports have little chance of getting through Parliament.
Remember they have powers that could keep the country locked up till the autumn. It need not be “pass this or we unlock with it”. It could be “pass this or we can’t unlock” and he blames Labour.
On cyclefree's question, no this time will not be different. I think the odds of us learning lessons from the positive and negative things around Covid, are a lot lower than people think, in the moment.
You can guarantee that all parties will commit to spending on pandemic preparedness following the next election. And then as the years go by, that budget will be chipped away at.
Yup, when we're 5 years into no pandemic a future government will look at the £1bn being spent on keeping a PPE strategic manufacturing reserve alive and say fuck it, I want that for a tax cut/spending rise.
One of the things I want looked at is the throw away culture for PPE - would it be better to go with re-usable protective systems? Even reusable filters?
This might also have some interaction with fit, comfort and the integration between the various parts of the PPE systems.
Some of the pictures of medics wearing stuff has looked patchy in coverage, lots of gaps and also cumbersome to wear.
Single use surgical drapes and gowns have a lot lower cross contamination issues as well as being significantly cheaper and easier to handle
With current materials - possibly. But one interesting advance, as a result of the chemicals revolution, is materials that can have long life and survive exposure to suitable cleaning agents.
So PPE you can dump into a bin full of a disinfectant, without it falling to bits?
Similarly, with mask technology, it may well be possible to design easy to disinfect systems that are re-usable.
You have to launder reusable ppe to be sure that you have adequately sterilised it. That needs space and capital expenditure on site (plus opportunity cost on the real estate) or expensive and complex outsourcing
1. Pfizer-BioNTech remains highly effective after six months. 2. It also appears to lose none of its efficacy against the South African variant.
Also the Brazilian variant?
There haven't been enough cases in the placebo group to know yet. However, this bodes well, because the antibody response drop was very similar between Brazil and SA variants.
I wonder if any government money has been spent trying to deal with Boris Johnson's inability to keep the snake inside the pet shop.
The man does his utmost to ensure there's a next generation of brits big enough pay your pension and all you di is criticise him
Really we should put our PM out to stud in Scotland and safeguard the Union..
Not such a good idea, a few months ago I read that he was barely on speaking terms with most of the kids he had with Marina Wheeler for the way he treated their mother.
Putting him out to stud in Scotland might be a mistake plus he doesn't give two hoots about the Union, as we saw with the no border down the Irish Sea.
Scaled up to the UK's population size that's now approximately 1,100 deaths a day. At peak the UK was averaging around 1,300 per day in each seven day period. The UK total for hospital patients peaked at about the same time as the daily death toll; Poland's hospital numbers are still going up. It's evidently very bad indeed over there at the moment; AIUI down in large part to the Kent variant.
Elsewhere, the French ICU total is now over 5,000 and still climbing. It does look like the tsunami that battered the UK and Portugal around the beginning of the year is now striking elsewhere.
Both of those things can be true. What is the implication here about specials? I think they are brilliant, and they are definitely on the front line.
Regularly? It is at best misleading as it is probably not what most people thought was meant by saying 12 years of frontline policing. That he has quit shows that he must know it was misleading as well, else he'd brazen it out.
Show your papers or you can't go to the Docs, the supermarkets, or the pub.
Ministers are discussing drawing up a list of “essential” places, including hospitals, GP surgeries and supermarkets, where vaccination passports would not be used, as Boris Johnson prepares to announce next week whether they will become a feature of British life.
Covid status certificates, available to those who have been vaccinated, recently tested negative or who have developed antibodies after contracting the virus, are being taken increasingly seriously at the top of government as a way of aiding the unlocking of the economy.
Just over five weeks ago Johnson announced that Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office minister, would lead a review of the issue. While he was not expected to report until mid-June, the prime minister is expected to provide a “high-level direction of travel” update on certificates on Monday. If he says that he sees a role for passports, the Gove review will continue to June, focusing on solving practical difficulties.
