The polling that shows that Boris is NOT the right UK leader to protect the union – politicalbetting

IshmaelZ said:

MarqueeMark said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

BBC News - Harriet Tubman: Biden moves to put anti-slavery activist on $20 bill
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-55808324

A Royal Navy warship captain?

No?

Yes, you don't ship 3.2 million bodies across the Atlantic without some serious professionals watching your back. Credit where credit is due.

MaxPB said:

Leon said:

MaxPB said:

kinabalu said:

Philip_Thompson said:

kinabalu said:

Leon said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Leon said:

Philip_Thompson said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

If the EU block export of Pfizer vaccines to UK, while demanding queue jumping of AZN ones made in the UK....that will go down well.

Don't worry, the EU will still have it's defenders in the UK, either out loud or by staying quiet.

Everyone needs to stop frothing.

The EU are not going to block export of Pfizer vaccines.

What is wrong with everyone?

So why are they putting a notification and approval process in place for exports?

We can discuss the behaviour of the EU if and when they actually do something. Otherwise everyone is just frothing about a few tweets from EU knobheads.

I know first-hand how integrated EU and UK pharma supply chains are. Britain therefore has significant leverage and any trade war would have awful consequences for both parties.

Everyone just needs to calm down.

You think that Commissioner Kyriakides is a knobhead?

A little undiplomatic but OK . . .

If the UK had been behaving with the chaotic, flailing incompetence of the EU and its media friends, in the last couple of weeks, they would have had squirting orgasms of delight.

The Handelsblatt error is just mind-bogglingly stupid, world class levels of irresponsible, and it could lead to actual deaths as people read the fake news (still being retweeted by Told You So anti-vaxxers) and avoid the jab.

How has the journalist wo wrote it still got a job? In the UK he'd now be collecting Universal Credit.

No, in the UK people who publish lies in newspapers become Prime Minister.

Whataboutery of the first water,

FFS this is a lie - sorry "journalistic error" - on a cosmic level; the 8% meme is now out there, and it will possibly cause deaths.

To make it worse, Handelsblatt were told last night be multiple experts - virologists, epidemiologists, everyone - that the "8% thing" was almost certainly wrong, damaging and dangerous, and should be immediately retracted. Did they? No. They doubled down.

It was still on their website just an hour ago.

In a spirit of genuine intellectual curiosity rather than whataboutery -

Do we think this will cost more lives than the Cummings scandal?

Obviously.

Sorry, forgot to add - the question is not to be attempted by people who lost their integrity over the Cummings scandal. To assess it properly you need (i) some core data, (ii) a set of reasonable assumptions about behaviour, (iii) a calculator, and (iv) your integrity.

I quit the Tory party over it, and this anti-vaxxer bullshit from Germany is way, way worse than Cummings. The effect on global vaccine take up in the developing world is going to be a disaster once the Russian "8%" memes start to spread all over African and Asian WhatsApp.

I suppose there is still the tiny possibility that the 8% "fact" is true; though it seems vanishingly unlikely, from all I've read about vaccines, and it has been vehemently denied by AZ, and is now denied by the German government.

It's not true, the German government has already said it was down to a misunderstanding of the report the German regulator has received from the EMA saying that 56-69 year olds only made up 8% of the trial. That's where the number comes from. It has nothing to do with efficacy.

SouthamObserver said:

felix said:

SouthamObserver said:

MaxPB said:

Leon said:

kinabalu said:

BluestBlue said:

kinabalu said:

Leon said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Leon said:

Philip_Thompson said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

If the EU block export of Pfizer vaccines to UK, while demanding queue jumping of AZN ones made in the UK....that will go down well.

Don't worry, the EU will still have it's defenders in the UK, either out loud or by staying quiet.

Everyone needs to stop frothing.

The EU are not going to block export of Pfizer vaccines.

What is wrong with everyone?

So why are they putting a notification and approval process in place for exports?

We can discuss the behaviour of the EU if and when they actually do something. Otherwise everyone is just frothing about a few tweets from EU knobheads.

I know first-hand how integrated EU and UK pharma supply chains are. Britain therefore has significant leverage and any trade war would have awful consequences for both parties.

Everyone just needs to calm down.

You think that Commissioner Kyriakides is a knobhead?

A little undiplomatic but OK . . .

If the UK had been behaving with the chaotic, flailing incompetence of the EU and its media friends, in the last couple of weeks, they would have had squirting orgasms of delight.

The Handelsblatt error is just mind-bogglingly stupid, world class levels of irresponsible, and it could lead to actual deaths as people read the fake news (still being retweeted by Told You So anti-vaxxers) and avoid the jab.

How has the journalist wo wrote it still got a job? In the UK he'd now be collecting Universal Credit.

No, in the UK people who publish lies in newspapers become Prime Minister.

Whataboutery of the first water,

FFS this is a lie - sorry "journalistic error" - on a cosmic level; the 8% meme is now out there, and it will possibly cause deaths.

To make it worse, Handelsblatt were told last night be multiple experts - virologists, epidemiologists, everyone - that the "8% thing" was almost certainly wrong, damaging and dangerous, and should be immediately retracted. Did they? No. They doubled down.

It was still on their website just an hour ago.

In a spirit of genuine intellectual curiosity rather than whataboutery -

Do we think this will cost more lives than the Cummings scandal?

Since there's not the slightest particle of evidence that even one additional person died as a result of that supposed scandal, the Handelsblatt Affair has every chance of prevailing.

None of this is provable in a hard scientific sense but it lends itself to insightful speculation for those with the head and stomach for it.
Here we are stacking up: (i) loss of trust in government lockdown messaging due to senior government advisor pissing all over it VERSUS (ii) loss of trust in AZ vaccine due to fake news story in German newspaper.
I don't have the answer. Was hoping to hear from others first. Particularly those who are talking about lives lost due to (ii).

Here is an example of why the Handelsblatt Affair is much more damaging.

The original tweets claiming "8% efficacy" were retweeted by multiple journalists, and experts, in Germany

Like this guy. Here he is explaining why he has now deleted the retweet

https://twitter.com/hendrikstreeck/status/1354038073001205762?s=20


Why does he matter? Because he has 100,000 followers and he is:


"Professor and Director of the Institute of Virology and German Center of HIV & AIDS
@UniBonn
Former:
@HarvardMed"

Many of his followers will automatically believe him, this is his field. They would have read this very alarming news last night, and told everyone on Facebook, and thus it now spreads around the world.

Yes, loss of trust in a government adviser and maybe the government maybe has a small effect in one country. People aren't burning cars in the Netherlands and France at the moment because if Cummings, at least. Undermining trust in the main vaccine for the developing world is completely unforgivable, the Russian bot farms will be in overdrive making "8%" memes for social media and WhatsApp that will spread through Africa and South Asia like wildfire, all of it with real quotes from a real respected German newspaper and real Tweets from respected German scientists questioning the efficacy of the vaccine.

It's genuinely a disaster for the world IMO.

I disagree. The story was killed quickly and categorically. It will have some effect. But not a disastrous one. Quotes can be made up. Tweets can be manufactured. Most people will not know a genuine German scientist from a fake one. Very few people outside of Germany will have heard of Handelsblatt. Bollocks will spread whatever.

EU good - nothing to see here. Next.

What on earth has it got to do with the EU? Are people really seeing this story in those terms? Bloody hell.

Luckyguy1983 said:

SouthamObserver said:

MaxPB said:

Leon said:

kinabalu said:

BluestBlue said:

kinabalu said:

Leon said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Leon said:

Philip_Thompson said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

If the EU block export of Pfizer vaccines to UK, while demanding queue jumping of AZN ones made in the UK....that will go down well.

Don't worry, the EU will still have it's defenders in the UK, either out loud or by staying quiet.

Everyone needs to stop frothing.

The EU are not going to block export of Pfizer vaccines.

What is wrong with everyone?

So why are they putting a notification and approval process in place for exports?

We can discuss the behaviour of the EU if and when they actually do something. Otherwise everyone is just frothing about a few tweets from EU knobheads.

I know first-hand how integrated EU and UK pharma supply chains are. Britain therefore has significant leverage and any trade war would have awful consequences for both parties.

Everyone just needs to calm down.

You think that Commissioner Kyriakides is a knobhead?

A little undiplomatic but OK . . .

If the UK had been behaving with the chaotic, flailing incompetence of the EU and its media friends, in the last couple of weeks, they would have had squirting orgasms of delight.

The Handelsblatt error is just mind-bogglingly stupid, world class levels of irresponsible, and it could lead to actual deaths as people read the fake news (still being retweeted by Told You So anti-vaxxers) and avoid the jab.

How has the journalist wo wrote it still got a job? In the UK he'd now be collecting Universal Credit.

No, in the UK people who publish lies in newspapers become Prime Minister.

Whataboutery of the first water,

FFS this is a lie - sorry "journalistic error" - on a cosmic level; the 8% meme is now out there, and it will possibly cause deaths.

To make it worse, Handelsblatt were told last night be multiple experts - virologists, epidemiologists, everyone - that the "8% thing" was almost certainly wrong, damaging and dangerous, and should be immediately retracted. Did they? No. They doubled down.

It was still on their website just an hour ago.

In a spirit of genuine intellectual curiosity rather than whataboutery -

Do we think this will cost more lives than the Cummings scandal?

Since there's not the slightest particle of evidence that even one additional person died as a result of that supposed scandal, the Handelsblatt Affair has every chance of prevailing.

None of this is provable in a hard scientific sense but it lends itself to insightful speculation for those with the head and stomach for it.
Here we are stacking up: (i) loss of trust in government lockdown messaging due to senior government advisor pissing all over it VERSUS (ii) loss of trust in AZ vaccine due to fake news story in German newspaper.
I don't have the answer. Was hoping to hear from others first. Particularly those who are talking about lives lost due to (ii).

Here is an example of why the Handelsblatt Affair is much more damaging.

The original tweets claiming "8% efficacy" were retweeted by multiple journalists, and experts, in Germany

Like this guy. Here he is explaining why he has now deleted the retweet

https://twitter.com/hendrikstreeck/status/1354038073001205762?s=20


Why does he matter? Because he has 100,000 followers and he is:


"Professor and Director of the Institute of Virology and German Center of HIV & AIDS
@UniBonn
Former:
@HarvardMed"

Many of his followers will automatically believe him, this is his field. They would have read this very alarming news last night, and told everyone on Facebook, and thus it now spreads around the world.

Yes, loss of trust in a government adviser and maybe the government maybe has a small effect in one country. People aren't burning cars in the Netherlands and France at the moment because if Cummings, at least. Undermining trust in the main vaccine for the developing world is completely unforgivable, the Russian bot farms will be in overdrive making "8%" memes for social media and WhatsApp that will spread through Africa and South Asia like wildfire, all of it with real quotes from a real respected German newspaper and real Tweets from respected German scientists questioning the efficacy of the vaccine.

It's genuinely a disaster for the world IMO.

I disagree. The story was killed quickly and categorically. It will have some effect. But not a disastrous one. Quotes can be made up. Tweets can be manufactured. Most people will not know a genuine German scientist from a fake one. Very few people outside of Germany will have heard of Handelsblatt. Bollocks will spread whatever.

I tend to agree - this is annoying but not ultimately a disaster. It is more of a concern that the EU has asked for British vaccine supplies to be diverted to itself, and is threatening to block the export of vaccines. We need to do everything possible to ensure that vaccines are manufactured in the UK. Does anyone know where the J&J one is being manufactured?

Gallowgate said:

Omnium said:

Gallowgate said:

ydoethur said:

Pulpstar said:

They'll be busted with a group visit to the doughnut shop next.

https://twitter.com/MargaretDavisPA/status/1354086077875834896

£200 for a haircut is quite a lot, although for some barbers it would be a mere snip.

I don't know a single barber who's *not* cutting people's hair on the sly. They claim they need to to survive.

How many barbers can you possibly know?

Just ask yourself how all these footballers and instagram influencers still have perfect hair.

MaxPB said:

Gallowgate said:

Israel new cases 30 days. Doesn't seem that encouraging at the moment.

Let's see how that feeds into the hospitalisation rate, we know a single dose may not be enough to prevent people from getting it, but should be enough to prevent severe symptoms that require hospitalisation.

Philip_Thompson said:

kinabalu said:

Philip_Thompson said:

kinabalu said:

Leon said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Leon said:

Philip_Thompson said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

If the EU block export of Pfizer vaccines to UK, while demanding queue jumping of AZN ones made in the UK....that will go down well.

Don't worry, the EU will still have it's defenders in the UK, either out loud or by staying quiet.

Everyone needs to stop frothing.

The EU are not going to block export of Pfizer vaccines.

What is wrong with everyone?

So why are they putting a notification and approval process in place for exports?

We can discuss the behaviour of the EU if and when they actually do something. Otherwise everyone is just frothing about a few tweets from EU knobheads.

I know first-hand how integrated EU and UK pharma supply chains are. Britain therefore has significant leverage and any trade war would have awful consequences for both parties.

Everyone just needs to calm down.

