I don't think anyone ever used the term Soft or Hard Brexit pre referendum. Soft Brexit was just invented by Remainers who couldn't come to terms with the fact they had lost.
Soft Brexit means a deal with trade continuing with the EU almost as before.
Hard Brexit is what happens when we don't have a deal with the EU as exporting anything is going to be f**** impossible.
Well even in no deal exporting anything won't be impossible.
I don't think anyone ever used the term Soft or Hard Brexit pre referendum. Soft Brexit was just invented by Remainers who couldn't come to terms with the fact they had lost.
Before the referendum, Vote Leave never defined what they meant by leaving the single market. They ever tried to argue that we weren't in the single market to begin with, implying that it would mean no change.
No they didn't. They rightly recognised we weren't fully integrated (we weren't) but said we would leave the single market, leave the ECJ and take back control of our laws, money and borders.
That's not "Soft". That was only invented post referendum.
"There is a European free trade zone from Iceland to the Russian border and we will be part of it."
SCOTUS rules 5-4 that the bonkers hasidic lot can continue to kill themselves
I know nothing about the case but surprised it's not 9-0 unless more below the surface. First Amendment surely applies.
230 years of precedent with governors on public health.
Public health is about killing others not killing themselves.
I don't know if you're being deliberately stupid or just wicked. Perhaps the latter as you advocated a return of the Troubles in Northern Ireland as the price of a 'true' Brexit.
Obviously if you get infected by covid you are also quite likely to pass it on to someone else. Which is killing others.
Turns out the BBC were right to report that the Oxford Vaccine was 70% effective.
GDBO, they've misled the country and the world, shame on them for raising the hopes of a nation.
Hah! You'll be a vaccine refusnik then next year when the Oxford vaccine is rolled out?
I'm already looking at buying the Moderna/Pfizer vaccines.
Is it excessively cynical for me to be wondering if that is the entire point of the article?
Let's face it, we're going to be seeing the worst side of Big Pharma, as each goes about trashing rivals to get a huge leg up in the contest to say "WE beat Covid" - and the financial gains those laurels bring. Just the opening skirmishes.
SCOTUS rules 5-4 that the bonkers hasidic lot can continue to kill themselves
I know nothing about the case but surprised it's not 9-0 unless more below the surface. First Amendment surely applies.
230 years of precedent with governors on public health.
Public health is about killing others not killing themselves.
I don't know if you're being deliberately stupid or just wicked. Perhaps the latter as you advocated a return of the Troubles in Northern Ireland as the price of a 'true' Brexit.
Obviously if you get infected by covid you are also quite likely to pass it on to someone else. Which is killing others.
Geddit?
I never advocated a return of the Troubles that is a lie.
Absolutely if you get infected by COVID you can kill others. That is literally what I just said. "Public health is about killing others".
What part of that was hard for you to understand? I had replied originally to a quote about them being allowed to kill themselves.
If someone wants to kill themselves by refusing a blood transfusion that is protected by the first amendment. If someone wants to kill others in a pandemic that never has been protected before.
So does Wired. It's been discussed in depth in this thread. That smells of a dodgy hack job.
Well I'm afraid I wasn't up at midnight. This comes on the back of questions being raised all week by scientists. Good, hard questions. And stating that a journalist has taken to piece the Oxford-AZ data doesn't address the points he or she has made, which are good ones.
It looks crystal clear to me that AstraZeneca rushed out their dodgy results because they were about to be left behind by Pfizer and Moderna.
It is, of course, typical Boris and the Union Jack types to leap onto the bandwagon leaving their brains, if indeed they have them, far behind.
I don't think anyone ever used the term Soft or Hard Brexit pre referendum. Soft Brexit was just invented by Remainers who couldn't come to terms with the fact they had lost.
Soft Brexit means a deal with trade continuing with the EU almost as before.
Hard Brexit is what happens when we don't have a deal with the EU as exporting anything is going to be f**** impossible.
Well even in no deal exporting anything won't be impossible.
Indeed! It has been fascinating tracking my product samples via DHL. Van to Cluj-Napoca yesterday morning, truck to Budapest, plane to Leipzig, plane to East Midlands, truck to Darlington and then another van to my house by noon. Business could bypass the non-functional land border and simply fly everything where I'm sure that DHL et al absolutely have the capacity to do so and when you think about it flying in food is cheaper and more ecologically sustainable than driving.
Can someone briefly update me on the Oxon full-full / half-full thing? I keep reading snippets on here but it seems to be a very stretched discussion, hard to piece together the responses.
Basically the methodology of the randomisation is potentially unsound. It is hard to be sure as we only have press releases to go on. The licensing bodies will want to look over the original data.
It doesn't mean that the vaccine is a dud, just not yet sufficiently proven.
Is that true? Or someone’s opinion? That sounds a very serious allegation to me.
The only real concern I have on the AZN/Oxford one is that the more efficacious regime hasn’t yet been trialled on the over 55s
Crikey, that's your only concern?
I have many and not just because of that article, which I agree was quite the hatchet. I don't think that's vaccine nationalism. It's because many of us smell a rat. For me it all began a couple of months ago when Andrew Pollard appeared to depart from science and entered the kind of entrepreneurial patter that I'd expect from a door-to-door salesman. It left a nasty taste in the mouth.
Nothing since has disabused me of that. The reports that they issued on efficacy, apparently rushed out because of the stellar show by both Moderna and Pfizer, contain some bizarrely muddled and mixed data. I am particularly concerned about their mashup of "70%" efficacy which doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny. It's an unscientific hotpotch of two radically different trials with two totally different datasets sets. You can't take those and make up an average.
And questions have been circulating in scientific circles for days. This one in Nature appeared earlier in the week:
"Mashing up results," or meta-analyses, aren't exactly new, and as long as the meta-analysis is done correctly and they are open with it (and they have been open with it), it's not remotely dodgy. Virtually all studies I've seen one health details, and the majority of covid studies that I've read, have been meta-analyses, specifically in order to get more data.
You seem to have extra information, though, suggesting that the meta-analysis was completely flawed and that they did it unscientifically, did a "hotpotch," and bastardised an average incorrectly. That wired article seemed to be summarised paragraph by paragraph as:
- It was a meta-analysis. - It was a meta-analysis. - Did I tell you it was a meta-analysis? - The original half-dose thing was unintentional but when it looked better, they ran with it. Oh, and it was a meta-analysis, okay? - They gave different placebos that were placebos. - The AZN/Oxford trial fell behind in the US when someone fell ill for unrelated reasons - They published plans to do a meta-analysis. Ooh, when did this become the plan? - The numbers are small [as with all these analyses; gloss over that]. Oh, and we're going to imply that they are dishonestly suppressing bad data at this point. - There were few over-55s
Maybe it's because I'm very used to meta-analyses being used and accepted that reading through that article didn't really make me concerned. In fact, it made me a bit wary of the intent of the author by the way they kept banging on about the meta-analysis bit. That's why I raised the question earlier of whether it is, in fact, such a cardinal sin in this context (and, if so, why they openly admit it). And the only point I came to where I went, "Oh, that's not ideal," was the "few over-55s" bit.
Turns out the BBC were right to report that the Oxford Vaccine was 70% effective.
GDBO, they've misled the country and the world, shame on them for raising the hopes of a nation.
Hah! You'll be a vaccine refusnik then next year when the Oxford vaccine is rolled out?
I'm already looking at buying the Moderna/Pfizer vaccines.
Is it excessively cynical for me to be wondering if that is the entire point of the article?
Let's face it, we're going to be seeing the worst side of Big Pharma, as each goes about trashing rivals to get a huge leg up in the contest to say "WE beat Covid" - and the financial gains those laurels bring. Just the opening skirmishes.
Which is true but this still doesn't address the very real issues re. the AstraZeneca data.
It's crap, to be frank. I particularly dislike the attempt to make 70% efficacy out of two entirely different trials, results and datasets. It's like taking Liverpool's defensive record and adding it to Alastair Cooke's batting average to produce a mean scoring rate.
Turns out the BBC were right to report that the Oxford Vaccine was 70% effective.
GDBO, they've misled the country and the world, shame on them for raising the hopes of a nation.
Hah! You'll be a vaccine refusnik then next year when the Oxford vaccine is rolled out?
I'm already looking at buying the Moderna/Pfizer vaccines.
Is it excessively cynical for me to be wondering if that is the entire point of the article?
Let's face it, we're going to be seeing the worst side of Big Pharma, as each goes about trashing rivals to get a huge leg up in the contest to say "WE beat Covid" - and the financial gains those laurels bring. Just the opening skirmishes.
Which is true but this still doesn't address the very real issues re. the AstraZeneca data.
It's crap, to be frank. I particularly dislike the attempt to make 70% efficacy out of two entirely different trials, results and datasets. It's like taking Liverpool's defensive record and adding it to Alastair Cooke's batting average to produce a mean scoring rate.
Turns out the BBC were right to report that the Oxford Vaccine was 70% effective.
GDBO, they've misled the country and the world, shame on them for raising the hopes of a nation.
Hah! You'll be a vaccine refusnik then next year when the Oxford vaccine is rolled out?
I'm already looking at buying the Moderna/Pfizer vaccines.
Is it excessively cynical for me to be wondering if that is the entire point of the article?
Let's face it, we're going to be seeing the worst side of Big Pharma, as each goes about trashing rivals to get a huge leg up in the contest to say "WE beat Covid" - and the financial gains those laurels bring. Just the opening skirmishes.
Which is true but this still doesn't address the very real issues re. the AstraZeneca data.
It's crap, to be frank. I particularly dislike the attempt to make 70% efficacy out of two entirely different trials, results and datasets. It's like taking Liverpool's defensive record and adding it to Alastair Cooke's batting average to produce a mean scoring rate.
It's one trial.
What may be dubious is the separating the 90% out though the MHRA will judge from a full scientific report and all the evidence not press releases.
Can someone briefly update me on the Oxon full-full / half-full thing? I keep reading snippets on here but it seems to be a very stretched discussion, hard to piece together the responses.
OK.
People given full dose / full dose of the AZN/Oxford vaccine saw efficacy of 60-70%. People given half dose / full dose of vaccine saw efficacy close to 90%.
HOWEVER, the half dose / full dose people were all under 55 (so this may simply be the case that the vaccine is much more efficacious on the young), and the numbers are too small to be certain that this isn't simply a statistical anomoly.
