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This doesn’t look good for Sunak “next PM” backers – politicalbetting.com
This doesn’t look good for Sunak “next PM” backers – politicalbetting.com
Rishi Sunak confirms he 'pushed' to help David Cameron with Greensill COVID loan request https://t.co/934T2aMYMf
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Peak Rishi was a long time ago.
His ratings will go further south once he has to start paying the Covid-19 bills and cannot save every business and job.
I'm hard work.
https://twitter.com/nmannathukkaren/status/1380129214259720202?s=21
end did require a change to the Market Notice but I have pushed the team to explore an
alternative with the Bank that might work. No guarantees, but the Bank are currently
looking at it and Charles should be in touch. Best, Rishi"
Not going to end his career.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/08/vaccines-advice-could-still-change-30s-jcvi-suggests/
The comms is just appalling. A vaccine is all about confidence. It doesn't work unless enough people feel confident in taking it.
They are all over the shop, yeah the jab is great, but we might ban it, yeah it's really safe, but no it's not safe for anyone under 30, or maybe early 30s, no wait under 40 is bad too, errrrrr.
It is shameful. Scientists should not have this job, it should be left to skilled politicians and media people. They are destroying the vaccine workhorse of the world with every amateurish interview. We will end up pointlessly banning it for anyone under 60 like the French, and much of the world will shun it, and many will die
There really is no reason to give under 40s AZ given the supply situation we're heading for and the logistical issues posed by requiring 12 weeks in between doses. I also think that increasing the relative value of Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax will be helpful for overall take up among 18-39 year olds.
Many countries will now boycott the best vaccine for the developing world. Because we are over-reacting to a tiny risk, and announcing this in very bold colours, without any proper PR management. It is shoddy British amateurism at its worst
Wait until the UK has enough vaccines and then sow distrust to discourage and slow vaccination in other countries thereby increasing the death rate and economic damage in those countries.
Perhaps Macron and Handelstwatt are involved / been useful idiots.
Others did better.
For first doses from Moderna, Novavax and Pfizer we will have supply of over 2m per week in May for around 9m total for the month. Once we get to under 30s we'll be getting just that from Novavax and Moderna alone. Our early purchase of the Novavax vaccine has put us in an incredibly good position to be able pick and choose which vaccines to use. Only the US has got the same luxury.
"Thirtysomethings could be asked to take an alternative jab to Astra Zeneca, members of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) have said.
The Government’s independent scientific advisers said a fresh risk/benefit assessment of the vaccine in different age brackets would be made before the rollout reaches those below the age of 40.
Prof Anthony Harnden, deputy chairman of the JCVI said that safety data will be examined “in scrupulous detail” before the programme is rolled out to the under 40s.
The scientist said “everybody should remain confident” in the vaccine programme which he said was going “full steam ahead”, saying any link with blood clots was a “very, very rare, extremely rare safety signal”."
So it's a "very very rare, extremely rare safety signal", BUT they might ban it for an entire new cohort, the under 40s. So that's fine, "everyone should remain confident"
We have huge takeup and also an independent regulator that is optimising each jab for the individual - as we get to lower age groups who have a lower individual risk from Covid we can pick and choose vaccinations as we're already at herd immunity within the context of current restrictions.
Now it might be taking a little longer than everyone hoped to get to younger age groups but that's due to our collosal takeup by everyone older. It's going magnificently and will probably end up being the best vaccination program of any major country in the world.
Edit: Because so many here are willijng to take a vaccine with the tiniest of risk it means millions won't have to. I mean I'd take it tommorow but I'm not offered it yet.
Other nations aren't in the position we're in due to people looking at the vaccine very much as an individual thing.
Now, if that is the case, they need to admit their fears IMMEDIATELY. I do not believe it is the case, I believe, as I have said, that it is truly terrible PR. But I cannot prove it
Neither solution to this puzzle is optimal
Currently they have almost no cases. So the present risk of catching and suffering harm from Covid is almost nil.