You think that Commissioner Kyriakides is a knobhead?

A little undiplomatic but OK . . .

If the UK had been behaving with the chaotic, flailing incompetence of the EU and its media friends, in the last couple of weeks, they would have had squirting orgasms of delight.

The Handelsblatt error is just mind-bogglingly stupid, world class levels of irresponsible, and it could lead to actual deaths as people read the fake news (still being retweeted by Told You So anti-vaxxers) and avoid the jab.

How has the journalist wo wrote it still got a job? In the UK he'd now be collecting Universal Credit.

No, in the UK people who publish lies in newspapers become Prime Minister.

Whataboutery of the first water,

FFS this is a lie - sorry "journalistic error" - on a cosmic level; the 8% meme is now out there, and it will possibly cause deaths.

To make it worse, Handelsblatt were told last night be multiple experts - virologists, epidemiologists, everyone - that the "8% thing" was almost certainly wrong, damaging and dangerous, and should be immediately retracted. Did they? No. They doubled down.

It was still on their website just an hour ago.

In a spirit of genuine intellectual curiosity rather than whataboutery -

Do we think this will cost more lives than the Cummings scandal?

Obviously.

Sorry, forgot to add - the question is not to be attempted by people who lost their integrity over the Cummings scandal. To assess it properly you need (i) some core data, (ii) a set of reasonable assumptions about behaviour, (iii) a calculator, and (iv) your integrity.

So you mean people who agree with you and your assumptions. Lets see your "core data" considering the Cummings "scandal" came while lockdown was being lifted and many months before the second wave began.

Don't be ridiculous claiming that cost lives while antivax BS doesn't. Show some "core data" to substantiate that. 🙄

RobD said:

SouthamObserver said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

SouthamObserver said:

MaxPB said:

Leon said:

kinabalu said:

BluestBlue said:

kinabalu said:

Leon said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Leon said:

Philip_Thompson said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

If the EU block export of Pfizer vaccines to UK, while demanding queue jumping of AZN ones made in the UK....that will go down well.

Don't worry, the EU will still have it's defenders in the UK, either out loud or by staying quiet.

Everyone needs to stop frothing.

The EU are not going to block export of Pfizer vaccines.

What is wrong with everyone?

So why are they putting a notification and approval process in place for exports?

We can discuss the behaviour of the EU if and when they actually do something. Otherwise everyone is just frothing about a few tweets from EU knobheads.

I know first-hand how integrated EU and UK pharma supply chains are. Britain therefore has significant leverage and any trade war would have awful consequences for both parties.

Everyone just needs to calm down.

You think that Commissioner Kyriakides is a knobhead?

A little undiplomatic but OK . . .

If the UK had been behaving with the chaotic, flailing incompetence of the EU and its media friends, in the last couple of weeks, they would have had squirting orgasms of delight.

The Handelsblatt error is just mind-bogglingly stupid, world class levels of irresponsible, and it could lead to actual deaths as people read the fake news (still being retweeted by Told You So anti-vaxxers) and avoid the jab.

How has the journalist wo wrote it still got a job? In the UK he'd now be collecting Universal Credit.

No, in the UK people who publish lies in newspapers become Prime Minister.

Whataboutery of the first water,

FFS this is a lie - sorry "journalistic error" - on a cosmic level; the 8% meme is now out there, and it will possibly cause deaths.

To make it worse, Handelsblatt were told last night be multiple experts - virologists, epidemiologists, everyone - that the "8% thing" was almost certainly wrong, damaging and dangerous, and should be immediately retracted. Did they? No. They doubled down.

It was still on their website just an hour ago.

In a spirit of genuine intellectual curiosity rather than whataboutery -

Do we think this will cost more lives than the Cummings scandal?

Since there's not the slightest particle of evidence that even one additional person died as a result of that supposed scandal, the Handelsblatt Affair has every chance of prevailing.

None of this is provable in a hard scientific sense but it lends itself to insightful speculation for those with the head and stomach for it.
Here we are stacking up: (i) loss of trust in government lockdown messaging due to senior government advisor pissing all over it VERSUS (ii) loss of trust in AZ vaccine due to fake news story in German newspaper.
I don't have the answer. Was hoping to hear from others first. Particularly those who are talking about lives lost due to (ii).

Here is an example of why the Handelsblatt Affair is much more damaging.

The original tweets claiming "8% efficacy" were retweeted by multiple journalists, and experts, in Germany

Like this guy. Here he is explaining why he has now deleted the retweet

https://twitter.com/hendrikstreeck/status/1354038073001205762?s=20


Why does he matter? Because he has 100,000 followers and he is:


"Professor and Director of the Institute of Virology and German Center of HIV & AIDS
@UniBonn
Former:
@HarvardMed"

Many of his followers will automatically believe him, this is his field. They would have read this very alarming news last night, and told everyone on Facebook, and thus it now spreads around the world.

Yes, loss of trust in a government adviser and maybe the government maybe has a small effect in one country. People aren't burning cars in the Netherlands and France at the moment because if Cummings, at least. Undermining trust in the main vaccine for the developing world is completely unforgivable, the Russian bot farms will be in overdrive making "8%" memes for social media and WhatsApp that will spread through Africa and South Asia like wildfire, all of it with real quotes from a real respected German newspaper and real Tweets from respected German scientists questioning the efficacy of the vaccine.

It's genuinely a disaster for the world IMO.

I disagree. The story was killed quickly and categorically. It will have some effect. But not a disastrous one. Quotes can be made up. Tweets can be manufactured. Most people will not know a genuine German scientist from a fake one. Very few people outside of Germany will have heard of Handelsblatt. Bollocks will spread whatever.

I tend to agree - this is annoying but not ultimately a disaster. It is more of a concern that the EU has asked for British vaccine supplies to be diverted to itself, and is threatening to block the export of vaccines. We need to do everything possible to ensure that vaccines are manufactured in the UK. Does anyone know where the J&J one is being manufactured?

Aren't UK AZN vaccines manufactured in the UK?

Mostly, but they've still asked for UK doses to be diverted.

SouthamObserver said:

MaxPB said:

Leon said:

kinabalu said:

BluestBlue said:

kinabalu said:

Leon said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Leon said:

Philip_Thompson said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

If the EU block export of Pfizer vaccines to UK, while demanding queue jumping of AZN ones made in the UK....that will go down well.

Don't worry, the EU will still have it's defenders in the UK, either out loud or by staying quiet.

Everyone needs to stop frothing.

The EU are not going to block export of Pfizer vaccines.

What is wrong with everyone?

So why are they putting a notification and approval process in place for exports?

We can discuss the behaviour of the EU if and when they actually do something. Otherwise everyone is just frothing about a few tweets from EU knobheads.

I know first-hand how integrated EU and UK pharma supply chains are. Britain therefore has significant leverage and any trade war would have awful consequences for both parties.

Everyone just needs to calm down.

You think that Commissioner Kyriakides is a knobhead?

A little undiplomatic but OK . . .

If the UK had been behaving with the chaotic, flailing incompetence of the EU and its media friends, in the last couple of weeks, they would have had squirting orgasms of delight.

The Handelsblatt error is just mind-bogglingly stupid, world class levels of irresponsible, and it could lead to actual deaths as people read the fake news (still being retweeted by Told You So anti-vaxxers) and avoid the jab.

How has the journalist wo wrote it still got a job? In the UK he'd now be collecting Universal Credit.

No, in the UK people who publish lies in newspapers become Prime Minister.

Whataboutery of the first water,

FFS this is a lie - sorry "journalistic error" - on a cosmic level; the 8% meme is now out there, and it will possibly cause deaths.

To make it worse, Handelsblatt were told last night be multiple experts - virologists, epidemiologists, everyone - that the "8% thing" was almost certainly wrong, damaging and dangerous, and should be immediately retracted. Did they? No. They doubled down.

It was still on their website just an hour ago.

In a spirit of genuine intellectual curiosity rather than whataboutery -

Do we think this will cost more lives than the Cummings scandal?

Since there's not the slightest particle of evidence that even one additional person died as a result of that supposed scandal, the Handelsblatt Affair has every chance of prevailing.

None of this is provable in a hard scientific sense but it lends itself to insightful speculation for those with the head and stomach for it.
Here we are stacking up: (i) loss of trust in government lockdown messaging due to senior government advisor pissing all over it VERSUS (ii) loss of trust in AZ vaccine due to fake news story in German newspaper.
I don't have the answer. Was hoping to hear from others first. Particularly those who are talking about lives lost due to (ii).

Here is an example of why the Handelsblatt Affair is much more damaging.

The original tweets claiming "8% efficacy" were retweeted by multiple journalists, and experts, in Germany

Like this guy. Here he is explaining why he has now deleted the retweet

https://twitter.com/hendrikstreeck/status/1354038073001205762?s=20


Why does he matter? Because he has 100,000 followers and he is:


"Professor and Director of the Institute of Virology and German Center of HIV & AIDS
@UniBonn
Former:
@HarvardMed"

Many of his followers will automatically believe him, this is his field. They would have read this very alarming news last night, and told everyone on Facebook, and thus it now spreads around the world.

Yes, loss of trust in a government adviser and maybe the government maybe has a small effect in one country. People aren't burning cars in the Netherlands and France at the moment because if Cummings, at least. Undermining trust in the main vaccine for the developing world is completely unforgivable, the Russian bot farms will be in overdrive making "8%" memes for social media and WhatsApp that will spread through Africa and South Asia like wildfire, all of it with real quotes from a real respected German newspaper and real Tweets from respected German scientists questioning the efficacy of the vaccine.

It's genuinely a disaster for the world IMO.

I disagree. The story was killed quickly and categorically. It will have some effect. But not a disastrous one. Quotes can be made up. Tweets can be manufactured. Most people will not know a genuine German scientist from a fake one. Very few people outside of Germany will have heard of Handelsblatt. Bollocks will spread whatever.

FF43 said:

SouthamObserver said:

MaxPB said:

Leon said:

kinabalu said:

BluestBlue said:

kinabalu said:

Leon said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Leon said:

Philip_Thompson said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

If the EU block export of Pfizer vaccines to UK, while demanding queue jumping of AZN ones made in the UK....that will go down well.

Don't worry, the EU will still have it's defenders in the UK, either out loud or by staying quiet.

Everyone needs to stop frothing.

The EU are not going to block export of Pfizer vaccines.

What is wrong with everyone?

So why are they putting a notification and approval process in place for exports?

We can discuss the behaviour of the EU if and when they actually do something. Otherwise everyone is just frothing about a few tweets from EU knobheads.

I know first-hand how integrated EU and UK pharma supply chains are. Britain therefore has significant leverage and any trade war would have awful consequences for both parties.

Everyone just needs to calm down.

You think that Commissioner Kyriakides is a knobhead?

A little undiplomatic but OK . . .

If the UK had been behaving with the chaotic, flailing incompetence of the EU and its media friends, in the last couple of weeks, they would have had squirting orgasms of delight.

The Handelsblatt error is just mind-bogglingly stupid, world class levels of irresponsible, and it could lead to actual deaths as people read the fake news (still being retweeted by Told You So anti-vaxxers) and avoid the jab.

How has the journalist wo wrote it still got a job? In the UK he'd now be collecting Universal Credit.

No, in the UK people who publish lies in newspapers become Prime Minister.

Whataboutery of the first water,

FFS this is a lie - sorry "journalistic error" - on a cosmic level; the 8% meme is now out there, and it will possibly cause deaths.

To make it worse, Handelsblatt were told last night be multiple experts - virologists, epidemiologists, everyone - that the "8% thing" was almost certainly wrong, damaging and dangerous, and should be immediately retracted. Did they? No. They doubled down.

It was still on their website just an hour ago.

In a spirit of genuine intellectual curiosity rather than whataboutery -

Do we think this will cost more lives than the Cummings scandal?

Since there's not the slightest particle of evidence that even one additional person died as a result of that supposed scandal, the Handelsblatt Affair has every chance of prevailing.

None of this is provable in a hard scientific sense but it lends itself to insightful speculation for those with the head and stomach for it.
Here we are stacking up: (i) loss of trust in government lockdown messaging due to senior government advisor pissing all over it VERSUS (ii) loss of trust in AZ vaccine due to fake news story in German newspaper.
I don't have the answer. Was hoping to hear from others first. Particularly those who are talking about lives lost due to (ii).

Here is an example of why the Handelsblatt Affair is much more damaging.

The original tweets claiming "8% efficacy" were retweeted by multiple journalists, and experts, in Germany

Like this guy. Here he is explaining why he has now deleted the retweet

https://twitter.com/hendrikstreeck/status/1354038073001205762?s=20


Why does he matter? Because he has 100,000 followers and he is:


"Professor and Director of the Institute of Virology and German Center of HIV & AIDS
@UniBonn
Former:
@HarvardMed"

Many of his followers will automatically believe him, this is his field. They would have read this very alarming news last night, and told everyone on Facebook, and thus it now spreads around the world.