It is worth noting, however, that (AFAUI) none of the people who got the AZN/Oxford vaccine became seriously ill with CV19, and it does not require sub zero storage at all. It is therefore a vaccine that could be useful for (a) the young and (b) emerging markets.
Sure that was my exact understanding, yet people like Foxy and Francis seem to be pouring water on the whole trial.
That strikes me as very serious allegation. And perhaps somewhat unfair?
The Wired article alleges that the way the results have been presented is such that they are not reporting clean data. Instead they've chosen to process it, and present it in the most flattering way possible.
It's a highly partisan article, which is based largely on supposition. The author seems to think that just because she hasn't seen the full data, the statisticians analysing the results haven't. And she seems to be arguing that lack of proof of efficacity (on data she herself argues is incomplete) is proof of inefficacity.
One to file, if not quite in the bin, at most in the 'needs corroboration' pile.
I spend almost a decade as an equity analyst. Companies that attempted to present results using esoteric (just thought up) measures, rather than - you know - actual profit and loss were usually hiding something.
There's no 'event' to show everyone who is long Uber is wrong though, just cash being shovelled in to keep the irrational fiction going for a very long time indeed...
Has anyone got any tips on how to discover an organisation's internal email address format? Googling "*@url" isn't working.
You could look up the MX records in DNS but it is possible they use something different internally. It depends what you want to know. These days, most firms of any repute are contactable by Twitter.
This isn't a customer service issue or anything like that. I wanted to email a certain person in a specific firm about possible work experience or internship opportunities. Usually I can find out if it's firstname.lastname@url or lastname@url from a Google search but not in this particular case.
I guess I will just have to try different combinations. 🤦♂️
If the person doesn't have their email address published as a contact for this sort of query, and hasn't asked you to contact them by giving you their email address, there's a fair chance they don't want your email at all.
Can someone briefly update me on the Oxon full-full / half-full thing? I keep reading snippets on here but it seems to be a very stretched discussion, hard to piece together the responses.
Basically the methodology of the randomisation is potentially unsound. It is hard to be sure as we only have press releases to go on. The licensing bodies will want to look over the original data.
It doesn't mean that the vaccine is a dud, just not yet sufficiently proven.
Is that true? Or someone’s opinion? That sounds a very serious allegation to me.
The only real concern I have on the AZN/Oxford one is that the more efficacious regime hasn’t yet been trialled on the over 55s
Crikey, that's your only concern?
I have many and not just because of that article, which I agree was quite the hatchet. I don't think that's vaccine nationalism. It's because many of us smell a rat. For me it all began a couple of months ago when Andrew Pollard appeared to depart from science and entered the kind of entrepreneurial patter that I'd expect from a door-to-door salesman. It left a nasty taste in the mouth.
Nothing since has disabused me of that. The reports that they issued on efficacy, apparently rushed out because of the stellar show by both Moderna and Pfizer, contain some bizarrely muddled and mixed data. I am particularly concerned about their mashup of "70%" efficacy which doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny. It's an unscientific hotpotch of two radically different trials with two totally different datasets sets. You can't take those and make up an average.
And questions have been circulating in scientific circles for days. This one in Nature appeared earlier in the week:
Turns out the BBC were right to report that the Oxford Vaccine was 70% effective.
GDBO, they've misled the country and the world, shame on them for raising the hopes of a nation.
Hah! You'll be a vaccine refusnik then next year when the Oxford vaccine is rolled out?
I'm already looking at buying the Moderna/Pfizer vaccines.
Is it excessively cynical for me to be wondering if that is the entire point of the article?
Let's face it, we're going to be seeing the worst side of Big Pharma, as each goes about trashing rivals to get a huge leg up in the contest to say "WE beat Covid" - and the financial gains those laurels bring. Just the opening skirmishes.
Which is true but this still doesn't address the very real issues re. the AstraZeneca data.
It's crap, to be frank. I particularly dislike the attempt to make 70% efficacy out of two entirely different trials, results and datasets. It's like taking Liverpool's defensive record and adding it to Alastair Cooke's batting average to produce a mean scoring rate.
Seriously what qualifies you to say that the AstraZenaca vaccine is crap?
As I keep pointing out, any deal that imposes customs and standards checks at the border will shut us down. That French test of a few days ago was checking only the immigration status of the driver - 70 seconds. Looks what queues it generated. It will take substantially longer than that to check the full load carried on the vehicle.
That is where the real fun starts. There is a lack of customs clerks on both sides of the channel. Before the EEA really kicked in there used to be a couple of thousand clerks on either side - now its reported as being in the dozens at best. With cross-border traffic now 400% of what it was back then.
No clerks to process the paperwork. No computer system to handle the paperwork. No customs agents to check the paperwork. No facilities to hold the agents the vehicles or the impounded for inspection loads. Things will quite literally grind to a halt and stay that way. Or the UK can agree a "continuity" deal with the EU as we have with Canada. The right to make changes at an unspecified later time but for now we continue the status quo. The right to have babies. Even though we can't have babies.
Politically these are the End Times for the PM. He announces a continuity deal and unleashes fire and damnation from the ERG, Faragistas and the press. He announces a deal with customs checks and we run out of fresh food medicines and fuel fairly quickly. Either way, he is done. For the PB Tories who live in the real world which is the least worst option for the party...?
"PB Tories who live in the real world" is a textbook definition of the empty set.
I don't think anyone ever used the term Soft or Hard Brexit pre referendum. Soft Brexit was just invented by Remainers who couldn't come to terms with the fact they had lost.
Soft Brexit means a deal with trade continuing with the EU almost as before.
Hard Brexit is what happens when we don't have a deal with the EU as exporting anything is going to be f**** impossible.
The deal we have negotiated is a hard Brexit as it involves leaving the single market as well as the political institutions of the EU and therefore creates substantial barriers to trade in both goods and services.
As I keep pointing out, any deal that imposes customs and standards checks at the border will shut us down. That French test of a few days ago was checking only the immigration status of the driver - 70 seconds. Looks what queues it generated. It will take substantially longer than that to check the full load carried on the vehicle.
That is where the real fun starts. There is a lack of customs clerks on both sides of the channel. Before the EEA really kicked in there used to be a couple of thousand clerks on either side - now its reported as being in the dozens at best. With cross-border traffic now 400% of what it was back then.
No clerks to process the paperwork. No computer system to handle the paperwork. No customs agents to check the paperwork. No facilities to hold the agents the vehicles or the impounded for inspection loads. Things will quite literally grind to a halt and stay that way. Or the UK can agree a "continuity" deal with the EU as we have with Canada. The right to make changes at an unspecified later time but for now we continue the status quo. The right to have babies. Even though we can't have babies.
Politically these are the End Times for the PM. He announces a continuity deal and unleashes fire and damnation from the ERG, Faragistas and the press. He announces a deal with customs checks and we run out of fresh food medicines and fuel fairly quickly. Either way, he is done. For the PB Tories who live in the real world which is the least worst option for the party...?
"PB Tories who live in the real world" is a textbook definition of the empty set.
There's quite a few of them - I think they all quit the party in disgust but still dress to the right so to speak. Was just curious as to how they see BJ (is that better than "shagger"?) getting out of this fine mess he's gotten himself into.
Someone said something on here the other day that really stuck with me. "PB is social media". And it is. And now we see that most emblematic of social media phenomena: non-scientists arguing about science.
I think 999 will be a good place to stop. See you!
As I keep pointing out, any deal that imposes customs and standards checks at the border will shut us down. That French test of a few days ago was checking only the immigration status of the driver - 70 seconds. Looks what queues it generated. It will take substantially longer than that to check the full load carried on the vehicle.
That is where the real fun starts. There is a lack of customs clerks on both sides of the channel. Before the EEA really kicked in there used to be a couple of thousand clerks on either side - now its reported as being in the dozens at best. With cross-border traffic now 400% of what it was back then.
No clerks to process the paperwork. No computer system to handle the paperwork. No customs agents to check the paperwork. No facilities to hold the agents the vehicles or the impounded for inspection loads. Things will quite literally grind to a halt and stay that way. Or the UK can agree a "continuity" deal with the EU as we have with Canada. The right to make changes at an unspecified later time but for now we continue the status quo. The right to have babies. Even though we can't have babies.
Politically these are the End Times for the PM. He announces a continuity deal and unleashes fire and damnation from the ERG, Faragistas and the press. He announces a deal with customs checks and we run out of fresh food medicines and fuel fairly quickly. Either way, he is done. For the PB Tories who live in the real world which is the least worst option for the party...?
"PB Tories who live in the real world" is a textbook definition of the empty set.
There's quite a few of them - I think they all quit the party in disgust but still dress to the right so to speak. Was just curious as to how they see BJ (is that better than "shagger"?) getting out of this fine mess he's gotten himself into.
Unfortunately he's gotten all of us into this mess together, so it's hard to sit back and watch with a sense of wry detachment. What a wretched oaf he is, and the flock of talentless lickspittles in the Tory party that enable him.
Turns out the BBC were right to report that the Oxford Vaccine was 70% effective.
GDBO, they've misled the country and the world, shame on them for raising the hopes of a nation.
Hah! You'll be a vaccine refusnik then next year when the Oxford vaccine is rolled out?
I'm already looking at buying the Moderna/Pfizer vaccines.
Is it excessively cynical for me to be wondering if that is the entire point of the article?
Let's face it, we're going to be seeing the worst side of Big Pharma, as each goes about trashing rivals to get a huge leg up in the contest to say "WE beat Covid" - and the financial gains those laurels bring. Just the opening skirmishes.
Which is true but this still doesn't address the very real issues re. the AstraZeneca data.
It's crap, to be frank. I particularly dislike the attempt to make 70% efficacy out of two entirely different trials, results and datasets. It's like taking Liverpool's defensive record and adding it to Alastair Cooke's batting average to produce a mean scoring rate.
It's one trial.
What may be dubious is the separating the 90% out though the MHRA will judge from a full scientific report and all the evidence not press releases.
No - it's clearly two trials in two different countries, with different protocols and different criteria for the recruitment of participants. It made no statistical sense at all to combine them, and it's left everyone guessing about what the truth is. And if that 90% efficacy for the accidental dosing regimen is real, it was unnecessary to combine them, because it will have made relatively little difference to the statistical power, but has (at least temporarily and in the public mind) cast doubt on the whole exercise.