On single use vs reusable in a medical and pharmaceutical setting you have to consider the energy/carbon cost of autoclaving or steam sterilising. It isn't cheap.
This is what I used to do for a job.
Steam would be seriously impractical too, what about x-rays or microwaves?
On cyclefree's question, no this time will not be different. I think the odds of us learning lessons from the positive and negative things around Covid, are a lot lower than people think, in the moment.
Or lessons will be learnt in the short-term and forgotten again in the medium- to long-term. That seems to be the case in industrial disasters.
I was thinking the other day "I wonder how close SARS and MERS came to catastrophe?" I suspect that if someone in early 2019 had pointed to those diseases as reasons to spend billions of pounds preparing for a pandemic they would have received short shrift. "But nothing much happened? So it would be a waste of money."
I hope we learn some lessons from COVID-19, but I dare say in 20 years or so most of them will have been forgotten.
On single use vs reusable in a medical and pharmaceutical setting you have to consider the energy/carbon cost of autoclaving or steam sterilising. It isn't cheap.
This is what I used to do for a job.
Hospital administration? Or equipment maintenance?
It is interesting that the US DoD and State Dept spend tens of millions of dollars on biosafety around the world, including buying developing countries autoclaves and incinerators, but somehow forgot to factor in the cost of the power/fuel to use them. Results - unused equipment and rooms of bags filled with medical waste.
I heard a rule of thumb that the average annual cost of operating a research lab is around 30-60% of the build cost, depending on the pathogens handled.
I designed single-use manufacturing systems for pharmaceutical companies to replace big stainless steel plants that use autoclaves and steam to sterilise.
That business is a license to print money. Why did you leave?
I'm still yet to see a compelling reason for vaccine passports, even on planes and cruise ships.
If I'm vaccinated, why do I care if everyone else is vaccinated or not? I have essentially 100% protection from COVID.
If I'm unvaccinated, well I can't access the service.
So who actually benefits?
I think it is being driven by the fears of a new (vaccine resistant) variants.
In right circumstances the vaccine passport will do a better job than test, trace, and isolate.
I think the government has seen the polling and realises the public supports them and will not forgive them for many more deaths.
Civil liberties can take a hike in their eyes.
I do not think the opposition to vaccine passports on this forum is anywhere near public opinion, and agree with these sentiments
But I do believe it has to be UK wide
Just because public opinion backs something doesn't mean it is the right thing to do.
Public opinion was quite keen on appeasement.
If it gets the economy started quicker that has to be the justification
It's not necessary. If the vaccine program continues to go well then the epidemic will soon be finished. If (and I think this is unlikely, but not impossible) a vaccine evading variant arises and manages to get into the country, then no amount of initiatives like this will do any good against it and we'll be back in lockdown again. Either way, papers contribute nothing. Indeed, putting extra staff on the doors of every venue to check the papers and stop the supposedly unclean from getting in will be burdensome to business, not helpful.
I wonder if any government money has been spent trying to deal with Boris Johnson's inability to keep the snake inside the pet shop.
The man does his utmost to ensure there's a next generation of brits big enough pay your pension and all you di is criticise him
Really we should put our PM out to stud in Scotland and safeguard the Union..
Not such a good idea, a few months ago I read that he was barely on speaking terms with most of the kids he had with Marina Wheeler for the way he treated their mother.
Putting him out to stud in Scotland might be a mistake plus he doesn't give two hoots about the Union, as we saw with the no border down the Irish Sea.
Boris Johnson's vaccine passports would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance.
Is that the same as my eTA with Canada
You need a history lesson before commentating further.
There is little or no difference to obtaining an eTA or a vaccine passport acceptable to Qantas and cruise ships
Indeed the EU are about to launch there own
Also I assume you have a driving licence
And if vaccine passports opens our economy quicker than everyone is a winner
And as I said Drakeford has confirmed talks with Gove indicating this will be a UK wide scheme
I think this discussion is being carried out at cross-purposes.