Yes, loss of trust in a government adviser and maybe the government maybe has a small effect in one country. People aren't burning cars in the Netherlands and France at the moment because if Cummings, at least. Undermining trust in the main vaccine for the developing world is completely unforgivable, the Russian bot farms will be in overdrive making "8%" memes for social media and WhatsApp that will spread through Africa and South Asia like wildfire, all of it with real quotes from a real respected German newspaper and real Tweets from respected German scientists questioning the efficacy of the vaccine.

It's genuinely a disaster for the world IMO.

I disagree. The story was killed quickly and categorically. It will have some effect. But not a disastrous one. Quotes can be made up. Tweets can be manufactured. Most people will not know a genuine German scientist from a fake one. Very few people outside of Germany will have heard of Handelsblatt. Bollocks will spread whatever.

The sensible thing is to wait until the EMA delivers its expected authorisation and conditions on Friday. They are not going to make mistakes like this. The problem is the widespread repetition as fact of unsubstantiated and unattributed assertion. Not just a German problem, I have to say...

There is speculation that the EMA will not authorise the AZ vaccine for over 65s. If this happens, I suspect a risk of people coming to the conclusion that the vaccine is unsafe, rather than that the EMA lacks the data to support authorisation, hopefully a temporary situation until the data can be procured.

SouthamObserver said:

MarqueeMark said:

SouthamObserver said:

felix said:

SouthamObserver said:

MaxPB said:

Leon said:

kinabalu said:

BluestBlue said:

kinabalu said:

Leon said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Leon said:

Philip_Thompson said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

If the EU block export of Pfizer vaccines to UK, while demanding queue jumping of AZN ones made in the UK....that will go down well.

Don't worry, the EU will still have it's defenders in the UK, either out loud or by staying quiet.

Everyone needs to stop frothing.

The EU are not going to block export of Pfizer vaccines.

What is wrong with everyone?

So why are they putting a notification and approval process in place for exports?

We can discuss the behaviour of the EU if and when they actually do something. Otherwise everyone is just frothing about a few tweets from EU knobheads.

I know first-hand how integrated EU and UK pharma supply chains are. Britain therefore has significant leverage and any trade war would have awful consequences for both parties.

Everyone just needs to calm down.

You think that Commissioner Kyriakides is a knobhead?

A little undiplomatic but OK . . .

If the UK had been behaving with the chaotic, flailing incompetence of the EU and its media friends, in the last couple of weeks, they would have had squirting orgasms of delight.

The Handelsblatt error is just mind-bogglingly stupid, world class levels of irresponsible, and it could lead to actual deaths as people read the fake news (still being retweeted by Told You So anti-vaxxers) and avoid the jab.

How has the journalist wo wrote it still got a job? In the UK he'd now be collecting Universal Credit.

No, in the UK people who publish lies in newspapers become Prime Minister.

Whataboutery of the first water,

FFS this is a lie - sorry "journalistic error" - on a cosmic level; the 8% meme is now out there, and it will possibly cause deaths.

To make it worse, Handelsblatt were told last night be multiple experts - virologists, epidemiologists, everyone - that the "8% thing" was almost certainly wrong, damaging and dangerous, and should be immediately retracted. Did they? No. They doubled down.

It was still on their website just an hour ago.

In a spirit of genuine intellectual curiosity rather than whataboutery -

Do we think this will cost more lives than the Cummings scandal?

Since there's not the slightest particle of evidence that even one additional person died as a result of that supposed scandal, the Handelsblatt Affair has every chance of prevailing.

None of this is provable in a hard scientific sense but it lends itself to insightful speculation for those with the head and stomach for it.
Here we are stacking up: (i) loss of trust in government lockdown messaging due to senior government advisor pissing all over it VERSUS (ii) loss of trust in AZ vaccine due to fake news story in German newspaper.
I don't have the answer. Was hoping to hear from others first. Particularly those who are talking about lives lost due to (ii).

Here is an example of why the Handelsblatt Affair is much more damaging.

The original tweets claiming "8% efficacy" were retweeted by multiple journalists, and experts, in Germany

Like this guy. Here he is explaining why he has now deleted the retweet

https://twitter.com/hendrikstreeck/status/1354038073001205762?s=20


Why does he matter? Because he has 100,000 followers and he is:


"Professor and Director of the Institute of Virology and German Center of HIV & AIDS
@UniBonn
Former:
@HarvardMed"

Many of his followers will automatically believe him, this is his field. They would have read this very alarming news last night, and told everyone on Facebook, and thus it now spreads around the world.

Yes, loss of trust in a government adviser and maybe the government maybe has a small effect in one country. People aren't burning cars in the Netherlands and France at the moment because if Cummings, at least. Undermining trust in the main vaccine for the developing world is completely unforgivable, the Russian bot farms will be in overdrive making "8%" memes for social media and WhatsApp that will spread through Africa and South Asia like wildfire, all of it with real quotes from a real respected German newspaper and real Tweets from respected German scientists questioning the efficacy of the vaccine.

It's genuinely a disaster for the world IMO.

I disagree. The story was killed quickly and categorically. It will have some effect. But not a disastrous one. Quotes can be made up. Tweets can be manufactured. Most people will not know a genuine German scientist from a fake one. Very few people outside of Germany will have heard of Handelsblatt. Bollocks will spread whatever.

EU good - nothing to see here. Next.

What on earth has it got to do with the EU? Are people really seeing this story in those terms? Bloody hell.

Are you not? Bloody hell.

No, I'm not. As someone who has bee involved in journalism for 30 years I am seeing it as a story about a newspaper and a journalist who have got something terribly, terribly wrong. I don't see what the EU has to do with this at all. It does not own the newspaper or control its output.

TimT said:

kinabalu said:

TimT said:

kinabalu said:

contrarian said:

williamglenn said:

contrarian said:

Farage is beside himself.

He told you so. He really did.

Surely you think this is all a load of nonsense because it's no worse than a bad cold and we should all get back to normal?

Tell you what. I will admit covid is a serious issue.

But then you have to admit that lockdowns have devastating consequences. On children. On young people. On people in poverty. On jobs and the economy. on mental health. On the fabric of society. On human rights. Its eminently clear today.

I at least have tried to have a debate about whether lockdowns are worth it and whether the extent to which the young are being sacrificed is worth it.

All you and others like you have tried to do is shut down debate.

It's a non-debate in terms of the big picture. Every single thing you mention would have been worse with no lockdown. There is no "cost of lockdown" because it was not an either/or choice. Or the cost is negative if you like. It's large and negative.

The valid debate has been - still is - around the details of the restrictions. The timing. The scope. Border control. The balance between trust and law. The extent to which it should be policed. All of this.

You have shown not the slightest interest in having a debate like that. All you've done on this whole topic since the virus emerged is spread lies and write fatuously pretentious faux "man of the world" drivel.

More correctly, the debate should not be about lockdown or not, but about what level of non-medical interventions (social distancing, hand and respiratory hygiene, PPE) is required to minimize the net impact of the outbreak. And that has to include consideration of all the issues Contrarian lists.

It so happens, lockdowns seem to be about the most socially doable mechanism. It need not have been the only option, or even the best one. For example, we could all have agreed to wear full PPE (full Tyvek body suit, booties, gloves, hood, N95, goggles, face shield - assuming no shortages), and gone about our normal business (except eating and drinking in public) and learnt how to don and doff our PPE correctly and decontaminate at the appropriate points in our activities.

There may well have been a better optimal mix of policies. Unfortunately, we'll never know, because this is not an experiment that can be re-run. And no, the UK's experience cannot really be directly compared with that of other nations because a pandemic is a complex adaptive system, a type of system which is extremely sensitive to initial states and inputs - i.e. where outcomes vary massively based on changes of initial state and input below the level at which measurements can be made. I think that drawing any inference from international comparisons is fraught, other than
1. timing is important, and
2. level of compliance with government guidelines/rules is much, much more important for effectiveness than the actual guidelines/rules themselves.

(1) for sure. As for (2) imo the messaging is more important than the precise legal rules since (least here) it's not aggressively policed. It's about getting the public to do the right thing. Which in turn means communicating a proper understanding of the virus and the risks, plus generating a sense of trust in government.

Not sure you are right on the last point - at least not fully so. Messaging - quality, consistency, and multiple channels with multiple champions - is clearly important. But some societies are just better at trusting and hence implementing governmental orders (whether they are good governments or not) and are better about thinking about others rather than themselves. The US and UK are bad (judged in pandemic response terms - these can be good qualities in other fields, such as scientific research and innovation) on both these cultural parameters.

SouthamObserver said:

RobD said:

SouthamObserver said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

SouthamObserver said:

MaxPB said:

Leon said:

kinabalu said:

BluestBlue said:

kinabalu said:

Leon said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Leon said:

Philip_Thompson said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

If the EU block export of Pfizer vaccines to UK, while demanding queue jumping of AZN ones made in the UK....that will go down well.

Don't worry, the EU will still have it's defenders in the UK, either out loud or by staying quiet.

Everyone needs to stop frothing.

The EU are not going to block export of Pfizer vaccines.

What is wrong with everyone?

So why are they putting a notification and approval process in place for exports?

We can discuss the behaviour of the EU if and when they actually do something. Otherwise everyone is just frothing about a few tweets from EU knobheads.

I know first-hand how integrated EU and UK pharma supply chains are. Britain therefore has significant leverage and any trade war would have awful consequences for both parties.

Everyone just needs to calm down.

You think that Commissioner Kyriakides is a knobhead?

A little undiplomatic but OK . . .

If the UK had been behaving with the chaotic, flailing incompetence of the EU and its media friends, in the last couple of weeks, they would have had squirting orgasms of delight.

The Handelsblatt error is just mind-bogglingly stupid, world class levels of irresponsible, and it could lead to actual deaths as people read the fake news (still being retweeted by Told You So anti-vaxxers) and avoid the jab.

How has the journalist wo wrote it still got a job? In the UK he'd now be collecting Universal Credit.

No, in the UK people who publish lies in newspapers become Prime Minister.

Whataboutery of the first water,

FFS this is a lie - sorry "journalistic error" - on a cosmic level; the 8% meme is now out there, and it will possibly cause deaths.

To make it worse, Handelsblatt were told last night be multiple experts - virologists, epidemiologists, everyone - that the "8% thing" was almost certainly wrong, damaging and dangerous, and should be immediately retracted. Did they? No. They doubled down.

It was still on their website just an hour ago.

In a spirit of genuine intellectual curiosity rather than whataboutery -

Do we think this will cost more lives than the Cummings scandal?

Since there's not the slightest particle of evidence that even one additional person died as a result of that supposed scandal, the Handelsblatt Affair has every chance of prevailing.

None of this is provable in a hard scientific sense but it lends itself to insightful speculation for those with the head and stomach for it.
Here we are stacking up: (i) loss of trust in government lockdown messaging due to senior government advisor pissing all over it VERSUS (ii) loss of trust in AZ vaccine due to fake news story in German newspaper.
I don't have the answer. Was hoping to hear from others first. Particularly those who are talking about lives lost due to (ii).

Here is an example of why the Handelsblatt Affair is much more damaging.

The original tweets claiming "8% efficacy" were retweeted by multiple journalists, and experts, in Germany

Like this guy. Here he is explaining why he has now deleted the retweet

https://twitter.com/hendrikstreeck/status/1354038073001205762?s=20


Why does he matter? Because he has 100,000 followers and he is:


"Professor and Director of the Institute of Virology and German Center of HIV & AIDS
@UniBonn
Former:
@HarvardMed"

Many of his followers will automatically believe him, this is his field. They would have read this very alarming news last night, and told everyone on Facebook, and thus it now spreads around the world.

Yes, loss of trust in a government adviser and maybe the government maybe has a small effect in one country. People aren't burning cars in the Netherlands and France at the moment because if Cummings, at least. Undermining trust in the main vaccine for the developing world is completely unforgivable, the Russian bot farms will be in overdrive making "8%" memes for social media and WhatsApp that will spread through Africa and South Asia like wildfire, all of it with real quotes from a real respected German newspaper and real Tweets from respected German scientists questioning the efficacy of the vaccine.

It's genuinely a disaster for the world IMO.

I disagree. The story was killed quickly and categorically. It will have some effect. But not a disastrous one. Quotes can be made up. Tweets can be manufactured. Most people will not know a genuine German scientist from a fake one. Very few people outside of Germany will have heard of Handelsblatt. Bollocks will spread whatever.

I tend to agree - this is annoying but not ultimately a disaster. It is more of a concern that the EU has asked for British vaccine supplies to be diverted to itself, and is threatening to block the export of vaccines. We need to do everything possible to ensure that vaccines are manufactured in the UK. Does anyone know where the J&J one is being manufactured?

Aren't UK AZN vaccines manufactured in the UK?

Mostly, but they've still asked for UK doses to be diverted.

Blimey - I had not heard that.

SouthamObserver said:

MarqueeMark said:

SouthamObserver said:

felix said:

SouthamObserver said:

MaxPB said:

Leon said:

kinabalu said:

BluestBlue said:

kinabalu said:

Leon said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Leon said:

Philip_Thompson said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

If the EU block export of Pfizer vaccines to UK, while demanding queue jumping of AZN ones made in the UK....that will go down well.