In all likelihood the vaccine will be fine to knock COVID-19 on the head, even if it doesn't have the same unpexpectedly high efficacy as the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines (and even reportedly the Sputnik vaccine).
The tragedy is that both the execution of the trial and the presentation of the results have been cocked up so badly that it's provided a truckload of ammunition to the anti-vaccine loonies. In much the same way that Kate Bingham's witless comments did, but this time under a much stronger spotlight of publicity.
Someone said something on here the other day that really stuck with me. "PB is social media". And it is. And now we see that most emblematic of social media phenomena: non-scientists arguing about science.
I think 999 will be a good place to stop. See you!
It would be more constructive if the certainty and righteousness that many posters give about scientific fields that are not their primary expertise is dialled down a notch or three. Having said that, this site is great for staying up to date on the latest state of covid related science.
SCOTUS rules 5-4 that the bonkers hasidic lot can continue to kill themselves
In fairness to SCOTUS giving religious lunatics the freedom to kill themselves doing religious lunatic things is basically the entire point of the United States of America.
Has anyone got any tips on how to discover an organisation's internal email address format? Googling "*@url" isn't working.
You could look up the MX records in DNS but it is possible they use something different internally. It depends what you want to know. These days, most firms of any repute are contactable by Twitter.
This isn't a customer service issue or anything like that. I wanted to email a certain person in a specific firm about possible work experience or internship opportunities. Usually I can find out if it's firstname.lastname@url or lastname@url from a Google search but not in this particular case.
I guess I will just have to try different combinations. 🤦♂️
If the person doesn't have their email address published as a contact for this sort of query, and hasn't asked you to contact them by giving you their email address, there's a fair chance they don't want your email at all.
If emails were only sent to those who specifically wanted them, the number of emails would drop by 99%!
I wonder what those who have seen their pay frozen or cut or even jobs lost think about politicians more concerned about our foreign aid being reduced than they seem to be concerned about people's wages or jobs?
Has anyone got any tips on how to discover an organisation's internal email address format? Googling "*@url" isn't working.
You could look up the MX records in DNS but it is possible they use something different internally. It depends what you want to know. These days, most firms of any repute are contactable by Twitter.
This isn't a customer service issue or anything like that. I wanted to email a certain person in a specific firm about possible work experience or internship opportunities. Usually I can find out if it's firstname.lastname@url or lastname@url from a Google search but not in this particular case.
I guess I will just have to try different combinations. 🤦♂️
If the person doesn't have their email address published as a contact for this sort of query, and hasn't asked you to contact them by giving you their email address, there's a fair chance they don't want your email at all.
You’re most probably right. Doesn’t hurt to try though.
Someone said something on here the other day that really stuck with me. "PB is social media". And it is. And now we see that most emblematic of social media phenomena: non-scientists arguing about science.
We can always rely on at least one non-scientist to pop up and assume everyone else is a non-scientist!
Has anyone got any tips on how to discover an organisation's internal email address format? Googling "*@url" isn't working.
You could look up the MX records in DNS but it is possible they use something different internally. It depends what you want to know. These days, most firms of any repute are contactable by Twitter.
This isn't a customer service issue or anything like that. I wanted to email a certain person in a specific firm about possible work experience or internship opportunities. Usually I can find out if it's firstname.lastname@url or lastname@url from a Google search but not in this particular case.
I guess I will just have to try different combinations. 🤦♂️
If the person doesn't have their email address published as a contact for this sort of query, and hasn't asked you to contact them by giving you their email address, there's a fair chance they don't want your email at all.
You’re most probably right. Doesn’t hurt to try though.
Nowt wrong in sending unsolicited emails - they may work they may not.
Can someone briefly update me on the Oxon full-full / half-full thing? I keep reading snippets on here but it seems to be a very stretched discussion, hard to piece together the responses.
Basically the methodology of the randomisation is potentially unsound. It is hard to be sure as we only have press releases to go on. The licensing bodies will want to look over the original data.
It doesn't mean that the vaccine is a dud, just not yet sufficiently proven.
Is that true? Or someone’s opinion? That sounds a very serious allegation to me.
It raised a few eyebrows with me - about the article rather than the study, though. It did have the faintest whiff of a hack job.
I was okayish with the repeated charges against using a meta-analysis to gain more and more information - when done properly, they’re more than fine for other science as they improve statistical scope (I understand many health studies are meta-analyses), but maybe there’s a specific reason they’re bad in this sense. Although AZN/Oxford have been up front with presenting that data (it’s exactly how wired are asking the question).
The placebo thing got me scratching my head. How would that affect anyone in the vaccine arms? Unless there was any reason at all to suggest either placebo was somehow efficacious against covid, it seems a totally irrelevant charge.
When they got towards implying near-malfeasance with “presumably none of the others [demonstrated efficacy],” I, and at least one acquaintance independently, started to suspect some sort of vaccine nationalism that we’ve seen before. Why immediately presume failure that’s been ineptly covered up rather than the obvious presumption that not enough events have yet happened for those particular ones to be given any statistical significance yet?
Coupled with the NY Times one saying that they were worse than Pfizer and Moderna for providing initial data in [checks notes] the exact same way as Pfizer and Moderna, it does rather raise eyebrows. Yes, I’d prefer a peer-reviewed paper first, but under the circumstances and breathless desire for some information as soon as possible, we know that’s not possible. And the only reason we know these details is because all three companies are providing all the details they have.
The only real concern I have on the AZN/Oxford one is that the more efficacious regime hasn’t yet been trialled on the over 55s (apparently; need full confirmation on that). That the smaller dose was given out deliberately for most of the trial after the initial unintentional one happened and provided encouraging data seems fine. Numbers are small, but still statistically significant.
I agree with that. Takes quite a while to publish full data, and (as I noted at the time here) Moderna did exactly the same sort of thing earlier in the year with data by press release, just before they had a pubic offering of stock, and with far greater price sensitivity for their stock.
Always wait for the full data is the rule with all drug companies.
Can someone briefly update me on the Oxon full-full / half-full thing? I keep reading snippets on here but it seems to be a very stretched discussion, hard to piece together the responses.
Basically the methodology of the randomisation is potentially unsound. It is hard to be sure as we only have press releases to go on. The licensing bodies will want to look over the original data.
It doesn't mean that the vaccine is a dud, just not yet sufficiently proven.
Is that true? Or someone’s opinion? That sounds a very serious allegation to me.
It raised a few eyebrows with me - about the article rather than the study, though. It did have the faintest whiff of a hack job.
I was okayish with the repeated charges against using a meta-analysis to gain more and more information - when done properly, they’re more than fine for other science as they improve statistical scope (I understand many health studies are meta-analyses), but maybe there’s a specific reason they’re bad in this sense. Although AZN/Oxford have been up front with presenting that data (it’s exactly how wired are asking the question).
The placebo thing got me scratching my head. How would that affect anyone in the vaccine arms? Unless there was any reason at all to suggest either placebo was somehow efficacious against covid, it seems a totally irrelevant charge.
When they got towards implying near-malfeasance with “presumably none of the others [demonstrated efficacy],” I, and at least one acquaintance independently, started to suspect some sort of vaccine nationalism that we’ve seen before. Why immediately presume failure that’s been ineptly covered up rather than the obvious presumption that not enough events have yet happened for those particular ones to be given any statistical significance yet?
Coupled with the NY Times one saying that they were worse than Pfizer and Moderna for providing initial data in [checks notes] the exact same way as Pfizer and Moderna, it does rather raise eyebrows. Yes, I’d prefer a peer-reviewed paper first, but under the circumstances and breathless desire for some information as soon as possible, we know that’s not possible. And the only reason we know these details is because all three companies are providing all the details they have.
The only real concern I have on the AZN/Oxford one is that the more efficacious regime hasn’t yet been trialled on the over 55s (apparently; need full confirmation on that). That the smaller dose was given out deliberately for most of the trial after the initial unintentional one happened and provided encouraging data seems fine. Numbers are small, but still statistically significant.
Mrs Lincoln: My only real concern with the play was...
You can add to the fact that it hasn't been trialled on the over 55s, the equally gobsmacking fact that it wasn't disclosed at the time the apparently good news was revealed that it hadn't been trialled on the over 55s. And never mind the statistics, let's take a step back and look at the most concerning fact of all: this may be a trial but it is also a medical procedure in which thousands of people got a dose out by x2 because of a cockup. People die because of that sort of dosing error; this is medical negligence on a massive scale, explained away as "serendipity."
I am as loyal an Englishman and Oxonian as they come, but the partisanship here is extraordinary. Like an Argentinian saying that there is no evidence that Maradona utouched the ball and this whole handball rule needs looking at anyway.
Both Georgia Republican Senators seem to have gotten themselves in a bit of trouble with their stock trading.
Don’t know about prison, though. While Obama made Congressional insider trading a crime back in 2012, it seems that no one has yet been convicted.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/insider/2020/05/26/how-senators-may-have-avoided-insider-trading-charges/?sh=3111905627ba ... Insider trading by a member of Congress is a crime. To bring a case here, however, federal authorities must overcome two obstacles: the Speech and Debate Clause, and proving “materiality” in novel circumstances. Indeed, the announcement that the authorities have closed their investigations into three senators may show these obstacles already have proven too steep....
If you are a director of a firm, in possession of non public information, and you use that to make money, that is pretty darn serious.
No kidding. The guy should be indicted.
And I realise this falls outside the Congressional insider dealing statute, and seems to be a straightforward insider dealing case. But it appears that he might still get away with it.
Purdue is probably protected (in that Trump can warn the FBI off it) for now, but once Biden has his hand on the tiller, that changes.
Presumably Governor Kemp gets to appoint a replacement, if Perdue goes down for insider trading. And then there'd be a special election?
Short of coming out of a bank, with the alarms ringing, in a stripped jersey & mask, carrying a bag marked "swag" - how much more obviously guilty can you get? Or stupid.
There's nothing to it. Trump's attempts to void democracy are increasingly pitiful to behold.
There is a great deal to it, given that at least a third of the US electorate seems genuinely to believe, against any evidence, that the election was fixed. It is exceptionally unlikely that the election results will be overturned (10,000/1, perhaps), but the lasting damage to democracy is baked in.
Trump failed in his endeavour because those at the state level who run elections are very largely honest, irrespective of party. What happens as the current generation of administrators are replaced (either by election of simply turnover by age) by radicalised anarchist Republicans is disturbing.