Few on here would object to a piece of paper which enables a business to, if it chooses, request to see, in order to check that you have been vaccinated as a condition of admittance. Few on here would object to a state being able to say who can and cannot come in, and for one of the criteria for admittance being vaccination, If this is as far as a vaccine passport goes, many objectors will object no more.
What we are objecting to is a system which - either by tracking your movements or by being compelled to scan an id on arrival at any given place (the pub being the example always given, but not the most important) - contributes to a database of movements which the government controls.
I will join you in not objecting to the former. But the latter strikes me as a dystopia actually worse than the last year.
Both of those things can be true. What is the implication here about specials? I think they are brilliant, and they are definitely on the front line.
Regularly? It is at best misleading as it is probably not what most people thought was meant by saying 12 years of frontline policing. That he has quit shows that he must know it was misleading as well, else he'd brazen it out.
But do parties not vet anymore?
Yup. Most specials do something like 20 hours a month, all on front line shifts. If someone’s been a Special for 12 years then I think it’s absolutely fine to say they have 12 years of front line policing. I mean, I’d advise a political candidate to be really clear, because the media are like children, but I wouldn’t think someone had lied on their cv if they said that.
@Gardenwalker very interesting video. Thank you for that.
Indeed. The question it raised in my mind, if the US is becoming Pacific-facing and the EU Eurasia-facing, is not so much how awkward that is for the UK, but rather that it presents us an opportunity not to be so defence-focused and to reshuffle our expectations of the economic vs military nature of our power and priorities.
If we are no longer at the centre of the battle zone, why do we need to find a place in a battle zone?
Because our values are the shining beacon that casts light into the darkest reaches of the earth.
Liberty, democracy, justice and the rule of law are precious and it’s our duty to fight for them
From 12th April all customers must sign in under new rules for pubs and restaurants
Anyone over 16 must give their contact details, or check in to NHS test and trace, before entering pub, restaurant or cafe venue when they reopen for outdoor service in England
OTOH these are mostly margin of error changes, and you could just as easily say that the brand new party, the existence of which became common knowledge less than a week ago, is already halfway to the amount of support it needs to be in serious contention for list seats. It's a bit early to be getting excited.
From 12th April all customers must sign in under new rules for pubs and restaurants
Anyone over 16 must give their contact details, or check in to NHS test and trace, before entering pub, restaurant or cafe venue when they reopen for outdoor service in England
OTOH these are mostly margin of error changes, and you could just as easily say that the brand new party, the existence of which became common knowledge less than a week ago, is already halfway to the amount of support it needs to be in serious contention for list seats. It's a bit early to be getting excited.
From 12th April all customers must sign in under new rules for pubs and restaurants
Anyone over 16 must give their contact details, or check in to NHS test and trace, before entering pub, restaurant or cafe venue when they reopen for outdoor service in England
Both of those things can be true. What is the implication here about specials? I think they are brilliant, and they are definitely on the front line.
Regularly? It is at best misleading as it is probably not what most people thought was meant by saying 12 years of frontline policing. That he has quit shows that he must know it was misleading as well, else he'd brazen it out.
What do Alba need to score for the AS plan to work?
5-10%, SNP now barely above its 2016 constituency vote and significantly down on its 2016 list vote and at serious risk of failing to get an SNP majority
Comments
Expect digital ID cards too. The consultation on that has already gone through.
Then comes a Chinese-style social credit system. The government has been working on that for around two years.
Think of the future UK population as a herd of 67 M electronically-tagged sheep.
A year ago, anyone who suggested that this might be on the cards was a 'mad conspiracy theorist'.
Watch recent interviews given by Nick Hudson in which he demolishes most of the policies adopted since Mar. 2020. All developed countries had detailed plans for dealing with epidemics, based on successful past experience. They then tore them up, almost all at once. Funny, that.
https://twitter.com/stianwestlake/status/1377658622218493953
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-9427657/Saira-Khan-claims-Asian-culture-held-racism.html
https://twitter.com/DPJHodges/status/1377661532943884289
https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/01/health/pfizer-covid-vaccine-efficacy-six-months-bn/index.html
1. Pfizer-BioNTech remains highly effective after six months.
2. It also appears to lose none of its efficacy against the South African variant.
Once we're all jabbed then the epidemic in Britain is finished. It's most of the way to being finished already. Papers are nothing to do with public health and everything to do with control.