Don't worry, the EU will still have it's defenders in the UK, either out loud or by staying quiet.

Everyone needs to stop frothing.

The EU are not going to block export of Pfizer vaccines.

What is wrong with everyone?

So why are they putting a notification and approval process in place for exports?

We can discuss the behaviour of the EU if and when they actually do something. Otherwise everyone is just frothing about a few tweets from EU knobheads.

I know first-hand how integrated EU and UK pharma supply chains are. Britain therefore has significant leverage and any trade war would have awful consequences for both parties.

Everyone just needs to calm down.

You think that Commissioner Kyriakides is a knobhead?

A little undiplomatic but OK . . .

If the UK had been behaving with the chaotic, flailing incompetence of the EU and its media friends, in the last couple of weeks, they would have had squirting orgasms of delight.

The Handelsblatt error is just mind-bogglingly stupid, world class levels of irresponsible, and it could lead to actual deaths as people read the fake news (still being retweeted by Told You So anti-vaxxers) and avoid the jab.

How has the journalist wo wrote it still got a job? In the UK he'd now be collecting Universal Credit.

No, in the UK people who publish lies in newspapers become Prime Minister.

Whataboutery of the first water,

FFS this is a lie - sorry "journalistic error" - on a cosmic level; the 8% meme is now out there, and it will possibly cause deaths.

To make it worse, Handelsblatt were told last night be multiple experts - virologists, epidemiologists, everyone - that the "8% thing" was almost certainly wrong, damaging and dangerous, and should be immediately retracted. Did they? No. They doubled down.

It was still on their website just an hour ago.

In a spirit of genuine intellectual curiosity rather than whataboutery -

Do we think this will cost more lives than the Cummings scandal?

Since there's not the slightest particle of evidence that even one additional person died as a result of that supposed scandal, the Handelsblatt Affair has every chance of prevailing.

None of this is provable in a hard scientific sense but it lends itself to insightful speculation for those with the head and stomach for it.
Here we are stacking up: (i) loss of trust in government lockdown messaging due to senior government advisor pissing all over it VERSUS (ii) loss of trust in AZ vaccine due to fake news story in German newspaper.
I don't have the answer. Was hoping to hear from others first. Particularly those who are talking about lives lost due to (ii).

Here is an example of why the Handelsblatt Affair is much more damaging.

The original tweets claiming "8% efficacy" were retweeted by multiple journalists, and experts, in Germany

Like this guy. Here he is explaining why he has now deleted the retweet

https://twitter.com/hendrikstreeck/status/1354038073001205762?s=20


Why does he matter? Because he has 100,000 followers and he is:


"Professor and Director of the Institute of Virology and German Center of HIV & AIDS
@UniBonn
Former:
@HarvardMed"

Many of his followers will automatically believe him, this is his field. They would have read this very alarming news last night, and told everyone on Facebook, and thus it now spreads around the world.

Yes, loss of trust in a government adviser and maybe the government maybe has a small effect in one country. People aren't burning cars in the Netherlands and France at the moment because if Cummings, at least. Undermining trust in the main vaccine for the developing world is completely unforgivable, the Russian bot farms will be in overdrive making "8%" memes for social media and WhatsApp that will spread through Africa and South Asia like wildfire, all of it with real quotes from a real respected German newspaper and real Tweets from respected German scientists questioning the efficacy of the vaccine.

It's genuinely a disaster for the world IMO.

I disagree. The story was killed quickly and categorically. It will have some effect. But not a disastrous one. Quotes can be made up. Tweets can be manufactured. Most people will not know a genuine German scientist from a fake one. Very few people outside of Germany will have heard of Handelsblatt. Bollocks will spread whatever.

EU good - nothing to see here. Next.

What on earth has it got to do with the EU? Are people really seeing this story in those terms? Bloody hell.

Are you not? Bloody hell.

No, I'm not. As someone who has bee involved in journalism for 30 years I am seeing it as a story about a newspaper and a journalist who have got something terribly, terribly wrong. I don't see what the EU has to do with this at all. It does not own the newspaper or control its output.

SouthamObserver said:

MaxPB said:

SouthamObserver said:

MaxPB said:

Leon said:

kinabalu said:

BluestBlue said:

kinabalu said:

Leon said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Leon said:

Philip_Thompson said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

If the EU block export of Pfizer vaccines to UK, while demanding queue jumping of AZN ones made in the UK....that will go down well.

Don't worry, the EU will still have it's defenders in the UK, either out loud or by staying quiet.

Everyone needs to stop frothing.

The EU are not going to block export of Pfizer vaccines.

What is wrong with everyone?

So why are they putting a notification and approval process in place for exports?

We can discuss the behaviour of the EU if and when they actually do something. Otherwise everyone is just frothing about a few tweets from EU knobheads.

I know first-hand how integrated EU and UK pharma supply chains are. Britain therefore has significant leverage and any trade war would have awful consequences for both parties.

Everyone just needs to calm down.

You think that Commissioner Kyriakides is a knobhead?

A little undiplomatic but OK . . .

If the UK had been behaving with the chaotic, flailing incompetence of the EU and its media friends, in the last couple of weeks, they would have had squirting orgasms of delight.

The Handelsblatt error is just mind-bogglingly stupid, world class levels of irresponsible, and it could lead to actual deaths as people read the fake news (still being retweeted by Told You So anti-vaxxers) and avoid the jab.

How has the journalist wo wrote it still got a job? In the UK he'd now be collecting Universal Credit.

No, in the UK people who publish lies in newspapers become Prime Minister.

Whataboutery of the first water,

FFS this is a lie - sorry "journalistic error" - on a cosmic level; the 8% meme is now out there, and it will possibly cause deaths.

To make it worse, Handelsblatt were told last night be multiple experts - virologists, epidemiologists, everyone - that the "8% thing" was almost certainly wrong, damaging and dangerous, and should be immediately retracted. Did they? No. They doubled down.

It was still on their website just an hour ago.

In a spirit of genuine intellectual curiosity rather than whataboutery -

Do we think this will cost more lives than the Cummings scandal?

Since there's not the slightest particle of evidence that even one additional person died as a result of that supposed scandal, the Handelsblatt Affair has every chance of prevailing.

None of this is provable in a hard scientific sense but it lends itself to insightful speculation for those with the head and stomach for it.
Here we are stacking up: (i) loss of trust in government lockdown messaging due to senior government advisor pissing all over it VERSUS (ii) loss of trust in AZ vaccine due to fake news story in German newspaper.
I don't have the answer. Was hoping to hear from others first. Particularly those who are talking about lives lost due to (ii).

Here is an example of why the Handelsblatt Affair is much more damaging.

The original tweets claiming "8% efficacy" were retweeted by multiple journalists, and experts, in Germany

Like this guy. Here he is explaining why he has now deleted the retweet

https://twitter.com/hendrikstreeck/status/1354038073001205762?s=20


Why does he matter? Because he has 100,000 followers and he is:


"Professor and Director of the Institute of Virology and German Center of HIV & AIDS
@UniBonn
Former:
@HarvardMed"

Many of his followers will automatically believe him, this is his field. They would have read this very alarming news last night, and told everyone on Facebook, and thus it now spreads around the world.

Yes, loss of trust in a government adviser and maybe the government maybe has a small effect in one country. People aren't burning cars in the Netherlands and France at the moment because if Cummings, at least. Undermining trust in the main vaccine for the developing world is completely unforgivable, the Russian bot farms will be in overdrive making "8%" memes for social media and WhatsApp that will spread through Africa and South Asia like wildfire, all of it with real quotes from a real respected German newspaper and real Tweets from respected German scientists questioning the efficacy of the vaccine.

It's genuinely a disaster for the world IMO.

I disagree. The story was killed quickly and categorically. It will have some effect. But not a disastrous one. Quotes can be made up. Tweets can be manufactured. Most people will not know a genuine German scientist from a fake one. Very few people outside of Germany will have heard of Handelsblatt. Bollocks will spread whatever.

Speaks someone who hasn't seen fake news about this first hand. I've watched videos forwarded to my parents full of this bullshit already, it won't be long until the Russian bot farms start to produce these memes and have direct quotes from German scientists to back up their bullshit claims. They've muddied the waters over the cheapest and easiest to transport vaccine that is being produced at a rate of 2bn per year in India for the developing world. It is unforgivable.

The whole point about fake news is that it is fake. It can be made up. Those susceptible to fake news will believe it whatever. The story was appalling. The newspaper and the journalist deserve every bit of crap they are getting. But in the great scheme of things it will make very little practical difference because it was killed too quickly to make it into any mainstream media coverage.

Gallowgate said:

Israel new cases 30 days. Doesn't seem that encouraging at the moment.

SouthamObserver said:

felix said:

SouthamObserver said:

MaxPB said:

Leon said:

kinabalu said:

BluestBlue said:

kinabalu said:

Leon said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Leon said:

Philip_Thompson said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

If the EU block export of Pfizer vaccines to UK, while demanding queue jumping of AZN ones made in the UK....that will go down well.

Don't worry, the EU will still have it's defenders in the UK, either out loud or by staying quiet.

Everyone needs to stop frothing.

The EU are not going to block export of Pfizer vaccines.

What is wrong with everyone?

So why are they putting a notification and approval process in place for exports?

We can discuss the behaviour of the EU if and when they actually do something. Otherwise everyone is just frothing about a few tweets from EU knobheads.

I know first-hand how integrated EU and UK pharma supply chains are. Britain therefore has significant leverage and any trade war would have awful consequences for both parties.

Everyone just needs to calm down.

You think that Commissioner Kyriakides is a knobhead?

A little undiplomatic but OK . . .

If the UK had been behaving with the chaotic, flailing incompetence of the EU and its media friends, in the last couple of weeks, they would have had squirting orgasms of delight.

The Handelsblatt error is just mind-bogglingly stupid, world class levels of irresponsible, and it could lead to actual deaths as people read the fake news (still being retweeted by Told You So anti-vaxxers) and avoid the jab.

How has the journalist wo wrote it still got a job? In the UK he'd now be collecting Universal Credit.

No, in the UK people who publish lies in newspapers become Prime Minister.

Whataboutery of the first water,

FFS this is a lie - sorry "journalistic error" - on a cosmic level; the 8% meme is now out there, and it will possibly cause deaths.

To make it worse, Handelsblatt were told last night be multiple experts - virologists, epidemiologists, everyone - that the "8% thing" was almost certainly wrong, damaging and dangerous, and should be immediately retracted. Did they? No. They doubled down.

It was still on their website just an hour ago.

In a spirit of genuine intellectual curiosity rather than whataboutery -

Do we think this will cost more lives than the Cummings scandal?

Since there's not the slightest particle of evidence that even one additional person died as a result of that supposed scandal, the Handelsblatt Affair has every chance of prevailing.

None of this is provable in a hard scientific sense but it lends itself to insightful speculation for those with the head and stomach for it.
Here we are stacking up: (i) loss of trust in government lockdown messaging due to senior government advisor pissing all over it VERSUS (ii) loss of trust in AZ vaccine due to fake news story in German newspaper.
I don't have the answer. Was hoping to hear from others first. Particularly those who are talking about lives lost due to (ii).

Here is an example of why the Handelsblatt Affair is much more damaging.

The original tweets claiming "8% efficacy" were retweeted by multiple journalists, and experts, in Germany

Like this guy. Here he is explaining why he has now deleted the retweet

https://twitter.com/hendrikstreeck/status/1354038073001205762?s=20


Why does he matter? Because he has 100,000 followers and he is:


"Professor and Director of the Institute of Virology and German Center of HIV & AIDS
@UniBonn
Former:
@HarvardMed"

Many of his followers will automatically believe him, this is his field. They would have read this very alarming news last night, and told everyone on Facebook, and thus it now spreads around the world.

Yes, loss of trust in a government adviser and maybe the government maybe has a small effect in one country. People aren't burning cars in the Netherlands and France at the moment because if Cummings, at least. Undermining trust in the main vaccine for the developing world is completely unforgivable, the Russian bot farms will be in overdrive making "8%" memes for social media and WhatsApp that will spread through Africa and South Asia like wildfire, all of it with real quotes from a real respected German newspaper and real Tweets from respected German scientists questioning the efficacy of the vaccine.

It's genuinely a disaster for the world IMO.

I disagree. The story was killed quickly and categorically. It will have some effect. But not a disastrous one. Quotes can be made up. Tweets can be manufactured. Most people will not know a genuine German scientist from a fake one. Very few people outside of Germany will have heard of Handelsblatt. Bollocks will spread whatever.

EU good - nothing to see here. Next.

What on earth has it got to do with the EU? Are people really seeing this story in those terms? Bloody hell.

CarlottaVance said:

SouthamObserver said:

RobD said:

SouthamObserver said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

SouthamObserver said:

MaxPB said:

Leon said:

kinabalu said:

BluestBlue said:

kinabalu said:

Leon said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Leon said:

Philip_Thompson said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

If the EU block export of Pfizer vaccines to UK, while demanding queue jumping of AZN ones made in the UK....that will go down well.