The Goldman Sachs Elf's finely calibrated positionalism actually makes him more detestable than Johnson's reflexive buffoonery. He's also got an S-Type which is a shit car in anybody's book but when for somebody as well heeled as him it's a crime against humanity.
Can someone briefly update me on the Oxon full-full / half-full thing? I keep reading snippets on here but it seems to be a very stretched discussion, hard to piece together the responses.
Basically the methodology of the randomisation is potentially unsound. It is hard to be sure as we only have press releases to go on. The licensing bodies will want to look over the original data.
It doesn't mean that the vaccine is a dud, just not yet sufficiently proven.
Is that true? Or someone’s opinion? That sounds a very serious allegation to me.
The only real concern I have on the AZN/Oxford one is that the more efficacious regime hasn’t yet been trialled on the over 55s
Crikey, that's your only concern?
I have many and not just because of that article, which I agree was quite the hatchet. I don't think that's vaccine nationalism. It's because many of us smell a rat. For me it all began a couple of months ago when Andrew Pollard appeared to depart from science and entered the kind of entrepreneurial patter that I'd expect from a door-to-door salesman. It left a nasty taste in the mouth.
Nothing since has disabused me of that. The reports that they issued on efficacy, apparently rushed out because of the stellar show by both Moderna and Pfizer, contain some bizarrely muddled and mixed data. I am particularly concerned about their mashup of "70%" efficacy which doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny. It's an unscientific hotpotch of two radically different trials with two totally different datasets sets. You can't take those and make up an average.
And questions have been circulating in scientific circles for days. This one in Nature appeared earlier in the week:
One of the scientist interviewed for Nature says however:
“There’s a long, long way to go before these data settle down and get reported and published in full.”
Quite - all the rest is largely politico-econo speculation from vetsed interests. Thyis is not the time to feed such trolling - let the regulators do their jab...I mean job!
I wonder what those who have seen their pay frozen or cut or even jobs lost think about politicians more concerned about our foreign aid being reduced than they seem to be concerned about people's wages or jobs?
Yes, I think that is the whole point. The cut in foreign aid makes up for less than 1% of this years deficit. It is quite a useful dead cat to chuck on the table in order to distract from the catastrophic figures published yesterday.
I wonder what those who have seen their pay frozen or cut or even jobs lost think about politicians more concerned about our foreign aid being reduced than they seem to be concerned about people's wages or jobs?
And a righteous media thinking that foreign aid is the big story from yesterday, as opposed to the billions earmarked for local projects and the continuing COVID response.
Can someone briefly update me on the Oxon full-full / half-full thing? I keep reading snippets on here but it seems to be a very stretched discussion, hard to piece together the responses.
Basically the methodology of the randomisation is potentially unsound. It is hard to be sure as we only have press releases to go on. The licensing bodies will want to look over the original data.
It doesn't mean that the vaccine is a dud, just not yet sufficiently proven.
Is that true? Or someone’s opinion? That sounds a very serious allegation to me.
The only real concern I have on the AZN/Oxford one is that the more efficacious regime hasn’t yet been trialled on the over 55s
Crikey, that's your only concern?
I have many and not just because of that article, which I agree was quite the hatchet. I don't think that's vaccine nationalism. It's because many of us smell a rat. For me it all began a couple of months ago when Andrew Pollard appeared to depart from science and entered the kind of entrepreneurial patter that I'd expect from a door-to-door salesman. It left a nasty taste in the mouth.
Nothing since has disabused me of that. The reports that they issued on efficacy, apparently rushed out because of the stellar show by both Moderna and Pfizer, contain some bizarrely muddled and mixed data. I am particularly concerned about their mashup of "70%" efficacy which doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny. It's an unscientific hotpotch of two radically different trials with two totally different datasets sets. You can't take those and make up an average.
And questions have been circulating in scientific circles for days. This one in Nature appeared earlier in the week:
I wonder what those who have seen their pay frozen or cut or even jobs lost think about politicians more concerned about our foreign aid being reduced than they seem to be concerned about people's wages or jobs?
The chattering classes are going off the rails again ever more stridently as the polls steadfastly refuse to reflect thier views. They really never learn.
Absolutely. By a landslide and don't forget it or forget why Scott.
Last December, we mostly knew Johnson was terrible, but alternative at the time seemed even worse.
That win is nothing at all to be proud of.
I don't think there was a single seat in the country where the choice was only between Conservative or Labour. My conscience wouldn't allow me to vote for either. Anyone who did was doing it with their eyes wide open. Personally, I don't have any time for excuses along the lines of "but the other side" when there are more than two sides.
For most though the third side is the lib dems and they are the worst choice of all. I would vote for corbyn long before I voted lib dem
If that's your preference, fine. But anyone's whose analysis runs "I didn't like Johnson or Corbyn, but I had to vote for one of them" isn't even being honest with themselves. There's no excuse for voting for something you know to be shit if there is an option on the ballot that doesn't look shit to you.
There were three options on my ballot, labour, con and ld they all looked shit so I voted for none of them
Can someone briefly update me on the Oxon full-full / half-full thing? I keep reading snippets on here but it seems to be a very stretched discussion, hard to piece together the responses.
Basically the methodology of the randomisation is potentially unsound. It is hard to be sure as we only have press releases to go on. The licensing bodies will want to look over the original data.
It doesn't mean that the vaccine is a dud, just not yet sufficiently proven.
Is that true? Or someone’s opinion? That sounds a very serious allegation to me.
The only real concern I have on the AZN/Oxford one is that the more efficacious regime hasn’t yet been trialled on the over 55s
Crikey, that's your only concern?
I have many and not just because of that article, which I agree was quite the hatchet. I don't think that's vaccine nationalism. It's because many of us smell a rat. For me it all began a couple of months ago when Andrew Pollard appeared to depart from science and entered the kind of entrepreneurial patter that I'd expect from a door-to-door salesman. It left a nasty taste in the mouth.
Nothing since has disabused me of that. The reports that they issued on efficacy, apparently rushed out because of the stellar show by both Moderna and Pfizer, contain some bizarrely muddled and mixed data. I am particularly concerned about their mashup of "70%" efficacy which doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny. It's an unscientific hotpotch of two radically different trials with two totally different datasets sets. You can't take those and make up an average.
And questions have been circulating in scientific circles for days. This one in Nature appeared earlier in the week:
"Mashing up results," or meta-analyses, aren't exactly new, and as long as the meta-analysis is done correctly and they are open with it (and they have been open with it), it's not remotely dodgy. Virtually all studies I've seen one health details, and the majority of covid studies that I've read, have been meta-analyses, specifically in order to get more data.
You seem to have extra information, though, suggesting that the meta-analysis was completely flawed and that they did it unscientifically, did a "hotpotch," and bastardised an average incorrectly. That wired article seemed to be summarised paragraph by paragraph as:
- It was a meta-analysis. - It was a meta-analysis. - Did I tell you it was a meta-analysis? - The original half-dose thing was unintentional but when it looked better, they ran with it. Oh, and it was a meta-analysis, okay? - They gave different placebos that were placebos. - The AZN/Oxford trial fell behind in the US when someone fell ill for unrelated reasons - They published plans to do a meta-analysis. Ooh, when did this become the plan? - The numbers are small [as with all these analyses; gloss over that]. Oh, and we're going to imply that they are dishonestly suppressing bad data at this point. - There were few over-55s
Maybe it's because I'm very used to meta-analyses being used and accepted that reading through that article didn't really make me concerned. In fact, it made me a bit wary of the intent of the author by the way they kept banging on about the meta-analysis bit. That's why I raised the question earlier of whether it is, in fact, such a cardinal sin in this context (and, if so, why they openly admit it). And the only point I came to where I went, "Oh, that's not ideal," was the "few over-55s" bit.
Yes, but a meta-analysis is conventionally done by looking at published trials that meet defined quality criteria. To combine two non identical incomplete studies at a point of interim analysis is rather statistically dubious. The results of the British and Brazilian trials should have been presented separately first.
This is not to say the vaccine is crap, indeed it may be very good, but that the results put out in the press release are only straws in the wind, not robust findings. I expect that we will get those fairly shortly, but pressure to launch prematurely is walking on very thin ice indeed.
On matters of economics Johnson has the kind of evidence-free optimism which is only possible when you have no understanding of reality. The UK under his leadership has already suffered the biggest economic collapse of any major economy. And now he breezily assures us that forecasts of a slow and partial recovery must be wrong. He exhibits the exact same blithe confidence that he knows better than the experts on the topic of a no deal Brexit, where he asserts - again with no supporting evidence, no successful forecasting record, no indication that he understands anything of which he speaks - that the costs of a WTO exit are vastly overstated.
The Goldman Sachs Elf's finely calibrated positionalism actually makes him more detestable than Johnson's reflexive buffoonery. He's also got an S-Type which is a shit car in anybody's book but when for somebody as well heeled as him it's a crime against humanity.
The original S-Type was, of course, the weapon of choice for a generation of villains. A favourite of Bruce Reynolds as I recall.
Unimaginative automotive typecasting from the Chancellor and would-be Bond villain.
Can someone briefly update me on the Oxon full-full / half-full thing? I keep reading snippets on here but it seems to be a very stretched discussion, hard to piece together the responses.
OK.
People given full dose / full dose of the AZN/Oxford vaccine saw efficacy of 60-70%. People given half dose / full dose of vaccine saw efficacy close to 90%.
HOWEVER, the half dose / full dose people were all under 55 (so this may simply be the case that the vaccine is much more efficacious on the young), and the numbers are too small to be certain that this isn't simply a statistical anomoly.
It is worth noting, however, that (AFAUI) none of the people who got the AZN/Oxford vaccine became seriously ill with CV19, and it does not require sub zero storage at all. It is therefore a vaccine that could be useful for (a) the young and (b) emerging markets.
Sure that was my exact understanding, yet people like Foxy and Francis seem to be pouring water on the whole trial.
That strikes me as very serious allegation. And perhaps somewhat unfair?
The Wired article alleges that the way the results have been presented is such that they are not reporting clean data. Instead they've chosen to process it, and present it in the most flattering way possible.
It's a highly partisan article, which is based largely on supposition. The author seems to think that just because she hasn't seen the full data, the statisticians analysing the results haven't. And she seems to be arguing that lack of proof of efficacity (on data she herself argues is incomplete) is proof of inefficacity.
One to file, if not quite in the bin, at most in the 'needs corroboration' pile.