All vaccines will have some risk, including Pfizer.
Should New Zealand wait until they've got enough cases of Covid to make the relative risk favourable before vaccinating anyone?
We really do overdo our "we're all doomed" narrative on these shores. Yes, the weather's a bit shit, houses cost too much, we have some terribly dreary towns, and the Wokies drives me nuts, but this truly is a great country to live in.
Drakeford has decided to open things up a bit earlier than planned in Wales due to lower infection rates.
I have to remove the name of educational institutions.
However I worked at educational institution Student’s Union during my studies.
Do we think I have to redact or remove that too?
If anything this actually flies completely in the face of the doom mongering models from SAGE over the weekend. The MHRA have made the (correct IMO) judgement that with COVID risk permanently lowered for under 30s and going down significantly for under 40s and with better vaccines available there is a case to use those for those two cohorts.
It's been blown completely out of proportion by the excitable types.
This can't be dismissed. London and Scotland voted to Remain by far more convincing margins than NI did and yet this belief has grown up that there was only one point of view in NI and only one community needed to be dealt with.
There wasn't and there isn't.
15,869 new cases and 345 new deaths in France. Following technical incidents detected in the chain of data, the Ministry of Health reported a higher number of positive cases today which includes a backlog. Worldometer redistributed the reported positive cases, of which 30,785 occurred on Apr 7, 49,754 occurred on Apr 6 and 1,542 occurred on Apr 5.
April 7
30,785 new cases and 431 new deaths in France. Around 400,000 test results (not deduplicated, positive or negative results) could not be integrated into the SI-DEP database of Public Health France. The total number of daily confirmed cases is therefore underestimated, and is not published today by Public Health France.
April 4
60,922 new cases and 185 new deaths in France. Following technical incidents detected in the chain of data, the Ministry of Health reported a higher number of positive cases today which includes a backlog. Worldometer redistributed the reported positive cases, of which 19,789 occurred on Apr 3.
April 3
19,789 new cases and 213 new deaths in France "Following an incident on the data flow, approximately 400,000 test results (not deduplicated, positive or negative results) could not be integrated into the SI-DEP database of Public Health France. The total number of confirmed cases recorded for the day was therefore underestimated, and is therefore not published by Santé Publique France."
March 31
41,907 new cases and 325 new deaths in France. Following technical incidents detected in the chain of data, the Ministry of Health reported a higher number of positive cases today which includes a backlog. Worldometer redistributed the reported 59,038 cases, of which 28,604 occurred on Mar 29 and 28,323 occurred on Mar 30.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/france/
Meanwhile the other vaccines probably have side effects too. We haven't heard much about them.
Also meanwhile, I heard earlier today that there could be a means of treating clotting.
Did London or Scotland have issues that were resolved with another country changing its constitution as part of an agreement we made with them?
Which again points to this being just a colossal PR clusterfuck, almost inexplicable, from JCVI
But the trials were ameturish in terms of getting solid data to send to the regulators, and production has stubbornly refused to take off. The PR doesn't matter if the doses don't exist.
I'm reminded of Beardy Branson's bids to run the National Lottery. He said he'd do that as a nonprofit, but it turned out that the profit-taking consortia were likely to raise more for good causes.
Half a dozen countries have either banned or severely restricted AZ since our decision. And it is our decision which is driving this
The Oz sub 50 restriction makes sense. Other nations where Covid is rampant... less so.
Or how about listening to the chap who went to the DUP conference and warned about the dangers of putting a border down the Irish Sea, he warned that would lead to violence.
Well, well.
For those following the Greensill affair - a murky business - the main characters in the frame have been Cameron, an ex-PM, and the late Jeremy Heywood, Cabinet Secretary.
All very interesting but a bit niche relating to long ago and people no longer active in politics.