Don't worry, the EU will still have it's defenders in the UK, either out loud or by staying quiet.

Everyone needs to stop frothing.

The EU are not going to block export of Pfizer vaccines.

What is wrong with everyone?

So why are they putting a notification and approval process in place for exports?

We can discuss the behaviour of the EU if and when they actually do something. Otherwise everyone is just frothing about a few tweets from EU knobheads.

I know first-hand how integrated EU and UK pharma supply chains are. Britain therefore has significant leverage and any trade war would have awful consequences for both parties.

Everyone just needs to calm down.

You think that Commissioner Kyriakides is a knobhead?

A little undiplomatic but OK . . .

If the UK had been behaving with the chaotic, flailing incompetence of the EU and its media friends, in the last couple of weeks, they would have had squirting orgasms of delight.

The Handelsblatt error is just mind-bogglingly stupid, world class levels of irresponsible, and it could lead to actual deaths as people read the fake news (still being retweeted by Told You So anti-vaxxers) and avoid the jab.

How has the journalist wo wrote it still got a job? In the UK he'd now be collecting Universal Credit.

No, in the UK people who publish lies in newspapers become Prime Minister.

Whataboutery of the first water,

FFS this is a lie - sorry "journalistic error" - on a cosmic level; the 8% meme is now out there, and it will possibly cause deaths.

To make it worse, Handelsblatt were told last night be multiple experts - virologists, epidemiologists, everyone - that the "8% thing" was almost certainly wrong, damaging and dangerous, and should be immediately retracted. Did they? No. They doubled down.

It was still on their website just an hour ago.

In a spirit of genuine intellectual curiosity rather than whataboutery -

Do we think this will cost more lives than the Cummings scandal?

Since there's not the slightest particle of evidence that even one additional person died as a result of that supposed scandal, the Handelsblatt Affair has every chance of prevailing.

None of this is provable in a hard scientific sense but it lends itself to insightful speculation for those with the head and stomach for it.
Here we are stacking up: (i) loss of trust in government lockdown messaging due to senior government advisor pissing all over it VERSUS (ii) loss of trust in AZ vaccine due to fake news story in German newspaper.
I don't have the answer. Was hoping to hear from others first. Particularly those who are talking about lives lost due to (ii).

Here is an example of why the Handelsblatt Affair is much more damaging.

The original tweets claiming "8% efficacy" were retweeted by multiple journalists, and experts, in Germany

Like this guy. Here he is explaining why he has now deleted the retweet

https://twitter.com/hendrikstreeck/status/1354038073001205762?s=20


Why does he matter? Because he has 100,000 followers and he is:


"Professor and Director of the Institute of Virology and German Center of HIV & AIDS
@UniBonn
Former:
@HarvardMed"

Many of his followers will automatically believe him, this is his field. They would have read this very alarming news last night, and told everyone on Facebook, and thus it now spreads around the world.

Yes, loss of trust in a government adviser and maybe the government maybe has a small effect in one country. People aren't burning cars in the Netherlands and France at the moment because if Cummings, at least. Undermining trust in the main vaccine for the developing world is completely unforgivable, the Russian bot farms will be in overdrive making "8%" memes for social media and WhatsApp that will spread through Africa and South Asia like wildfire, all of it with real quotes from a real respected German newspaper and real Tweets from respected German scientists questioning the efficacy of the vaccine.

It's genuinely a disaster for the world IMO.

I disagree. The story was killed quickly and categorically. It will have some effect. But not a disastrous one. Quotes can be made up. Tweets can be manufactured. Most people will not know a genuine German scientist from a fake one. Very few people outside of Germany will have heard of Handelsblatt. Bollocks will spread whatever.

I tend to agree - this is annoying but not ultimately a disaster. It is more of a concern that the EU has asked for British vaccine supplies to be diverted to itself, and is threatening to block the export of vaccines. We need to do everything possible to ensure that vaccines are manufactured in the UK. Does anyone know where the J&J one is being manufactured?

Aren't UK AZN vaccines manufactured in the UK?

Mostly, but they've still asked for UK doses to be diverted.

Blimey - I had not heard that.

https://twitter.com/b_judah/status/1354050644416602113?s=20

Sandpit said:

SouthamObserver said:

MarqueeMark said:

SouthamObserver said:

felix said:

SouthamObserver said:

MaxPB said:

Leon said:

kinabalu said:

BluestBlue said:

kinabalu said:

Leon said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Leon said:

Philip_Thompson said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

If the EU block export of Pfizer vaccines to UK, while demanding queue jumping of AZN ones made in the UK....that will go down well.

Don't worry, the EU will still have it's defenders in the UK, either out loud or by staying quiet.

Everyone needs to stop frothing.

The EU are not going to block export of Pfizer vaccines.

What is wrong with everyone?

So why are they putting a notification and approval process in place for exports?

We can discuss the behaviour of the EU if and when they actually do something. Otherwise everyone is just frothing about a few tweets from EU knobheads.

I know first-hand how integrated EU and UK pharma supply chains are. Britain therefore has significant leverage and any trade war would have awful consequences for both parties.

Everyone just needs to calm down.

You think that Commissioner Kyriakides is a knobhead?

A little undiplomatic but OK . . .

If the UK had been behaving with the chaotic, flailing incompetence of the EU and its media friends, in the last couple of weeks, they would have had squirting orgasms of delight.

The Handelsblatt error is just mind-bogglingly stupid, world class levels of irresponsible, and it could lead to actual deaths as people read the fake news (still being retweeted by Told You So anti-vaxxers) and avoid the jab.

How has the journalist wo wrote it still got a job? In the UK he'd now be collecting Universal Credit.

No, in the UK people who publish lies in newspapers become Prime Minister.

Whataboutery of the first water,

FFS this is a lie - sorry "journalistic error" - on a cosmic level; the 8% meme is now out there, and it will possibly cause deaths.

To make it worse, Handelsblatt were told last night be multiple experts - virologists, epidemiologists, everyone - that the "8% thing" was almost certainly wrong, damaging and dangerous, and should be immediately retracted. Did they? No. They doubled down.

It was still on their website just an hour ago.

In a spirit of genuine intellectual curiosity rather than whataboutery -

Do we think this will cost more lives than the Cummings scandal?

Since there's not the slightest particle of evidence that even one additional person died as a result of that supposed scandal, the Handelsblatt Affair has every chance of prevailing.

None of this is provable in a hard scientific sense but it lends itself to insightful speculation for those with the head and stomach for it.
Here we are stacking up: (i) loss of trust in government lockdown messaging due to senior government advisor pissing all over it VERSUS (ii) loss of trust in AZ vaccine due to fake news story in German newspaper.
I don't have the answer. Was hoping to hear from others first. Particularly those who are talking about lives lost due to (ii).

Here is an example of why the Handelsblatt Affair is much more damaging.

The original tweets claiming "8% efficacy" were retweeted by multiple journalists, and experts, in Germany

Like this guy. Here he is explaining why he has now deleted the retweet

https://twitter.com/hendrikstreeck/status/1354038073001205762?s=20


Why does he matter? Because he has 100,000 followers and he is:


"Professor and Director of the Institute of Virology and German Center of HIV & AIDS
@UniBonn
Former:
@HarvardMed"

Many of his followers will automatically believe him, this is his field. They would have read this very alarming news last night, and told everyone on Facebook, and thus it now spreads around the world.

Yes, loss of trust in a government adviser and maybe the government maybe has a small effect in one country. People aren't burning cars in the Netherlands and France at the moment because if Cummings, at least. Undermining trust in the main vaccine for the developing world is completely unforgivable, the Russian bot farms will be in overdrive making "8%" memes for social media and WhatsApp that will spread through Africa and South Asia like wildfire, all of it with real quotes from a real respected German newspaper and real Tweets from respected German scientists questioning the efficacy of the vaccine.

It's genuinely a disaster for the world IMO.

I disagree. The story was killed quickly and categorically. It will have some effect. But not a disastrous one. Quotes can be made up. Tweets can be manufactured. Most people will not know a genuine German scientist from a fake one. Very few people outside of Germany will have heard of Handelsblatt. Bollocks will spread whatever.

EU good - nothing to see here. Next.

What on earth has it got to do with the EU? Are people really seeing this story in those terms? Bloody hell.

Are you not? Bloody hell.

No, I'm not. As someone who has bee involved in journalism for 30 years I am seeing it as a story about a newspaper and a journalist who have got something terribly, terribly wrong. I don't see what the EU has to do with this at all. It does not own the newspaper or control its output.

The EU have asked companies for advance notification of all exports of vaccines, and an Irish minister on Euro News this morning said that the EU should be looking after their own first, before allowing the export of vaccines.

kinabalu said:

TimT said:

kinabalu said:

TimT said:

kinabalu said:

contrarian said:

williamglenn said:

contrarian said:

Farage is beside himself.

He told you so. He really did.

Surely you think this is all a load of nonsense because it's no worse than a bad cold and we should all get back to normal?

Tell you what. I will admit covid is a serious issue.

But then you have to admit that lockdowns have devastating consequences. On children. On young people. On people in poverty. On jobs and the economy. on mental health. On the fabric of society. On human rights. Its eminently clear today.

I at least have tried to have a debate about whether lockdowns are worth it and whether the extent to which the young are being sacrificed is worth it.

All you and others like you have tried to do is shut down debate.

It's a non-debate in terms of the big picture. Every single thing you mention would have been worse with no lockdown. There is no "cost of lockdown" because it was not an either/or choice. Or the cost is negative if you like. It's large and negative.

The valid debate has been - still is - around the details of the restrictions. The timing. The scope. Border control. The balance between trust and law. The extent to which it should be policed. All of this.

You have shown not the slightest interest in having a debate like that. All you've done on this whole topic since the virus emerged is spread lies and write fatuously pretentious faux "man of the world" drivel.

More correctly, the debate should not be about lockdown or not, but about what level of non-medical interventions (social distancing, hand and respiratory hygiene, PPE) is required to minimize the net impact of the outbreak. And that has to include consideration of all the issues Contrarian lists.

It so happens, lockdowns seem to be about the most socially doable mechanism. It need not have been the only option, or even the best one. For example, we could all have agreed to wear full PPE (full Tyvek body suit, booties, gloves, hood, N95, goggles, face shield - assuming no shortages), and gone about our normal business (except eating and drinking in public) and learnt how to don and doff our PPE correctly and decontaminate at the appropriate points in our activities.

There may well have been a better optimal mix of policies. Unfortunately, we'll never know, because this is not an experiment that can be re-run. And no, the UK's experience cannot really be directly compared with that of other nations because a pandemic is a complex adaptive system, a type of system which is extremely sensitive to initial states and inputs - i.e. where outcomes vary massively based on changes of initial state and input below the level at which measurements can be made. I think that drawing any inference from international comparisons is fraught, other than
1. timing is important, and
2. level of compliance with government guidelines/rules is much, much more important for effectiveness than the actual guidelines/rules themselves.

(1) for sure. As for (2) imo the messaging is more important than the precise legal rules since (least here) it's not aggressively policed. It's about getting the public to do the right thing. Which in turn means communicating a proper understanding of the virus and the risks, plus generating a sense of trust in government.

Not sure you are right on the last point - at least not fully so. Messaging - quality, consistency, and multiple channels with multiple champions - is clearly important. But some societies are just better at trusting and hence implementing governmental orders (whether they are good governments or not) and are better about thinking about others rather than themselves. The US and UK are bad (judged in pandemic response terms - these can be good qualities in other fields, such as scientific research and innovation) on both these cultural parameters.

Agree with that. A collectivist - "there's nothing special about me" - mindset is better is these circumstances. Indeed it is in most circumstances imo but that's another story.

FF43 said:

SouthamObserver said:

MaxPB said:

Leon said:

kinabalu said:

BluestBlue said:

kinabalu said:

Leon said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Leon said:

Philip_Thompson said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

If the EU block export of Pfizer vaccines to UK, while demanding queue jumping of AZN ones made in the UK....that will go down well.

Don't worry, the EU will still have it's defenders in the UK, either out loud or by staying quiet.

Everyone needs to stop frothing.

The EU are not going to block export of Pfizer vaccines.

What is wrong with everyone?

So why are they putting a notification and approval process in place for exports?

We can discuss the behaviour of the EU if and when they actually do something. Otherwise everyone is just frothing about a few tweets from EU knobheads.

I know first-hand how integrated EU and UK pharma supply chains are. Britain therefore has significant leverage and any trade war would have awful consequences for both parties.

Everyone just needs to calm down.

You think that Commissioner Kyriakides is a knobhead?

A little undiplomatic but OK . . .

If the UK had been behaving with the chaotic, flailing incompetence of the EU and its media friends, in the last couple of weeks, they would have had squirting orgasms of delight.

The Handelsblatt error is just mind-bogglingly stupid, world class levels of irresponsible, and it could lead to actual deaths as people read the fake news (still being retweeted by Told You So anti-vaxxers) and avoid the jab.