I spend almost a decade as an equity analyst. Companies that attempted to present results using esoteric (just thought up) measures, rather than - you know - actual profit and loss were usually hiding something.
There's no 'event' to show everyone who is long Uber is wrong though, just cash being shovelled in to keep the irrational fiction going for a very long time indeed...
The detail is about WeWork, which is a yet more egregious example of exactly the same thing.
The key point is that not all of these are irrational fictions. Keep shovelling in enough cash, and sometimes you'll simply drive competition in a new sector out of business. It is a gross distortion of the market, clearly, but no one yet has a solution to it.
I wonder what those who have seen their pay frozen or cut or even jobs lost think about politicians more concerned about our foreign aid being reduced than they seem to be concerned about people's wages or jobs?
Yes, I think that is the whole point. The cut in foreign aid makes up for less than 1% of this years deficit. It is quite a useful dead cat to chuck on the table in order to distract from the catastrophic figures published yesterday.
On the one hand - Labour focusing criticism on foreign aid would be a vote loser and makes it harder for them to change perceptions and get into office.
On the other - there is perhaps some prospect of defeating the govt and I suppose saving a lot of lives?
Can someone briefly update me on the Oxon full-full / half-full thing? I keep reading snippets on here but it seems to be a very stretched discussion, hard to piece together the responses.
Basically the methodology of the randomisation is potentially unsound. It is hard to be sure as we only have press releases to go on. The licensing bodies will want to look over the original data.
It doesn't mean that the vaccine is a dud, just not yet sufficiently proven.
Is that true? Or someone’s opinion? That sounds a very serious allegation to me.
It raised a few eyebrows with me - about the article rather than the study, though. It did have the faintest whiff of a hack job.
I was okayish with the repeated charges against using a meta-analysis to gain more and more information - when done properly, they’re more than fine for other science as they improve statistical scope (I understand many health studies are meta-analyses), but maybe there’s a specific reason they’re bad in this sense. Although AZN/Oxford have been up front with presenting that data (it’s exactly how wired are asking the question).
The placebo thing got me scratching my head. How would that affect anyone in the vaccine arms? Unless there was any reason at all to suggest either placebo was somehow efficacious against covid, it seems a totally irrelevant charge.
When they got towards implying near-malfeasance with “presumably none of the others [demonstrated efficacy],” I, and at least one acquaintance independently, started to suspect some sort of vaccine nationalism that we’ve seen before. Why immediately presume failure that’s been ineptly covered up rather than the obvious presumption that not enough events have yet happened for those particular ones to be given any statistical significance yet?
Coupled with the NY Times one saying that they were worse than Pfizer and Moderna for providing initial data in [checks notes] the exact same way as Pfizer and Moderna, it does rather raise eyebrows. Yes, I’d prefer a peer-reviewed paper first, but under the circumstances and breathless desire for some information as soon as possible, we know that’s not possible. And the only reason we know these details is because all three companies are providing all the details they have.
The only real concern I have on the AZN/Oxford one is that the more efficacious regime hasn’t yet been trialled on the over 55s (apparently; need full confirmation on that). That the smaller dose was given out deliberately for most of the trial after the initial unintentional one happened and provided encouraging data seems fine. Numbers are small, but still statistically significant.
Sorry, but it's just not right to say that they presented the data in the same way as the other companies (and the way the other companies presented the data as a headline figure without a range was bad enough).
The main problems are:
(1) The data from two studies were combined, despite those studies being in different countries, with different protocols and different recruitment criteria. A proper meta-analysis would be one thing, but that's not what's described in the press release, which talks simple of "combining", "averaging" and "pooling".
(2) It's not just that the half-dose-full-dose regimen wasn't done in over-55s (and I agree that the age range hasn't been stated and that's another thing we're having to guess about). It's also that - reportedly - after the error that led to that regimen was discovered, the recruitment criteria were changed, so even within the UK study there is a mismatch between the participants who received the different regimens. And that raises the question of how the efficacy has been calculated for the half-dose-full-dose regimen - with reference to the placebo during the earlier stage, or the pooled placebo for the whole UK study? One would hope the former, but again we're left guessing, in a way we're not for the Pfizer and Moderna studies.
Can someone briefly update me on the Oxon full-full / half-full thing? I keep reading snippets on here but it seems to be a very stretched discussion, hard to piece together the responses.
Basically the methodology of the randomisation is potentially unsound. It is hard to be sure as we only have press releases to go on. The licensing bodies will want to look over the original data.
It doesn't mean that the vaccine is a dud, just not yet sufficiently proven.
Is that true? Or someone’s opinion? That sounds a very serious allegation to me.
The only real concern I have on the AZN/Oxford one is that the more efficacious regime hasn’t yet been trialled on the over 55s
Crikey, that's your only concern?
I have many and not just because of that article, which I agree was quite the hatchet. I don't think that's vaccine nationalism. It's because many of us smell a rat. For me it all began a couple of months ago when Andrew Pollard appeared to depart from science and entered the kind of entrepreneurial patter that I'd expect from a door-to-door salesman. It left a nasty taste in the mouth.
Nothing since has disabused me of that. The reports that they issued on efficacy, apparently rushed out because of the stellar show by both Moderna and Pfizer, contain some bizarrely muddled and mixed data. I am particularly concerned about their mashup of "70%" efficacy which doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny. It's an unscientific hotpotch of two radically different trials with two totally different datasets sets. You can't take those and make up an average.
And questions have been circulating in scientific circles for days. This one in Nature appeared earlier in the week:
And yet the full data will be published, so all of that is irrelevant.
But it's not irrelevant to the process of convincing people that they should be vaccinated once the vaccine has been properly evaluated and (hopefully) approved. The way the data have been reported could almost have been calculated to strengthen the hand of the anti-vaccine loonies.
The Goldman Sachs Elf's finely calibrated positionalism actually makes him more detestable than Johnson's reflexive buffoonery. He's also got an S-Type which is a shit car in anybody's book but when for somebody as well heeled as him it's a crime against humanity.
The original S-Type was, of course, the weapon of choice for a generation of villains. A favourite of Bruce Reynolds as I recall.
Unimaginative automotive typecasting from the Chancellor and would-be Bond villain.
I think the Mark 2 Jag was the classic 1960s getaway car, the 1960s S type was a more ungainly larger saloon version.
There's nothing to it. Trump's attempts to void democracy are increasingly pitiful to behold.
There is a great deal to it, given that at least a third of the US electorate seems genuinely to believe, against any evidence, that the election was fixed. It is exceptionally unlikely that the election results will be overturned (10,000/1, perhaps), but the lasting damage to democracy is baked in.
Trump failed in his endeavour because those at the state level who run elections are very largely honest, irrespective of party. What happens as the current generation of administrators are replaced (either by election of simply turnover by age) by radicalised anarchist Republicans is disturbing.
Can someone briefly update me on the Oxon full-full / half-full thing? I keep reading snippets on here but it seems to be a very stretched discussion, hard to piece together the responses.
Basically the methodology of the randomisation is potentially unsound. It is hard to be sure as we only have press releases to go on. The licensing bodies will want to look over the original data.
It doesn't mean that the vaccine is a dud, just not yet sufficiently proven.
Is that true? Or someone’s opinion? That sounds a very serious allegation to me.
The only real concern I have on the AZN/Oxford one is that the more efficacious regime hasn’t yet been trialled on the over 55s
Crikey, that's your only concern?
I have many and not just because of that article, which I agree was quite the hatchet. I don't think that's vaccine nationalism. It's because many of us smell a rat. For me it all began a couple of months ago when Andrew Pollard appeared to depart from science and entered the kind of entrepreneurial patter that I'd expect from a door-to-door salesman. It left a nasty taste in the mouth.
Nothing since has disabused me of that. The reports that they issued on efficacy, apparently rushed out because of the stellar show by both Moderna and Pfizer, contain some bizarrely muddled and mixed data. I am particularly concerned about their mashup of "70%" efficacy which doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny. It's an unscientific hotpotch of two radically different trials with two totally different datasets sets. You can't take those and make up an average.
And questions have been circulating in scientific circles for days. This one in Nature appeared earlier in the week:
And yet the full data will be published, so all of that is irrelevant.
But it's not irrelevant to the process of convincing people that they should be vaccinated once the vaccine has been properly evaluated and (hopefully) approved. The way the data have been reported could almost have been calculated to strengthen the hand of the anti-vaccine loonies.
And to piss off the FDA, with huge imlications for the chances of getting the necessary certifications to distribute to the third world.
I wonder what those who have seen their pay frozen or cut or even jobs lost think about politicians more concerned about our foreign aid being reduced than they seem to be concerned about people's wages or jobs?
And a righteous media thinking that foreign aid is the big story from yesterday, as opposed to the billions earmarked for local projects and the continuing COVID response.
Ah yes the levelling up agenda, the flagship of this government, to which it has allocated (checks notes) 0.2% of GDP.
I wonder what those who have seen their pay frozen or cut or even jobs lost think about politicians more concerned about our foreign aid being reduced than they seem to be concerned about people's wages or jobs?
Yes, I think that is the whole point. The cut in foreign aid makes up for less than 1% of this years deficit. It is quite a useful dead cat to chuck on the table in order to distract from the catastrophic figures published yesterday.
Unfortunately, it's a dead cat that's likely to lead to a large number of dead people. Still, they're destitute foreigners, so who cares, eh?
Can someone briefly update me on the Oxon full-full / half-full thing? I keep reading snippets on here but it seems to be a very stretched discussion, hard to piece together the responses.
OK.
People given full dose / full dose of the AZN/Oxford vaccine saw efficacy of 60-70%. People given half dose / full dose of vaccine saw efficacy close to 90%.
HOWEVER, the half dose / full dose people were all under 55 (so this may simply be the case that the vaccine is much more efficacious on the young), and the numbers are too small to be certain that this isn't simply a statistical anomoly.
It is worth noting, however, that (AFAUI) none of the people who got the AZN/Oxford vaccine became seriously ill with CV19, and it does not require sub zero storage at all. It is therefore a vaccine that could be useful for (a) the young and (b) emerging markets.
Sure that was my exact understanding, yet people like Foxy and Francis seem to be pouring water on the whole trial.
That strikes me as very serious allegation. And perhaps somewhat unfair?
The Wired article alleges that the way the results have been presented is such that they are not reporting clean data. Instead they've chosen to process it, and present it in the most flattering way possible.