After. Totally unnecessary.
Indeed the EU are about to launch there own
Also I assume you have a driving licence
And if vaccine passports opens our economy quicker than everyone is a winner
And as I said Drakeford has confirmed talks with Gove indicating this will be a UK wide scheme
If I'm vaccinated, why do I care if everyone else is vaccinated or not? I have essentially 100% protection from COVID.
If I'm unvaccinated, well I can't access the service.
So who actually benefits?
For overseas travel, then yes they are fine.
""Covid is not going to go away," he said. "You've got to work out what's a rational policy to this and here I would differentiate quite a lot between a pandemic environment and what you get with seasonal flu.
"Every year, somewhere between 7,000 and 9,000 citizens die of flu, most of them very elderly, and every few years you get a bad flu year where 20,000 to 25,000 die of it. The last time we had that was three years ago and no one noticed it.
"So it is clear we are going to have to manage it, at some point, rather like we manage the flu. Here is a seasonal, very dangerous disease that kills thousands of people and society has chosen a particular way round it.""
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/01/no-lockdowns-britain-will-treat-coronavirus-like-flu-says/
In right circumstances the vaccine passport will do a better job than test, trace, and isolate.
I think the government has seen the polling and realises the public supports them and will not forgive them for many more deaths.
Civil liberties can take a hike in their eyes.
If we are no longer at the centre of the battle zone, why do we need to find a place in a battle zone?
But I do believe it has to be UK wide
https://twitter.com/mikeysmith/status/1377670595920416773
Public opinion was quite keen on appeasement.
Elsewhere, the French ICU total is now over 5,000 and still climbing. It does look like the tsunami that battered the UK and Portugal around the beginning of the year is now striking elsewhere.
But do parties not vet anymore?
https://crankyflier.com/2021/04/01/united-announces-sweeping-changes-to-europe-will-open-london-heathrow-hub/
And also, running a successful vaccine programme.
https://twitter.com/edwardpoole1975/status/1377552406729347072?s=19
I hope we learn some lessons from COVID-19, but I dare say in 20 years or so most of them will have been forgotten.
Are we sure that will help Labour hold
SNP vote down on both the constituency and list vote in new Holyrood Survation poll and Alba on just 3% on the list
https://twitter.com/BritainElects/status/1377673249304276993?s=20
(I take it it’s still morning in that small unimportant place in the middle of America that you live in?)
Few on here would object to a piece of paper which enables a business to, if it chooses, request to see, in order to check that you have been vaccinated as a condition of admittance.
Few on here would object to a state being able to say who can and cannot come in, and for one of the criteria for admittance being vaccination,
If this is as far as a vaccine passport goes, many objectors will object no more.
What we are objecting to is a system which - either by tracking your movements or by being compelled to scan an id on arrival at any given place (the pub being the example always given, but not the most important) - contributes to a database of movements which the government controls.
I will join you in not objecting to the former. But the latter strikes me as a dystopia actually worse than the last year.
The trick is, not to let them rabbit on.
Liberty, democracy, justice and the rule of law are precious and it’s our duty to fight for them
List: Independence: 51 Union 45
From 12th April all customers must sign in under new rules for pubs and restaurants
Anyone over 16 must give their contact details, or check in to NHS test and trace, before entering pub, restaurant or cafe venue when they reopen for outdoor service in England
No, you don't.
Tory who claimed MP faked Jewish beliefs is to run in local elections
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/apr/01/tory-wendy-maisey-claimed-mp-faked-jewish-beliefs-stand-local-elections
https://twitter.com/AnErrorOfComedy/status/1377674599392022531?s=20
https://twitter.com/davieclegg/status/1377668216424660999
Anything could happen in Scotland