How has the journalist wo wrote it still got a job? In the UK he'd now be collecting Universal Credit.

No, in the UK people who publish lies in newspapers become Prime Minister.

Whataboutery of the first water,

FFS this is a lie - sorry "journalistic error" - on a cosmic level; the 8% meme is now out there, and it will possibly cause deaths.

To make it worse, Handelsblatt were told last night be multiple experts - virologists, epidemiologists, everyone - that the "8% thing" was almost certainly wrong, damaging and dangerous, and should be immediately retracted. Did they? No. They doubled down.

It was still on their website just an hour ago.

In a spirit of genuine intellectual curiosity rather than whataboutery -

Do we think this will cost more lives than the Cummings scandal?

Since there's not the slightest particle of evidence that even one additional person died as a result of that supposed scandal, the Handelsblatt Affair has every chance of prevailing.

None of this is provable in a hard scientific sense but it lends itself to insightful speculation for those with the head and stomach for it.
Here we are stacking up: (i) loss of trust in government lockdown messaging due to senior government advisor pissing all over it VERSUS (ii) loss of trust in AZ vaccine due to fake news story in German newspaper.
I don't have the answer. Was hoping to hear from others first. Particularly those who are talking about lives lost due to (ii).

Here is an example of why the Handelsblatt Affair is much more damaging.

The original tweets claiming "8% efficacy" were retweeted by multiple journalists, and experts, in Germany

Like this guy. Here he is explaining why he has now deleted the retweet

https://twitter.com/hendrikstreeck/status/1354038073001205762?s=20


Why does he matter? Because he has 100,000 followers and he is:


"Professor and Director of the Institute of Virology and German Center of HIV & AIDS
@UniBonn
Former:
@HarvardMed"

Many of his followers will automatically believe him, this is his field. They would have read this very alarming news last night, and told everyone on Facebook, and thus it now spreads around the world.

Yes, loss of trust in a government adviser and maybe the government maybe has a small effect in one country. People aren't burning cars in the Netherlands and France at the moment because if Cummings, at least. Undermining trust in the main vaccine for the developing world is completely unforgivable, the Russian bot farms will be in overdrive making "8%" memes for social media and WhatsApp that will spread through Africa and South Asia like wildfire, all of it with real quotes from a real respected German newspaper and real Tweets from respected German scientists questioning the efficacy of the vaccine.

It's genuinely a disaster for the world IMO.

I disagree. The story was killed quickly and categorically. It will have some effect. But not a disastrous one. Quotes can be made up. Tweets can be manufactured. Most people will not know a genuine German scientist from a fake one. Very few people outside of Germany will have heard of Handelsblatt. Bollocks will spread whatever.

The sensible thing is to wait until the EMA delivers its expected authorisation and conditions for the Astrazeneca vaccine on Friday. They are not going to make mistakes like this. The problem is the widespread repetition as fact of unsubstantiated and unattributed assertion. Not just a German problem, I have to say...

There is speculation that the EMA will not authorise the AZ vaccine for over 65s. If this happens, I suspect a risk of people coming to the conclusion that the vaccine is unsafe, rather than that the EMA lacks the data to support authorisation, hopefully a temporary situation until the data can be procured.

Gallowgate said:

FF43 said:

SouthamObserver said:

MaxPB said:

Leon said:

kinabalu said:

BluestBlue said:

kinabalu said:

Leon said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Leon said:

Philip_Thompson said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

If the EU block export of Pfizer vaccines to UK, while demanding queue jumping of AZN ones made in the UK....that will go down well.

Don't worry, the EU will still have it's defenders in the UK, either out loud or by staying quiet.

Everyone needs to stop frothing.

The EU are not going to block export of Pfizer vaccines.

What is wrong with everyone?

So why are they putting a notification and approval process in place for exports?

We can discuss the behaviour of the EU if and when they actually do something. Otherwise everyone is just frothing about a few tweets from EU knobheads.

I know first-hand how integrated EU and UK pharma supply chains are. Britain therefore has significant leverage and any trade war would have awful consequences for both parties.

Everyone just needs to calm down.

You think that Commissioner Kyriakides is a knobhead?

A little undiplomatic but OK . . .

If the UK had been behaving with the chaotic, flailing incompetence of the EU and its media friends, in the last couple of weeks, they would have had squirting orgasms of delight.

The Handelsblatt error is just mind-bogglingly stupid, world class levels of irresponsible, and it could lead to actual deaths as people read the fake news (still being retweeted by Told You So anti-vaxxers) and avoid the jab.

How has the journalist wo wrote it still got a job? In the UK he'd now be collecting Universal Credit.

No, in the UK people who publish lies in newspapers become Prime Minister.

Whataboutery of the first water,

FFS this is a lie - sorry "journalistic error" - on a cosmic level; the 8% meme is now out there, and it will possibly cause deaths.

To make it worse, Handelsblatt were told last night be multiple experts - virologists, epidemiologists, everyone - that the "8% thing" was almost certainly wrong, damaging and dangerous, and should be immediately retracted. Did they? No. They doubled down.

It was still on their website just an hour ago.

In a spirit of genuine intellectual curiosity rather than whataboutery -

Do we think this will cost more lives than the Cummings scandal?

Since there's not the slightest particle of evidence that even one additional person died as a result of that supposed scandal, the Handelsblatt Affair has every chance of prevailing.

None of this is provable in a hard scientific sense but it lends itself to insightful speculation for those with the head and stomach for it.
Here we are stacking up: (i) loss of trust in government lockdown messaging due to senior government advisor pissing all over it VERSUS (ii) loss of trust in AZ vaccine due to fake news story in German newspaper.
I don't have the answer. Was hoping to hear from others first. Particularly those who are talking about lives lost due to (ii).

Here is an example of why the Handelsblatt Affair is much more damaging.

The original tweets claiming "8% efficacy" were retweeted by multiple journalists, and experts, in Germany

Like this guy. Here he is explaining why he has now deleted the retweet

https://twitter.com/hendrikstreeck/status/1354038073001205762?s=20


Why does he matter? Because he has 100,000 followers and he is:


"Professor and Director of the Institute of Virology and German Center of HIV & AIDS
@UniBonn
Former:
@HarvardMed"

Many of his followers will automatically believe him, this is his field. They would have read this very alarming news last night, and told everyone on Facebook, and thus it now spreads around the world.

Yes, loss of trust in a government adviser and maybe the government maybe has a small effect in one country. People aren't burning cars in the Netherlands and France at the moment because if Cummings, at least. Undermining trust in the main vaccine for the developing world is completely unforgivable, the Russian bot farms will be in overdrive making "8%" memes for social media and WhatsApp that will spread through Africa and South Asia like wildfire, all of it with real quotes from a real respected German newspaper and real Tweets from respected German scientists questioning the efficacy of the vaccine.

It's genuinely a disaster for the world IMO.

I disagree. The story was killed quickly and categorically. It will have some effect. But not a disastrous one. Quotes can be made up. Tweets can be manufactured. Most people will not know a genuine German scientist from a fake one. Very few people outside of Germany will have heard of Handelsblatt. Bollocks will spread whatever.

The sensible thing is to wait until the EMA delivers its expected authorisation and conditions on Friday. They are not going to make mistakes like this. The problem is the widespread repetition as fact of unsubstantiated and unattributed assertion. Not just a German problem, I have to say...

There is speculation that the EMA will not authorise the AZ vaccine for over 65s. If this happens, I suspect a risk of people coming to the conclusion that the vaccine is unsafe, rather than that the EMA lacks the data to support authorisation, hopefully a temporary situation until the data can be procured.

By that time all our over 65s will already be vaccinated!

Leon said:

SouthamObserver said:

felix said:

SouthamObserver said:

MaxPB said:

Leon said:

kinabalu said:

BluestBlue said:

kinabalu said:

Leon said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Leon said:

Philip_Thompson said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

If the EU block export of Pfizer vaccines to UK, while demanding queue jumping of AZN ones made in the UK....that will go down well.

Don't worry, the EU will still have it's defenders in the UK, either out loud or by staying quiet.

Everyone needs to stop frothing.

The EU are not going to block export of Pfizer vaccines.

What is wrong with everyone?

So why are they putting a notification and approval process in place for exports?

We can discuss the behaviour of the EU if and when they actually do something. Otherwise everyone is just frothing about a few tweets from EU knobheads.

I know first-hand how integrated EU and UK pharma supply chains are. Britain therefore has significant leverage and any trade war would have awful consequences for both parties.

Everyone just needs to calm down.

You think that Commissioner Kyriakides is a knobhead?

A little undiplomatic but OK . . .

If the UK had been behaving with the chaotic, flailing incompetence of the EU and its media friends, in the last couple of weeks, they would have had squirting orgasms of delight.

The Handelsblatt error is just mind-bogglingly stupid, world class levels of irresponsible, and it could lead to actual deaths as people read the fake news (still being retweeted by Told You So anti-vaxxers) and avoid the jab.

How has the journalist wo wrote it still got a job? In the UK he'd now be collecting Universal Credit.

No, in the UK people who publish lies in newspapers become Prime Minister.

Whataboutery of the first water,

FFS this is a lie - sorry "journalistic error" - on a cosmic level; the 8% meme is now out there, and it will possibly cause deaths.

To make it worse, Handelsblatt were told last night be multiple experts - virologists, epidemiologists, everyone - that the "8% thing" was almost certainly wrong, damaging and dangerous, and should be immediately retracted. Did they? No. They doubled down.

It was still on their website just an hour ago.

In a spirit of genuine intellectual curiosity rather than whataboutery -

Do we think this will cost more lives than the Cummings scandal?

Since there's not the slightest particle of evidence that even one additional person died as a result of that supposed scandal, the Handelsblatt Affair has every chance of prevailing.

None of this is provable in a hard scientific sense but it lends itself to insightful speculation for those with the head and stomach for it.
Here we are stacking up: (i) loss of trust in government lockdown messaging due to senior government advisor pissing all over it VERSUS (ii) loss of trust in AZ vaccine due to fake news story in German newspaper.
I don't have the answer. Was hoping to hear from others first. Particularly those who are talking about lives lost due to (ii).

Here is an example of why the Handelsblatt Affair is much more damaging.

The original tweets claiming "8% efficacy" were retweeted by multiple journalists, and experts, in Germany

Like this guy. Here he is explaining why he has now deleted the retweet

https://twitter.com/hendrikstreeck/status/1354038073001205762?s=20


Why does he matter? Because he has 100,000 followers and he is:


"Professor and Director of the Institute of Virology and German Center of HIV & AIDS
@UniBonn
Former:
@HarvardMed"

Many of his followers will automatically believe him, this is his field. They would have read this very alarming news last night, and told everyone on Facebook, and thus it now spreads around the world.

Yes, loss of trust in a government adviser and maybe the government maybe has a small effect in one country. People aren't burning cars in the Netherlands and France at the moment because if Cummings, at least. Undermining trust in the main vaccine for the developing world is completely unforgivable, the Russian bot farms will be in overdrive making "8%" memes for social media and WhatsApp that will spread through Africa and South Asia like wildfire, all of it with real quotes from a real respected German newspaper and real Tweets from respected German scientists questioning the efficacy of the vaccine.

It's genuinely a disaster for the world IMO.

I disagree. The story was killed quickly and categorically. It will have some effect. But not a disastrous one. Quotes can be made up. Tweets can be manufactured. Most people will not know a genuine German scientist from a fake one. Very few people outside of Germany will have heard of Handelsblatt. Bollocks will spread whatever.

EU good - nothing to see here. Next.

What on earth has it got to do with the EU? Are people really seeing this story in those terms? Bloody hell.

Because the EU, in charge of EU vaccine procurement, is going nuts about AZ not providing enough vaccine to the EU, and this fake news can easily be seen as an organised attack on AZ. Handelsblatt claimed it got the fact from multiple sources in the German government. And, of course, these two things - the EU shouting at AZ, and the fake news about AZ, coincidentally happened on the same day.

https://twitter.com/alexwickham/status/1354006295637078016?s=20

MaxPB said:

TOPPING said:

felix said:

TOPPING said:

Leon said:

kinabalu said:

BluestBlue said:

kinabalu said:

Leon said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Leon said:

Philip_Thompson said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

If the EU block export of Pfizer vaccines to UK, while demanding queue jumping of AZN ones made in the UK....that will go down well.

Don't worry, the EU will still have it's defenders in the UK, either out loud or by staying quiet.

Everyone needs to stop frothing.

The EU are not going to block export of Pfizer vaccines.

What is wrong with everyone?

So why are they putting a notification and approval process in place for exports?

We can discuss the behaviour of the EU if and when they actually do something. Otherwise everyone is just frothing about a few tweets from EU knobheads.

I know first-hand how integrated EU and UK pharma supply chains are. Britain therefore has significant leverage and any trade war would have awful consequences for both parties.

Everyone just needs to calm down.

You think that Commissioner Kyriakides is a knobhead?