It's a highly partisan article, which is based largely on supposition. The author seems to think that just because she hasn't seen the full data, the statisticians analysing the results haven't. And she seems to be arguing that lack of proof of efficacity (on data she herself argues is incomplete) is proof of inefficacity.
One to file, if not quite in the bin, at most in the 'needs corroboration' pile.
I spend almost a decade as an equity analyst. Companies that attempted to present results using esoteric (just thought up) measures, rather than - you know - actual profit and loss were usually hiding something.
There's no 'event' to show everyone who is long Uber is wrong though, just cash being shovelled in to keep the irrational fiction going for a very long time indeed...
The detail is about WeWork, which is a yet more egregious example of exactly the same thing.
The key point is that not all of these are irrational fictions. Keep shovelling in enough cash, and sometimes you'll simply drive competition in a new sector out of business. It is a gross distortion of the market, clearly, but no one yet has a solution to it.
I think in some of these markets - particularly the taxicab businesses - the barriers to entry are quite low, there are no network effects to lock people in and the economies of scale are small, so you can't simply drive the competition out of business and then make monopoly profits from your impregnable position.
Can someone briefly update me on the Oxon full-full / half-full thing? I keep reading snippets on here but it seems to be a very stretched discussion, hard to piece together the responses.
Basically the methodology of the randomisation is potentially unsound. It is hard to be sure as we only have press releases to go on. The licensing bodies will want to look over the original data.
It doesn't mean that the vaccine is a dud, just not yet sufficiently proven.
Is that true? Or someone’s opinion? That sounds a very serious allegation to me.
The only real concern I have on the AZN/Oxford one is that the more efficacious regime hasn’t yet been trialled on the over 55s
Crikey, that's your only concern?
I have many and not just because of that article, which I agree was quite the hatchet. I don't think that's vaccine nationalism. It's because many of us smell a rat. For me it all began a couple of months ago when Andrew Pollard appeared to depart from science and entered the kind of entrepreneurial patter that I'd expect from a door-to-door salesman. It left a nasty taste in the mouth.
Nothing since has disabused me of that. The reports that they issued on efficacy, apparently rushed out because of the stellar show by both Moderna and Pfizer, contain some bizarrely muddled and mixed data. I am particularly concerned about their mashup of "70%" efficacy which doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny. It's an unscientific hotpotch of two radically different trials with two totally different datasets sets. You can't take those and make up an average.
And questions have been circulating in scientific circles for days. This one in Nature appeared earlier in the week:
And yet the full data will be published, so all of that is irrelevant.
But it's not irrelevant to the process of convincing people that they should be vaccinated once the vaccine has been properly evaluated and (hopefully) approved. The way the data have been reported could almost have been calculated to strengthen the hand of the anti-vaccine loonies.
And to piss off the FDA, with huge imlications for the chances of getting the necessary certifications to distribute to the third world.
The FDA will approve based on scientific papers and full data submissions, not press releases.
Can someone briefly update me on the Oxon full-full / half-full thing? I keep reading snippets on here but it seems to be a very stretched discussion, hard to piece together the responses.
Basically the methodology of the randomisation is potentially unsound. It is hard to be sure as we only have press releases to go on. The licensing bodies will want to look over the original data.
It doesn't mean that the vaccine is a dud, just not yet sufficiently proven.
Is that true? Or someone’s opinion? That sounds a very serious allegation to me.
The only real concern I have on the AZN/Oxford one is that the more efficacious regime hasn’t yet been trialled on the over 55s
Crikey, that's your only concern?
I have many and not just because of that article, which I agree was quite the hatchet. I don't think that's vaccine nationalism. It's because many of us smell a rat. For me it all began a couple of months ago when Andrew Pollard appeared to depart from science and entered the kind of entrepreneurial patter that I'd expect from a door-to-door salesman. It left a nasty taste in the mouth.
Nothing since has disabused me of that. The reports that they issued on efficacy, apparently rushed out because of the stellar show by both Moderna and Pfizer, contain some bizarrely muddled and mixed data. I am particularly concerned about their mashup of "70%" efficacy which doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny. It's an unscientific hotpotch of two radically different trials with two totally different datasets sets. You can't take those and make up an average.
And questions have been circulating in scientific circles for days. This one in Nature appeared earlier in the week:
And yet the full data will be published, so all of that is irrelevant.
But it's not irrelevant to the process of convincing people that they should be vaccinated once the vaccine has been properly evaluated and (hopefully) approved. The way the data have been reported could almost have been calculated to strengthen the hand of the anti-vaccine loonies.
I said last night that the press releases were regrettable. They won't alter the data, though.
Shows how out of touch they are if they think the average family home can accommodate eight adults enjoying Christmas Dinner together, two metres apart.
Can someone briefly update me on the Oxon full-full / half-full thing? I keep reading snippets on here but it seems to be a very stretched discussion, hard to piece together the responses.
Basically the methodology of the randomisation is potentially unsound. It is hard to be sure as we only have press releases to go on. The licensing bodies will want to look over the original data.
It doesn't mean that the vaccine is a dud, just not yet sufficiently proven.
Is that true? Or someone’s opinion? That sounds a very serious allegation to me.
The only real concern I have on the AZN/Oxford one is that the more efficacious regime hasn’t yet been trialled on the over 55s
Crikey, that's your only concern?
I have many and not just because of that article, which I agree was quite the hatchet. I don't think that's vaccine nationalism. It's because many of us smell a rat. For me it all began a couple of months ago when Andrew Pollard appeared to depart from science and entered the kind of entrepreneurial patter that I'd expect from a door-to-door salesman. It left a nasty taste in the mouth.
Nothing since has disabused me of that. The reports that they issued on efficacy, apparently rushed out because of the stellar show by both Moderna and Pfizer, contain some bizarrely muddled and mixed data. I am particularly concerned about their mashup of "70%" efficacy which doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny. It's an unscientific hotpotch of two radically different trials with two totally different datasets sets. You can't take those and make up an average.
And questions have been circulating in scientific circles for days. This one in Nature appeared earlier in the week:
And yet the full data will be published, so all of that is irrelevant.
But it's not irrelevant to the process of convincing people that they should be vaccinated once the vaccine has been properly evaluated and (hopefully) approved. The way the data have been reported could almost have been calculated to strengthen the hand of the anti-vaccine loonies.
And to piss off the FDA, with huge imlications for the chances of getting the necessary certifications to distribute to the third world.
There's no real evidence - over many years - that the FDA take any notice of such things.
I wonder what those who have seen their pay frozen or cut or even jobs lost think about politicians more concerned about our foreign aid being reduced than they seem to be concerned about people's wages or jobs?
Yes, I think that is the whole point. The cut in foreign aid makes up for less than 1% of this years deficit. It is quite a useful dead cat to chuck on the table in order to distract from the catastrophic figures published yesterday.
Unfortunately, it's a dead cat that's likely to lead to a large number of dead people. Still, they're destitute foreigners, so who cares, eh?
It very much depends on what is prioritised within the aid budget. Famine relief and medical programmes being cut may well do as you say. A lot of the aid is for infrastructure development, both physical and human, such as strengthening democracy, human rights, rule of law, anti-corruption etc. Very important roles for development of course, but less likely to cause mortality in the short term.
Shows how out of touch they are if they think the average family home can accommodate eight adults enjoying Christmas Dinner together, two metres apart.
Surely just take away 2/3 of the chairs at the table in the dining hall? 🧐
On matters of economics Johnson has the kind of evidence-free optimism which is only possible when you have no understanding of reality. The UK under his leadership has already suffered the biggest economic collapse of any major economy. And now he breezily assures us that forecasts of a slow and partial recovery must be wrong. He exhibits the exact same blithe confidence that he knows better than the experts on the topic of a no deal Brexit, where he asserts - again with no supporting evidence, no successful forecasting record, no indication that he understands anything of which he speaks - that the costs of a WTO exit are vastly overstated.
Given that he 'can't manage' on an income of £150k.......
Can someone briefly update me on the Oxon full-full / half-full thing? I keep reading snippets on here but it seems to be a very stretched discussion, hard to piece together the responses.
OK.
People given full dose / full dose of the AZN/Oxford vaccine saw efficacy of 60-70%. People given half dose / full dose of vaccine saw efficacy close to 90%.
HOWEVER, the half dose / full dose people were all under 55 (so this may simply be the case that the vaccine is much more efficacious on the young), and the numbers are too small to be certain that this isn't simply a statistical anomoly.
It is worth noting, however, that (AFAUI) none of the people who got the AZN/Oxford vaccine became seriously ill with CV19, and it does not require sub zero storage at all. It is therefore a vaccine that could be useful for (a) the young and (b) emerging markets.
Sure that was my exact understanding, yet people like Foxy and Francis seem to be pouring water on the whole trial.
That strikes me as very serious allegation. And perhaps somewhat unfair?
The Wired article alleges that the way the results have been presented is such that they are not reporting clean data. Instead they've chosen to process it, and present it in the most flattering way possible.
It's a highly partisan article, which is based largely on supposition. The author seems to think that just because she hasn't seen the full data, the statisticians analysing the results haven't. And she seems to be arguing that lack of proof of efficacity (on data she herself argues is incomplete) is proof of inefficacity.
One to file, if not quite in the bin, at most in the 'needs corroboration' pile.
I spend almost a decade as an equity analyst. Companies that attempted to present results using esoteric (just thought up) measures, rather than - you know - actual profit and loss were usually hiding something.
There's no 'event' to show everyone who is long Uber is wrong though, just cash being shovelled in to keep the irrational fiction going for a very long time indeed...
The detail is about WeWork, which is a yet more egregious example of exactly the same thing.
The key point is that not all of these are irrational fictions. Keep shovelling in enough cash, and sometimes you'll simply drive competition in a new sector out of business. It is a gross distortion of the market, clearly, but no one yet has a solution to it.
Uber bet the house on self driving car technology, and have somewhat belatedly realised its a 90/10 problem which is awful long way from turning into a 98/2 problem. IMHO the company is now nothing but a giant ponzi scheme with investors throwing good money after bad, while the original shareholders sell out. Even before the pandemic they were losing billions of dollars a quarter.
The Goldman Sachs Elf's finely calibrated positionalism actually makes him more detestable than Johnson's reflexive buffoonery. He's also got an S-Type which is a shit car in anybody's book but when for somebody as well heeled as him it's a crime against humanity.