And now we find emails being disgorged at record speed following an FoI request which suggest that Sunak may have pushed officials to consider Greensill's requests for Covid-related loans, which the doomed company did in fact get.
Dear me. Would it be impertinent to ask who might benefit from the Chancellor being dragged into this mess?
At this rate, by that thinking, it will very soon be statistically perverse for the healthy under 50s to take any vaccine at all.
Not sure the government has thought this through?
The smart thing to do would be to reserve AZ (and probably J&J which has also had blood clotting noted as a rare side effect) for the world's over 40s population and use the other ones for under 40s.
There needs to be some checks between Ireland the continent and some between GB and NI and virtually none across the island of Ireland, except at the point of use, and the British isles as a whole should form a single SPS zone.
That'd be fair to all sides, and would fix it. Everyone should swallow their pride, bite the bullet and just get on with it.
The expectation is not that vaccination will almost eliminate Covid - as with Polio, say - and so there will be a continual risk of exposure to the virus that would be expected to grow as we end lockdown when protected by the vaccine.
So ultimately the likelihood of catching the virus approaches 1, and the vaccine protects you from becoming ill.
But, if the history of Northern Ireland has taught us anything, it's that one-sided treatment toward a community by virtue of a majority causes.. err.. Trouble.
With the other vaccines, Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax, that isn't the case. Yes they have some side effects, Moderna in particular seems to generate a lot of them in patients in the US, but they are all fleeting and none of them have been associated to any deaths. On an individual risk basis it doesn't make sense for under 40s to take AZ when COVID prevalence is so low when other vaccines are available to us.
Top 10 now are:
Czechia
Hungary
Bosnia
Montenegro
Bulgaria
Belgium
Macedonia
Slovenia
Slovakia
Italy
Surprisingly the US is not far behind the UK now. 893 deaths today despite what is supposed to be a great vaccine roll out.
I would expect most of the South American countries to go past the UK over the summer for deaths per capita. For the rest of Europe, they have the summer to get their act together.
11-20 globally are:
UK
USA
Portugal
Spain
Peru
Brazil
Mexico
Croatia
France
Poland
But “I’ve pushed officials to do X” is just loose wording to get brownie points with Cameron / look like he is being responsive. At most all it means he sent an email saying “chat to the bank about X”.
Not a smoking gun
It’s not a good look, to put it ludicrously mildly.
We have not seen all the relevant emails. Nor do we know the basis on which Greensills did get Covid loans. So it is not possible to judge.
But what has happened is that a niche story involving an ex-PM now involves the current Chancellor.
Is someone drip-feeding these emails out? An awful lot have come out. Is Sunak getting his defence in early? What else is to come?
And who benefits?
Fair point, well made.
I think if they communicated the immune response in the young factor properly, it could have helped matters.
I wonder how much complacency the luck they had last spring induced.
Ireland should have been given home rule within the UK in the 1890s under Gladstone's second home rule bill, IMHO, with safeguards for Ulster as a special provincial government; however, by 1921 splitting Northern Ireland out was the only way to avoid protracted civil war.
If anything, I think the person who comes out of this worst - based only on what we've seen - is Jeremy Heywood.
What is also interesting is that, despite all the alleged horror at what Greensill was trying to do, the Treasury is still going ahead with something similar now - and is apparently going out to tender. Why? There is no rationale for such a scheme, as many civil servants pointed out at the time. What's changed? If it did not make sense then, why does it make sense now?
And who is going to benefit and what will it cost taxpayers?
These are the questions Labour ought to be asking. Not about the Ministerial code etc.
Unfortunately, AZ had burnt up a lot of the initial goodwill. Partly because of the initial messy data, partly because of the sense that the PR was running a step or two ahead of what the data were showing at any given moment.
But the biggest problem is the simple lack of doses. And whilst making biological stuff is hard (I'm a science teacher, it's blooming hard to make biological experiments work reliably), AZ's inexperience in the field can't have helped.