A little undiplomatic but OK . . .

If the UK had been behaving with the chaotic, flailing incompetence of the EU and its media friends, in the last couple of weeks, they would have had squirting orgasms of delight.

The Handelsblatt error is just mind-bogglingly stupid, world class levels of irresponsible, and it could lead to actual deaths as people read the fake news (still being retweeted by Told You So anti-vaxxers) and avoid the jab.

How has the journalist wo wrote it still got a job? In the UK he'd now be collecting Universal Credit.

No, in the UK people who publish lies in newspapers become Prime Minister.

Whataboutery of the first water,

FFS this is a lie - sorry "journalistic error" - on a cosmic level; the 8% meme is now out there, and it will possibly cause deaths.

To make it worse, Handelsblatt were told last night be multiple experts - virologists, epidemiologists, everyone - that the "8% thing" was almost certainly wrong, damaging and dangerous, and should be immediately retracted. Did they? No. They doubled down.

It was still on their website just an hour ago.

In a spirit of genuine intellectual curiosity rather than whataboutery -

Do we think this will cost more lives than the Cummings scandal?

Since there's not the slightest particle of evidence that even one additional person died as a result of that supposed scandal, the Handelsblatt Affair has every chance of prevailing.

None of this is provable in a hard scientific sense but it lends itself to insightful speculation for those with the head and stomach for it.
Here we are stacking up: (i) loss of trust in government lockdown messaging due to senior government advisor pissing all over it VERSUS (ii) loss of trust in AZ vaccine due to fake news story in German newspaper.
I don't have the answer. Was hoping to hear from others first. Particularly those who are talking about lives lost due to (ii).

Here is an example of why the Handelsblatt Affair is much more damaging.

The original tweets claiming "8% efficacy" were retweeted by multiple journalists, and experts, in Germany

Like this guy. Here he is explaining why he has now deleted the retweet

https://twitter.com/hendrikstreeck/status/1354038073001205762?s=20


Why does he matter? Because he has 100,000 followers and he is:


"Professor and Director of the Institute of Virology and German Center of HIV & AIDS
@UniBonn
Former:
@HarvardMed"

Many of his followers will automatically believe him, this is his field. They would have read this very alarming news last night, and told everyone on Facebook, and thus it now spreads around the world.

Huh? He deletes the tweet and says wait for the manufacturers.

What's wrong with that?

Your reading comprehension! I guess you understood around 8 % of that post.

Google translate is your friend here.

Yes the first tweet (not seen) might have been bad but this is addressing that.

And as for @Leon's fake news fear, and others, yes of course there may be some damage but if people are only going to look at one tweet by some German guy as their criterion for having the jab or not perhaps it's best to let them do their thing.

Let's put the shoe on the other foot, it's The Sun making the report and it's about the Belgian Janssen vaccine. The government is experiencing difficulties in procuring it to the extent we wanted and then briefs a journalist to say "it's shite anyway" and that journalist with no investigation simply repeats that as "this is shit" with no presentation of any evidence to support it other than "trust us, we have a source".

Everyone on here playing it down right now would be spitting with rage at Boris and everyone else involved with this.

SouthamObserver said:

RobD said:

SouthamObserver said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

SouthamObserver said:

MaxPB said:

Leon said:

kinabalu said:

BluestBlue said:

kinabalu said:

Leon said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Leon said:

Philip_Thompson said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

If the EU block export of Pfizer vaccines to UK, while demanding queue jumping of AZN ones made in the UK....that will go down well.

Don't worry, the EU will still have it's defenders in the UK, either out loud or by staying quiet.

Everyone needs to stop frothing.

The EU are not going to block export of Pfizer vaccines.

What is wrong with everyone?

So why are they putting a notification and approval process in place for exports?

We can discuss the behaviour of the EU if and when they actually do something. Otherwise everyone is just frothing about a few tweets from EU knobheads.

I know first-hand how integrated EU and UK pharma supply chains are. Britain therefore has significant leverage and any trade war would have awful consequences for both parties.

Everyone just needs to calm down.

You think that Commissioner Kyriakides is a knobhead?

A little undiplomatic but OK . . .

If the UK had been behaving with the chaotic, flailing incompetence of the EU and its media friends, in the last couple of weeks, they would have had squirting orgasms of delight.

The Handelsblatt error is just mind-bogglingly stupid, world class levels of irresponsible, and it could lead to actual deaths as people read the fake news (still being retweeted by Told You So anti-vaxxers) and avoid the jab.

How has the journalist wo wrote it still got a job? In the UK he'd now be collecting Universal Credit.

No, in the UK people who publish lies in newspapers become Prime Minister.

Whataboutery of the first water,

FFS this is a lie - sorry "journalistic error" - on a cosmic level; the 8% meme is now out there, and it will possibly cause deaths.

To make it worse, Handelsblatt were told last night be multiple experts - virologists, epidemiologists, everyone - that the "8% thing" was almost certainly wrong, damaging and dangerous, and should be immediately retracted. Did they? No. They doubled down.

It was still on their website just an hour ago.

In a spirit of genuine intellectual curiosity rather than whataboutery -

Do we think this will cost more lives than the Cummings scandal?

Since there's not the slightest particle of evidence that even one additional person died as a result of that supposed scandal, the Handelsblatt Affair has every chance of prevailing.

None of this is provable in a hard scientific sense but it lends itself to insightful speculation for those with the head and stomach for it.
Here we are stacking up: (i) loss of trust in government lockdown messaging due to senior government advisor pissing all over it VERSUS (ii) loss of trust in AZ vaccine due to fake news story in German newspaper.
I don't have the answer. Was hoping to hear from others first. Particularly those who are talking about lives lost due to (ii).

Here is an example of why the Handelsblatt Affair is much more damaging.

The original tweets claiming "8% efficacy" were retweeted by multiple journalists, and experts, in Germany

Like this guy. Here he is explaining why he has now deleted the retweet

https://twitter.com/hendrikstreeck/status/1354038073001205762?s=20


Why does he matter? Because he has 100,000 followers and he is:


"Professor and Director of the Institute of Virology and German Center of HIV & AIDS
@UniBonn
Former:
@HarvardMed"

Many of his followers will automatically believe him, this is his field. They would have read this very alarming news last night, and told everyone on Facebook, and thus it now spreads around the world.

Yes, loss of trust in a government adviser and maybe the government maybe has a small effect in one country. People aren't burning cars in the Netherlands and France at the moment because if Cummings, at least. Undermining trust in the main vaccine for the developing world is completely unforgivable, the Russian bot farms will be in overdrive making "8%" memes for social media and WhatsApp that will spread through Africa and South Asia like wildfire, all of it with real quotes from a real respected German newspaper and real Tweets from respected German scientists questioning the efficacy of the vaccine.

It's genuinely a disaster for the world IMO.

I disagree. The story was killed quickly and categorically. It will have some effect. But not a disastrous one. Quotes can be made up. Tweets can be manufactured. Most people will not know a genuine German scientist from a fake one. Very few people outside of Germany will have heard of Handelsblatt. Bollocks will spread whatever.

I tend to agree - this is annoying but not ultimately a disaster. It is more of a concern that the EU has asked for British vaccine supplies to be diverted to itself, and is threatening to block the export of vaccines. We need to do everything possible to ensure that vaccines are manufactured in the UK. Does anyone know where the J&J one is being manufactured?

Aren't UK AZN vaccines manufactured in the UK?

Mostly, but they've still asked for UK doses to be diverted.

Blimey - I had not heard that.

Leon said:

SouthamObserver said:

felix said:

SouthamObserver said:

MaxPB said:

Leon said:

kinabalu said:

BluestBlue said:

kinabalu said:

Leon said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Leon said:

Philip_Thompson said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

If the EU block export of Pfizer vaccines to UK, while demanding queue jumping of AZN ones made in the UK....that will go down well.

Don't worry, the EU will still have it's defenders in the UK, either out loud or by staying quiet.

Everyone needs to stop frothing.

The EU are not going to block export of Pfizer vaccines.

What is wrong with everyone?

So why are they putting a notification and approval process in place for exports?

We can discuss the behaviour of the EU if and when they actually do something. Otherwise everyone is just frothing about a few tweets from EU knobheads.

I know first-hand how integrated EU and UK pharma supply chains are. Britain therefore has significant leverage and any trade war would have awful consequences for both parties.

Everyone just needs to calm down.

You think that Commissioner Kyriakides is a knobhead?

A little undiplomatic but OK . . .

If the UK had been behaving with the chaotic, flailing incompetence of the EU and its media friends, in the last couple of weeks, they would have had squirting orgasms of delight.

The Handelsblatt error is just mind-bogglingly stupid, world class levels of irresponsible, and it could lead to actual deaths as people read the fake news (still being retweeted by Told You So anti-vaxxers) and avoid the jab.

How has the journalist wo wrote it still got a job? In the UK he'd now be collecting Universal Credit.

No, in the UK people who publish lies in newspapers become Prime Minister.

Whataboutery of the first water,

FFS this is a lie - sorry "journalistic error" - on a cosmic level; the 8% meme is now out there, and it will possibly cause deaths.

To make it worse, Handelsblatt were told last night be multiple experts - virologists, epidemiologists, everyone - that the "8% thing" was almost certainly wrong, damaging and dangerous, and should be immediately retracted. Did they? No. They doubled down.

It was still on their website just an hour ago.

In a spirit of genuine intellectual curiosity rather than whataboutery -

Do we think this will cost more lives than the Cummings scandal?

Since there's not the slightest particle of evidence that even one additional person died as a result of that supposed scandal, the Handelsblatt Affair has every chance of prevailing.

None of this is provable in a hard scientific sense but it lends itself to insightful speculation for those with the head and stomach for it.
Here we are stacking up: (i) loss of trust in government lockdown messaging due to senior government advisor pissing all over it VERSUS (ii) loss of trust in AZ vaccine due to fake news story in German newspaper.
I don't have the answer. Was hoping to hear from others first. Particularly those who are talking about lives lost due to (ii).

Here is an example of why the Handelsblatt Affair is much more damaging.

The original tweets claiming "8% efficacy" were retweeted by multiple journalists, and experts, in Germany

Like this guy. Here he is explaining why he has now deleted the retweet

https://twitter.com/hendrikstreeck/status/1354038073001205762?s=20


Why does he matter? Because he has 100,000 followers and he is:


"Professor and Director of the Institute of Virology and German Center of HIV & AIDS
@UniBonn
Former:
@HarvardMed"

Many of his followers will automatically believe him, this is his field. They would have read this very alarming news last night, and told everyone on Facebook, and thus it now spreads around the world.

Yes, loss of trust in a government adviser and maybe the government maybe has a small effect in one country. People aren't burning cars in the Netherlands and France at the moment because if Cummings, at least. Undermining trust in the main vaccine for the developing world is completely unforgivable, the Russian bot farms will be in overdrive making "8%" memes for social media and WhatsApp that will spread through Africa and South Asia like wildfire, all of it with real quotes from a real respected German newspaper and real Tweets from respected German scientists questioning the efficacy of the vaccine.

It's genuinely a disaster for the world IMO.

I disagree. The story was killed quickly and categorically. It will have some effect. But not a disastrous one. Quotes can be made up. Tweets can be manufactured. Most people will not know a genuine German scientist from a fake one. Very few people outside of Germany will have heard of Handelsblatt. Bollocks will spread whatever.

EU good - nothing to see here. Next.

What on earth has it got to do with the EU? Are people really seeing this story in those terms? Bloody hell.

Because the EU, in charge of EU vaccine procurement, is going nuts about AZ not providing enough vaccine to the EU, and this fake news can easily be seen as an organised attack on AZ. Handelsblatt claimed it got the fact from multiple sources in the German government. And, of course, these two things - the EU shouting at AZ, and the fake news about AZ, coincidentally happened on the same day.

https://twitter.com/alexwickham/status/1354006295637078016?s=20

FF43 said:

SouthamObserver said:

MaxPB said:

Leon said:

kinabalu said:

BluestBlue said:

kinabalu said:

Leon said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Leon said:

Philip_Thompson said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

If the EU block export of Pfizer vaccines to UK, while demanding queue jumping of AZN ones made in the UK....that will go down well.

Don't worry, the EU will still have it's defenders in the UK, either out loud or by staying quiet.

Everyone needs to stop frothing.

The EU are not going to block export of Pfizer vaccines.

What is wrong with everyone?

So why are they putting a notification and approval process in place for exports?

We can discuss the behaviour of the EU if and when they actually do something. Otherwise everyone is just frothing about a few tweets from EU knobheads.

I know first-hand how integrated EU and UK pharma supply chains are. Britain therefore has significant leverage and any trade war would have awful consequences for both parties.

Everyone just needs to calm down.

You think that Commissioner Kyriakides is a knobhead?

A little undiplomatic but OK . . .

If the UK had been behaving with the chaotic, flailing incompetence of the EU and its media friends, in the last couple of weeks, they would have had squirting orgasms of delight.