The original S-Type was, of course, the weapon of choice for a generation of villains. A favourite of Bruce Reynolds as I recall.
Unimaginative automotive typecasting from the Chancellor and would-be Bond villain.
I think the Mark 2 Jag was the classic 1960s getaway car, the 1960s S type was a more ungainly larger saloon version.
The S-Type was a Mark 2 replacement with IRS instead of a live axle - basically a 4 door E-Type. But the Mark 2 kept selling so Brown's Lane kept making them. The 420 was the big lardy one.
I wonder what those who have seen their pay frozen or cut or even jobs lost think about politicians more concerned about our foreign aid being reduced than they seem to be concerned about people's wages or jobs?
The chattering classes are going off the rails again ever more stridently as the polls steadfastly refuse to reflect thier views. They really never learn.
I wonder what those who have seen their pay frozen or cut or even jobs lost think about politicians more concerned about our foreign aid being reduced than they seem to be concerned about people's wages or jobs?
Yes, it's completely ridiculous. The aid budget is an unaffordable luxury. Additionally it does nothing for the "global Britain" brand, these countries didn't like us before the 0.7% commitment, they don't like us with it and they won't like us when we get rid of it. The idea that a few billion pounds can erase decades of colonial hardship in Africa is hilarious. The UK's aid budget is another example of liberal whites thinking that only liberal whites know what's best for black and brown countries.
We should have cut it to zero and provided disaster relief only and then funnelled whatever spare vaccine doses we're due in 2021-2022 into it.
I'd rather that £10bn either not be borrowed or used to give teachers and other public facing state sector people a payrise or a one off bonus for this year of difficulty.
The Goldman Sachs Elf's finely calibrated positionalism actually makes him more detestable than Johnson's reflexive buffoonery. He's also got an S-Type which is a shit car in anybody's book but when for somebody as well heeled as him it's a crime against humanity.
The original S-Type was, of course, the weapon of choice for a generation of villains. A favourite of Bruce Reynolds as I recall.
Unimaginative automotive typecasting from the Chancellor and would-be Bond villain.
I think the Mark 2 Jag was the classic 1960s getaway car, the 1960s S type was a more ungainly larger saloon version.
The S-Type was the updated MkII. The villain's car in The title sequence of the Sweeney. The bandit car in the Callan movie and also in the Richard Burton film "Villain" and more besides. I think you have the Jaguar MK X in mind.
I wonder what those who have seen their pay frozen or cut or even jobs lost think about politicians more concerned about our foreign aid being reduced than they seem to be concerned about people's wages or jobs?
Yes, I think that is the whole point. The cut in foreign aid makes up for less than 1% of this years deficit. It is quite a useful dead cat to chuck on the table in order to distract from the catastrophic figures published yesterday.
Unfortunately, it's a dead cat that's likely to lead to a large number of dead people. Still, they're destitute foreigners, so who cares, eh?
It very much depends on what is prioritised within the aid budget. Famine relief and medical programmes being cut may well do as you say. A lot of the aid is for infrastructure development, both physical and human, such as strengthening democracy, human rights, rule of law, anti-corruption etc. Very important roles for development of course, but less likely to cause mortality in the short term.
That's a fair point, though development and education (especially for girls) does a lot for health and life expectancy in the medium term.
But the bottom line is that the UK is nibbling round the edge of its fiscal problem by breaking its committment to people who are waaaay worse off than us. And that's not right.
Can someone briefly update me on the Oxon full-full / half-full thing? I keep reading snippets on here but it seems to be a very stretched discussion, hard to piece together the responses.
OK.
People given full dose / full dose of the AZN/Oxford vaccine saw efficacy of 60-70%. People given half dose / full dose of vaccine saw efficacy close to 90%.
HOWEVER, the half dose / full dose people were all under 55 (so this may simply be the case that the vaccine is much more efficacious on the young), and the numbers are too small to be certain that this isn't simply a statistical anomoly.
It is worth noting, however, that (AFAUI) none of the people who got the AZN/Oxford vaccine became seriously ill with CV19, and it does not require sub zero storage at all. It is therefore a vaccine that could be useful for (a) the young and (b) emerging markets.
Sure that was my exact understanding, yet people like Foxy and Francis seem to be pouring water on the whole trial.
That strikes me as very serious allegation. And perhaps somewhat unfair?
The Wired article alleges that the way the results have been presented is such that they are not reporting clean data. Instead they've chosen to process it, and present it in the most flattering way possible.
It's a highly partisan article, which is based largely on supposition. The author seems to think that just because she hasn't seen the full data, the statisticians analysing the results haven't. And she seems to be arguing that lack of proof of efficacity (on data she herself argues is incomplete) is proof of inefficacity.
One to file, if not quite in the bin, at most in the 'needs corroboration' pile.
I spend almost a decade as an equity analyst. Companies that attempted to present results using esoteric (just thought up) measures, rather than - you know - actual profit and loss were usually hiding something.
There's no 'event' to show everyone who is long Uber is wrong though, just cash being shovelled in to keep the irrational fiction going for a very long time indeed...
The detail is about WeWork, which is a yet more egregious example of exactly the same thing.
The key point is that not all of these are irrational fictions. Keep shovelling in enough cash, and sometimes you'll simply drive competition in a new sector out of business. It is a gross distortion of the market, clearly, but no one yet has a solution to it.
I think in some of these markets - particularly the taxicab businesses - the barriers to entry are quite low, there are no network effects to lock people in and the economies of scale are small, so you can't simply drive the competition out of business and then make monopoly profits from your impregnable position.
You're probably right - Uber is not something I'd touch, FWIW - but the general point is an important and not widely recognised one. There are perverse incentives for venture capital to keep doing this kind of thing.
Can someone briefly update me on the Oxon full-full / half-full thing? I keep reading snippets on here but it seems to be a very stretched discussion, hard to piece together the responses.
Basically the methodology of the randomisation is potentially unsound. It is hard to be sure as we only have press releases to go on. The licensing bodies will want to look over the original data.
It doesn't mean that the vaccine is a dud, just not yet sufficiently proven.
Is that true? Or someone’s opinion? That sounds a very serious allegation to me.
It raised a few eyebrows with me - about the article rather than the study, though. It did have the faintest whiff of a hack job.
I was okayish with the repeated charges against using a meta-analysis to gain more and more information - when done properly, they’re more than fine for other science as they improve statistical scope (I understand many health studies are meta-analyses), but maybe there’s a specific reason they’re bad in this sense. Although AZN/Oxford have been up front with presenting that data (it’s exactly how wired are asking the question).
The placebo thing got me scratching my head. How would that affect anyone in the vaccine arms? Unless there was any reason at all to suggest either placebo was somehow efficacious against covid, it seems a totally irrelevant charge.
When they got towards implying near-malfeasance with “presumably none of the others [demonstrated efficacy],” I, and at least one acquaintance independently, started to suspect some sort of vaccine nationalism that we’ve seen before. Why immediately presume failure that’s been ineptly covered up rather than the obvious presumption that not enough events have yet happened for those particular ones to be given any statistical significance yet?
Coupled with the NY Times one saying that they were worse than Pfizer and Moderna for providing initial data in [checks notes] the exact same way as Pfizer and Moderna, it does rather raise eyebrows. Yes, I’d prefer a peer-reviewed paper first, but under the circumstances and breathless desire for some information as soon as possible, we know that’s not possible. And the only reason we know these details is because all three companies are providing all the details they have.
The only real concern I have on the AZN/Oxford one is that the more efficacious regime hasn’t yet been trialled on the over 55s (apparently; need full confirmation on that). That the smaller dose was given out deliberately for most of the trial after the initial unintentional one happened and provided encouraging data seems fine. Numbers are small, but still statistically significant.
Sorry, but it's just not right to say that they presented the data in the same way as the other companies (and the way the other companies presented the data as a headline figure without a range was bad enough).
The main problems are:
(1) The data from two studies were combined, despite those studies being in different countries, with different protocols and different recruitment criteria. A proper meta-analysis would be one thing, but that's not what's described in the press release, which talks simple of "combining", "averaging" and "pooling".
(2) It's not just that the half-dose-full-dose regimen wasn't done in over-55s (and I agree that the age range hasn't been stated and that's another thing we're having to guess about). It's also that - reportedly - after the error that led to that regimen was discovered, the recruitment criteria were changed, so even within the UK study there is a mismatch between the participants who received the different regimens. And that raises the question of how the efficacy has been calculated for the half-dose-full-dose regimen - with reference to the placebo during the earlier stage, or the pooled placebo for the whole UK study? One would hope the former, but again we're left guessing, in a way we're not for the Pfizer and Moderna studies.
That's right. It may turn out that the Oxford vaccine is just as good (or indeed better) than the others, but the only sensible thing is an independent MRHA analysis of the full data and keeping an open mind till that arrives. I don't care where the best vaccine comes from, and I'd like to be confident that the Government won't simply prefer the British one, 'cos it's ours and it's cheap. Unfortunately, I don't feel that confidence.
On the cost, if anything justifed 0.5p on income tax, getting the best vaccine for each population group really does.
The Goldman Sachs Elf's finely calibrated positionalism actually makes him more detestable than Johnson's reflexive buffoonery. He's also got an S-Type which is a shit car in anybody's book but when for somebody as well heeled as him it's a crime against humanity.
The original S-Type was, of course, the weapon of choice for a generation of villains. A favourite of Bruce Reynolds as I recall.
Unimaginative automotive typecasting from the Chancellor and would-be Bond villain.
I think the Mark 2 Jag was the classic 1960s getaway car, the 1960s S type was a more ungainly larger saloon version.
The S-Type was a Mark 2 replacement with IRS instead of a live axle - basically a 4 door E-Type. But the Mark 2 kept selling so Brown's Lane kept making them. The 420 was the big lardy one.
The S-type always looked wrong, with an out of proportion rear end. The Mark 2 was a classic though. Like the P6 V8 Rover, a real British classic saloon car.
On matters of economics Johnson has the kind of evidence-free optimism which is only possible when you have no understanding of reality. The UK under his leadership has already suffered the biggest economic collapse of any major economy. And now he breezily assures us that forecasts of a slow and partial recovery must be wrong. He exhibits the exact same blithe confidence that he knows better than the experts on the topic of a no deal Brexit, where he asserts - again with no supporting evidence, no successful forecasting record, no indication that he understands anything of which he speaks - that the costs of a WTO exit are vastly overstated.
Given that he 'can't manage' on an income of £150k.......
Plus his wife is earning.
Is she again? I thought she had stood down from her environmental post....
The Goldman Sachs Elf's finely calibrated positionalism actually makes him more detestable than Johnson's reflexive buffoonery. He's also got an S-Type which is a shit car in anybody's book but when for somebody as well heeled as him it's a crime against humanity.
The original S-Type was, of course, the weapon of choice for a generation of villains. A favourite of Bruce Reynolds as I recall.
Unimaginative automotive typecasting from the Chancellor and would-be Bond villain.
I think the Mark 2 Jag was the classic 1960s getaway car, the 1960s S type was a more ungainly larger saloon version.
The S-Type was a Mark 2 replacement with IRS instead of a live axle - basically a 4 door E-Type. But the Mark 2 kept selling so Brown's Lane kept making them. The 420 was the big lardy one.
I thought the big fat cat was the MK 10, on which the XJ6 was sort of based.
On matters of economics Johnson has the kind of evidence-free optimism which is only possible when you have no understanding of reality. The UK under his leadership has already suffered the biggest economic collapse of any major economy. And now he breezily assures us that forecasts of a slow and partial recovery must be wrong. He exhibits the exact same blithe confidence that he knows better than the experts on the topic of a no deal Brexit, where he asserts - again with no supporting evidence, no successful forecasting record, no indication that he understands anything of which he speaks - that the costs of a WTO exit are vastly overstated.
Given that he 'can't manage' on an income of £150k.......
Plus his wife is earning.
Is she again? I thought she had stood down from her environmental post....
On matters of economics Johnson has the kind of evidence-free optimism which is only possible when you have no understanding of reality. The UK under his leadership has already suffered the biggest economic collapse of any major economy. And now he breezily assures us that forecasts of a slow and partial recovery must be wrong. He exhibits the exact same blithe confidence that he knows better than the experts on the topic of a no deal Brexit, where he asserts - again with no supporting evidence, no successful forecasting record, no indication that he understands anything of which he speaks - that the costs of a WTO exit are vastly overstated.
Given that he 'can't manage' on an income of £150k.......
Plus his wife is earning.
Is she again? I thought she had stood down from her environmental post....
On matters of economics Johnson has the kind of evidence-free optimism which is only possible when you have no understanding of reality. The UK under his leadership has already suffered the biggest economic collapse of any major economy. And now he breezily assures us that forecasts of a slow and partial recovery must be wrong. He exhibits the exact same blithe confidence that he knows better than the experts on the topic of a no deal Brexit, where he asserts - again with no supporting evidence, no successful forecasting record, no indication that he understands anything of which he speaks - that the costs of a WTO exit are vastly overstated.
Given that he 'can't manage' on an income of £150k.......
Plus his wife is earning.
Is she again? I thought she had stood down from her environmental post....
Boris will still be receiving book royalties so you can help out the Prime Minister by choosing Christmas presents from his back catalogue. I've already done my bit.
Comments
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03326-w
That sounds pretty "soft".
Obviously if you get infected by covid you are also quite likely to pass it on to someone else. Which is killing others.
Geddit?
Absolutely if you get infected by COVID you can kill others. That is literally what I just said. "Public health is about killing others".
What part of that was hard for you to understand? I had replied originally to a quote about them being allowed to kill themselves.
If someone wants to kill themselves by refusing a blood transfusion that is protected by the first amendment. If someone wants to kill others in a pandemic that never has been protected before.
It looks crystal clear to me that AstraZeneca rushed out their dodgy results because they were about to be left behind by Pfizer and Moderna.
It is, of course, typical Boris and the Union Jack types to leap onto the bandwagon leaving their brains, if indeed they have them, far behind.
"Mashing up results," or meta-analyses, aren't exactly new, and as long as the meta-analysis is done correctly and they are open with it (and they have been open with it), it's not remotely dodgy. Virtually all studies I've seen one health details, and the majority of covid studies that I've read, have been meta-analyses, specifically in order to get more data.
You seem to have extra information, though, suggesting that the meta-analysis was completely flawed and that they did it unscientifically, did a "hotpotch," and bastardised an average incorrectly. That wired article seemed to be summarised paragraph by paragraph as:
- It was a meta-analysis.
- It was a meta-analysis.
- Did I tell you it was a meta-analysis?
- The original half-dose thing was unintentional but when it looked better, they ran with it. Oh, and it was a meta-analysis, okay?
- They gave different placebos that were placebos.
- The AZN/Oxford trial fell behind in the US when someone fell ill for unrelated reasons
- They published plans to do a meta-analysis. Ooh, when did this become the plan?
- The numbers are small [as with all these analyses; gloss over that]. Oh, and we're going to imply that they are dishonestly suppressing bad data at this point.
- There were few over-55s
Maybe it's because I'm very used to meta-analyses being used and accepted that reading through that article didn't really make me concerned. In fact, it made me a bit wary of the intent of the author by the way they kept banging on about the meta-analysis bit. That's why I raised the question earlier of whether it is, in fact, such a cardinal sin in this context (and, if so, why they openly admit it).
And the only point I came to where I went, "Oh, that's not ideal," was the "few over-55s" bit.
It's crap, to be frank. I particularly dislike the attempt to make 70% efficacy out of two entirely different trials, results and datasets. It's like taking Liverpool's defensive record and adding it to Alastair Cooke's batting average to produce a mean scoring rate.
What may be dubious is the separating the 90% out though the MHRA will judge from a full scientific report and all the evidence not press releases.
“There’s a long, long way to go before these data settle down and get reported and published in full.”
The WHO seemed very pleased with it.
Biden is now 1.07 on BF.
1.07!!! Yeh Gods.
R4 just said Hancock will announce later, but didn't say when.
And it is.
And now we see that most emblematic of social media phenomena: non-scientists arguing about science.
I think 999 will be a good place to stop. See you!
https://twitter.com/paulwaugh/status/1331876727614824450
In all likelihood the vaccine will be fine to knock COVID-19 on the head, even if it doesn't have the same unpexpectedly high efficacy as the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines (and even reportedly the Sputnik vaccine).
The tragedy is that both the execution of the trial and the presentation of the results have been cocked up so badly that it's provided a truckload of ammunition to the anti-vaccine loonies. In much the same way that Kate Bingham's witless comments did, but this time under a much stronger spotlight of publicity.
The right choice was my suggestion of spending the 2021 aid budget on free Oxford vaccine to the entire world.
Have you tried using LinkedIn
Takes quite a while to publish full data, and (as I noted at the time here) Moderna did exactly the same sort of thing earlier in the year with data by press release, just before they had a pubic offering of stock, and with far greater price sensitivity for their stock.
Always wait for the full data is the rule with all drug companies.
" [Sunak has] set the scene for a future ideological reckoning in the Tory party,"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/11/25/britain-facing-ruin-deludedtories-still-refusing-accept/
You can add to the fact that it hasn't been trialled on the over 55s, the equally gobsmacking fact that it wasn't disclosed at the time the apparently good news was revealed that it hadn't been trialled on the over 55s. And never mind the statistics, let's take a step back and look at the most concerning fact of all: this may be a trial but it is also a medical procedure in which thousands of people got a dose out by x2 because of a cockup. People die because of that sort of dosing error; this is medical negligence on a massive scale, explained away as "serendipity."
I am as loyal an Englishman and Oxonian as they come, but the partisanship here is extraordinary. Like an Argentinian saying that there is no evidence that Maradona utouched the ball and this whole handball rule needs looking at anyway.
It is exceptionally unlikely that the election results will be overturned (10,000/1, perhaps), but the lasting damage to democracy is baked in.
Trump failed in his endeavour because those at the state level who run elections are very largely honest, irrespective of party. What happens as the current generation of administrators are replaced (either by election of simply turnover by age) by radicalised anarchist Republicans is disturbing.
Starmer needs Ed Balls back in Parliament me thinks.
This is not to say the vaccine is crap, indeed it may be very good, but that the results put out in the press release are only straws in the wind, not robust findings. I expect that we will get those fairly shortly, but pressure to launch prematurely is walking on very thin ice indeed.
https://twitter.com/skynews/status/1331876161052434434?s=21
He exhibits the exact same blithe confidence that he knows better than the experts on the topic of a no deal Brexit, where he asserts - again with no supporting evidence, no successful forecasting record, no indication that he understands anything of which he speaks - that the costs of a WTO exit are vastly overstated.
Unimaginative automotive typecasting from the Chancellor and would-be Bond villain.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/30/how-venture-capitalists-are-deforming-capitalism
The detail is about WeWork, which is a yet more egregious example of exactly the same thing.
The key point is that not all of these are irrational fictions. Keep shovelling in enough cash, and sometimes you'll simply drive competition in a new sector out of business.
It is a gross distortion of the market, clearly, but no one yet has a solution to it.
On the other - there is perhaps some prospect of defeating the govt and I suppose saving a lot of lives?
Tricky.
The main problems are:
(1) The data from two studies were combined, despite those studies being in different countries, with different protocols and different recruitment criteria. A proper meta-analysis would be one thing, but that's not what's described in the press release, which talks simple of "combining", "averaging" and "pooling".
(2) It's not just that the half-dose-full-dose regimen wasn't done in over-55s (and I agree that the age range hasn't been stated and that's another thing we're having to guess about). It's also that - reportedly - after the error that led to that regimen was discovered, the recruitment criteria were changed, so even within the UK study there is a mismatch between the participants who received the different regimens. And that raises the question of how the efficacy has been calculated for the half-dose-full-dose regimen - with reference to the placebo during the earlier stage, or the pooled placebo for the whole UK study? One would hope the former, but again we're left guessing, in a way we're not for the Pfizer and Moderna studies.
They won't alter the data, though.
Plus his wife is earning.
https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1331650556566368258
https://twitter.com/toryboypierce/status/1331703683378188298
We should have cut it to zero and provided disaster relief only and then funnelled whatever spare vaccine doses we're due in 2021-2022 into it.
I'd rather that £10bn either not be borrowed or used to give teachers and other public facing state sector people a payrise or a one off bonus for this year of difficulty.
But the bottom line is that the UK is nibbling round the edge of its fiscal problem by breaking its committment to people who are waaaay worse off than us. And that's not right.
There are perverse incentives for venture capital to keep doing this kind of thing.
On the cost, if anything justifed 0.5p on income tax, getting the best vaccine for each population group really does.
Stop ramping your stupid culture war.