The Handelsblatt error is just mind-bogglingly stupid, world class levels of irresponsible, and it could lead to actual deaths as people read the fake news (still being retweeted by Told You So anti-vaxxers) and avoid the jab.

How has the journalist wo wrote it still got a job? In the UK he'd now be collecting Universal Credit.

No, in the UK people who publish lies in newspapers become Prime Minister.

Whataboutery of the first water,

FFS this is a lie - sorry "journalistic error" - on a cosmic level; the 8% meme is now out there, and it will possibly cause deaths.

To make it worse, Handelsblatt were told last night be multiple experts - virologists, epidemiologists, everyone - that the "8% thing" was almost certainly wrong, damaging and dangerous, and should be immediately retracted. Did they? No. They doubled down.

It was still on their website just an hour ago.

In a spirit of genuine intellectual curiosity rather than whataboutery -

Do we think this will cost more lives than the Cummings scandal?

Since there's not the slightest particle of evidence that even one additional person died as a result of that supposed scandal, the Handelsblatt Affair has every chance of prevailing.

None of this is provable in a hard scientific sense but it lends itself to insightful speculation for those with the head and stomach for it.
Here we are stacking up: (i) loss of trust in government lockdown messaging due to senior government advisor pissing all over it VERSUS (ii) loss of trust in AZ vaccine due to fake news story in German newspaper.
I don't have the answer. Was hoping to hear from others first. Particularly those who are talking about lives lost due to (ii).

Here is an example of why the Handelsblatt Affair is much more damaging.

The original tweets claiming "8% efficacy" were retweeted by multiple journalists, and experts, in Germany

Like this guy. Here he is explaining why he has now deleted the retweet

https://twitter.com/hendrikstreeck/status/1354038073001205762?s=20


Why does he matter? Because he has 100,000 followers and he is:


"Professor and Director of the Institute of Virology and German Center of HIV & AIDS
@UniBonn
Former:
@HarvardMed"

Many of his followers will automatically believe him, this is his field. They would have read this very alarming news last night, and told everyone on Facebook, and thus it now spreads around the world.

Yes, loss of trust in a government adviser and maybe the government maybe has a small effect in one country. People aren't burning cars in the Netherlands and France at the moment because if Cummings, at least. Undermining trust in the main vaccine for the developing world is completely unforgivable, the Russian bot farms will be in overdrive making "8%" memes for social media and WhatsApp that will spread through Africa and South Asia like wildfire, all of it with real quotes from a real respected German newspaper and real Tweets from respected German scientists questioning the efficacy of the vaccine.

It's genuinely a disaster for the world IMO.

I disagree. The story was killed quickly and categorically. It will have some effect. But not a disastrous one. Quotes can be made up. Tweets can be manufactured. Most people will not know a genuine German scientist from a fake one. Very few people outside of Germany will have heard of Handelsblatt. Bollocks will spread whatever.

The sensible thing is to wait until the EMA delivers its expected authorisation and conditions for the Astrazeneca vaccine on Friday. They are not going to make mistakes like this. The problem is the widespread repetition as fact of unsubstantiated and unattributed assertion. Not just a German problem, I have to say...

There is speculation that the EMA will not authorise the AZ vaccine for over 65s. If this happens, I suspect a risk of people coming to the conclusion that the vaccine is unsafe, rather than that the EMA lacks the data to support authorisation, hopefully a temporary situation until the data can be procured.

MarqueeMark said:

occasionalranter said:

Wulfrun_Phil said:

Gallowgate said:

ydoethur said:

Pulpstar said:

They'll be busted with a group visit to the doughnut shop next.

https://twitter.com/MargaretDavisPA/status/1354086077875834896

£200 for a haircut is quite a lot, although for some barbers it would be a mere snip.

I don't know a single barber who's *not* cutting people's hair on the sly. They claim they need to to survive.

How many barbers do you know personally? Sample of 2, 1, 0 or what?

I think he knows a few more making a living at the fringes of society.

The risks? They just brush it off....

Mexicanpete said:

SouthamObserver said:

RobD said:

SouthamObserver said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

SouthamObserver said:

MaxPB said:

Leon said:

kinabalu said:

BluestBlue said:

kinabalu said:

Leon said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Leon said:

Philip_Thompson said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

If the EU block export of Pfizer vaccines to UK, while demanding queue jumping of AZN ones made in the UK....that will go down well.

Don't worry, the EU will still have it's defenders in the UK, either out loud or by staying quiet.

Everyone needs to stop frothing.

The EU are not going to block export of Pfizer vaccines.

What is wrong with everyone?

So why are they putting a notification and approval process in place for exports?

We can discuss the behaviour of the EU if and when they actually do something. Otherwise everyone is just frothing about a few tweets from EU knobheads.

I know first-hand how integrated EU and UK pharma supply chains are. Britain therefore has significant leverage and any trade war would have awful consequences for both parties.

Everyone just needs to calm down.

You think that Commissioner Kyriakides is a knobhead?

A little undiplomatic but OK . . .

If the UK had been behaving with the chaotic, flailing incompetence of the EU and its media friends, in the last couple of weeks, they would have had squirting orgasms of delight.

The Handelsblatt error is just mind-bogglingly stupid, world class levels of irresponsible, and it could lead to actual deaths as people read the fake news (still being retweeted by Told You So anti-vaxxers) and avoid the jab.

How has the journalist wo wrote it still got a job? In the UK he'd now be collecting Universal Credit.

No, in the UK people who publish lies in newspapers become Prime Minister.

Whataboutery of the first water,

FFS this is a lie - sorry "journalistic error" - on a cosmic level; the 8% meme is now out there, and it will possibly cause deaths.

To make it worse, Handelsblatt were told last night be multiple experts - virologists, epidemiologists, everyone - that the "8% thing" was almost certainly wrong, damaging and dangerous, and should be immediately retracted. Did they? No. They doubled down.

It was still on their website just an hour ago.

In a spirit of genuine intellectual curiosity rather than whataboutery -

Do we think this will cost more lives than the Cummings scandal?

Since there's not the slightest particle of evidence that even one additional person died as a result of that supposed scandal, the Handelsblatt Affair has every chance of prevailing.

None of this is provable in a hard scientific sense but it lends itself to insightful speculation for those with the head and stomach for it.
Here we are stacking up: (i) loss of trust in government lockdown messaging due to senior government advisor pissing all over it VERSUS (ii) loss of trust in AZ vaccine due to fake news story in German newspaper.
I don't have the answer. Was hoping to hear from others first. Particularly those who are talking about lives lost due to (ii).

Here is an example of why the Handelsblatt Affair is much more damaging.

The original tweets claiming "8% efficacy" were retweeted by multiple journalists, and experts, in Germany

Like this guy. Here he is explaining why he has now deleted the retweet

https://twitter.com/hendrikstreeck/status/1354038073001205762?s=20


Why does he matter? Because he has 100,000 followers and he is:


"Professor and Director of the Institute of Virology and German Center of HIV & AIDS
@UniBonn
Former:
@HarvardMed"

Many of his followers will automatically believe him, this is his field. They would have read this very alarming news last night, and told everyone on Facebook, and thus it now spreads around the world.

Yes, loss of trust in a government adviser and maybe the government maybe has a small effect in one country. People aren't burning cars in the Netherlands and France at the moment because if Cummings, at least. Undermining trust in the main vaccine for the developing world is completely unforgivable, the Russian bot farms will be in overdrive making "8%" memes for social media and WhatsApp that will spread through Africa and South Asia like wildfire, all of it with real quotes from a real respected German newspaper and real Tweets from respected German scientists questioning the efficacy of the vaccine.

It's genuinely a disaster for the world IMO.

I disagree. The story was killed quickly and categorically. It will have some effect. But not a disastrous one. Quotes can be made up. Tweets can be manufactured. Most people will not know a genuine German scientist from a fake one. Very few people outside of Germany will have heard of Handelsblatt. Bollocks will spread whatever.

I tend to agree - this is annoying but not ultimately a disaster. It is more of a concern that the EU has asked for British vaccine supplies to be diverted to itself, and is threatening to block the export of vaccines. We need to do everything possible to ensure that vaccines are manufactured in the UK. Does anyone know where the J&J one is being manufactured?

Aren't UK AZN vaccines manufactured in the UK?

Mostly, but they've still asked for UK doses to be diverted.

Blimey - I had not heard that.

It seems to be a tit-for-tat exercise between a UK supplier favouring the UK, and in response the EU demand EU suppliers favour the EU. The whole affair appears rather unappealing, however as this is PB, it is a case of evil EU bad, plucky England/Boris Johnson good.

CarlottaVance said:

SouthamObserver said:

RobD said:

SouthamObserver said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

SouthamObserver said:

MaxPB said:

Leon said:

kinabalu said:

BluestBlue said:

kinabalu said:

Leon said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Leon said:

Philip_Thompson said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

Gallowgate said:

MaxPB said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

If the EU block export of Pfizer vaccines to UK, while demanding queue jumping of AZN ones made in the UK....that will go down well.

Don't worry, the EU will still have it's defenders in the UK, either out loud or by staying quiet.

Everyone needs to stop frothing.

The EU are not going to block export of Pfizer vaccines.

What is wrong with everyone?

So why are they putting a notification and approval process in place for exports?

We can discuss the behaviour of the EU if and when they actually do something. Otherwise everyone is just frothing about a few tweets from EU knobheads.

I know first-hand how integrated EU and UK pharma supply chains are. Britain therefore has significant leverage and any trade war would have awful consequences for both parties.

Everyone just needs to calm down.

You think that Commissioner Kyriakides is a knobhead?

A little undiplomatic but OK . . .

If the UK had been behaving with the chaotic, flailing incompetence of the EU and its media friends, in the last couple of weeks, they would have had squirting orgasms of delight.

The Handelsblatt error is just mind-bogglingly stupid, world class levels of irresponsible, and it could lead to actual deaths as people read the fake news (still being retweeted by Told You So anti-vaxxers) and avoid the jab.

How has the journalist wo wrote it still got a job? In the UK he'd now be collecting Universal Credit.

No, in the UK people who publish lies in newspapers become Prime Minister.

Whataboutery of the first water,

FFS this is a lie - sorry "journalistic error" - on a cosmic level; the 8% meme is now out there, and it will possibly cause deaths.

To make it worse, Handelsblatt were told last night be multiple experts - virologists, epidemiologists, everyone - that the "8% thing" was almost certainly wrong, damaging and dangerous, and should be immediately retracted. Did they? No. They doubled down.

It was still on their website just an hour ago.

In a spirit of genuine intellectual curiosity rather than whataboutery -

Do we think this will cost more lives than the Cummings scandal?

Since there's not the slightest particle of evidence that even one additional person died as a result of that supposed scandal, the Handelsblatt Affair has every chance of prevailing.

None of this is provable in a hard scientific sense but it lends itself to insightful speculation for those with the head and stomach for it.
Here we are stacking up: (i) loss of trust in government lockdown messaging due to senior government advisor pissing all over it VERSUS (ii) loss of trust in AZ vaccine due to fake news story in German newspaper.
I don't have the answer. Was hoping to hear from others first. Particularly those who are talking about lives lost due to (ii).

Here is an example of why the Handelsblatt Affair is much more damaging.

The original tweets claiming "8% efficacy" were retweeted by multiple journalists, and experts, in Germany

Like this guy. Here he is explaining why he has now deleted the retweet

https://twitter.com/hendrikstreeck/status/1354038073001205762?s=20


Why does he matter? Because he has 100,000 followers and he is:


"Professor and Director of the Institute of Virology and German Center of HIV & AIDS
@UniBonn
Former:
@HarvardMed"

Many of his followers will automatically believe him, this is his field. They would have read this very alarming news last night, and told everyone on Facebook, and thus it now spreads around the world.

Yes, loss of trust in a government adviser and maybe the government maybe has a small effect in one country. People aren't burning cars in the Netherlands and France at the moment because if Cummings, at least. Undermining trust in the main vaccine for the developing world is completely unforgivable, the Russian bot farms will be in overdrive making "8%" memes for social media and WhatsApp that will spread through Africa and South Asia like wildfire, all of it with real quotes from a real respected German newspaper and real Tweets from respected German scientists questioning the efficacy of the vaccine.

It's genuinely a disaster for the world IMO.

I disagree. The story was killed quickly and categorically. It will have some effect. But not a disastrous one. Quotes can be made up. Tweets can be manufactured. Most people will not know a genuine German scientist from a fake one. Very few people outside of Germany will have heard of Handelsblatt. Bollocks will spread whatever.

I tend to agree - this is annoying but not ultimately a disaster. It is more of a concern that the EU has asked for British vaccine supplies to be diverted to itself, and is threatening to block the export of vaccines. We need to do everything possible to ensure that vaccines are manufactured in the UK. Does anyone know where the J&J one is being manufactured?

Aren't UK AZN vaccines manufactured in the UK?

Mostly, but they've still asked for UK doses to be diverted.

Blimey - I had not heard that.

https://twitter.com/b_judah/status/1354050644416602113?s=20

HYUFD said:

https://twitter.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1354082183997222917?s=20