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More people will die if ministers respond to populist campaigns like this – politicalbetting.com
More people will die if ministers respond to populist campaigns like this – politicalbetting.com
The issue here who is going to be next in the vaccination queue once categories 1-4 have been completed which should be by the middle of February. The current plan is to go to group five which is people in their 60s NOT teachers or other groups for which the media can whip up special pleading.
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The header is right. Govt has no option, political or scientific, other than to hold the line on this.
Perhaps also, those who value their cynicism wrt Boris over scientific advice.
I think it's one of those knee-jerk populist policies, beloved of old Labour, which will be systematically and repeatedly pulled apart over the coming days.
It is also wrong in saying that the current age-based priority list targets the most vulnerable. This may have been true at the start but, for instance, we have been told that BAME people are more likely to catch and to die from Covid-19, yet they are not prioritised. Nor for that matter are covidiots on foreign holidays.
The Proteas are 75 runs ahead in their final innings with 4 wickets remaining.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=cvIkW5SRSLQ
There’s two issues with schools. One is staff absence due to exposure or catching the virus itself, the other is asymptomatic children passing it between families.
Vaccinating teachers solves neither issue, as we are telling vaccinated people to still isolate if they have contact with the virus, and even if they all have the first jab tomorrow it will be May before they’re all fully immune.
Not to mention there’s still millions of vulnerable and elderly parents and grandparents out there unvaccinated. They are next month’s covid deaths.
My suggestion would be as some others have been discussing - use it where it can make a big difference. I would love to be able to horse trade for eg Market Equivalence, but I do not think that can be justified.
My suggested priorities would be towards countries with links, developing countries esp Commonwealth, smaller countries where a big difference can be made, to mitigate impact of any EU export-intervention, and perhaps hotspots.
It's a devil of a thing to order, though - needs clear principles as we have for vaccine priority, and a small amount of pragmatism.
Perhaps Overseas Territories, ROI / Portugal, small Commonwealth countries and developing. Malta and Cyprus?
(Not that I ever bet on matches involving Pakistan)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-51643556
It is not the Mirror doing Labour's bidding so much as Tories falling into line behind Boris. How sure can they be the government will not reverse ferret and prioritise teachers before mid-April?
Unless you're Taiwanese, in which case Beijing wants you to kowtow or war if you won't:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-55851052
There will be some places completely set up but simply short of vaccine supply, to others where they they don’t even have enough nurses and they need a whole team of people travelling with the vaccines.
Your list sounds about right. Overseas territories and RoI for the obvious reasons, then look to smaller nations and virus hotspots, where the intervention can make the biggest difference.
Not just vaccines either, we have learned so much about care for the infected over the past year, sending medical expertise and devices such as the Mercedes-F1 CPAP machines can also make a huge difference to developing nations.
It now looks like we will soon have more vaccines than we know what to do with.
It's time to stop this moralising shit, and ask what works best for the UK? Which countries have not secured enough jabs, who'll be willing to pay?
With the pb collective obsession about the EU, we've missed the fact that the Canadians and the Swiss and the Norwegians (three of the richest countries on earth) are lagging in the vaccine stakes, and have lots of money.
Yes, we could send vaccines to Africa.
But the British government is responsible to its citizens, to its taxpayers. Where do we get bang for the buck? Who has something we want? Where can we leverage this?
It's time to be selfish. And it's time to maximise the value of those extra jabs.
HOWEVER - our international networks do give us excuses for picking and choosing whom to help, because clearly even if Britain ends up with a substantial vaccine surplus we can't cover the whole world. Yes, Ireland is an obvious first target, and getting together with India to try to help as much as possible of the Commonwealth would provide a convenient excuse to throw a few planeloads at Malta and Cyprus. As far as the British Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories are concerned, the Government has already confirmed that it will be sending them all vaccines, as you would expect - and, in fact, a quick search returns a recent House of Commons briefing paper which reveals that the shipping of vaccines to some of the territories, including Gibraltar and St Helena, has already started.
Above all, it should be given to friends with no strings attached. As you say, trying to use it as leverage over the EU (or anyone else) isn't justified.
Direct flights from UAE to UK suspended, after South African variant Covid spotted coming to UK from or through Middle East.
https://www.thenationalnews.com/uae/uae-uk-travel-ban-all-your-questions-answered-1.1155845
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israelis-over-55-teachers-to-begin-receiving-covid-vaccines-starting-tuesday-1.9440877
Besides, the stroppier the EU gets with us, the more we need the goodwill of these people.
We can be generous, sure. But the cost ship sailed months ago. We put the cash down. We took the gamble.
Why should the Swiss or the Canadians be able to pay "cost". If they wanted to skip the queue with AZN, do you think they'd be paying cost?
I thought they were pick-a-back on Sweden from EU supplies, Sweden having ordered more. Not sure how that locks in with the firm "per pop" distribution.
Aside: Novavax is another one where EU were still in "Exploratory Talks" in December. UK signed contract in August.
I wonder how rapidly MHRA will be able to approve it.
Let the USA and Moderna make profits from the rich nations who didn’t invest enough at the start, and let UKAid look after those countries who never had the chance to spend billions on vaccines in the first place #softpower.
https://twitter.com/ropoem/status/1354964379289194501?s=21
Serious issues about data protection and racial segregation:
https://theconversation.com/israels-vaccine-rollout-has-been-fast-so-why-is-it-controversial-and-what-can-other-countries-learn-153687
Covid: Data shows outbreaks in England's offices in lockdown
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55843506
The truth is this disease makes us all vulnerable to infection unless we are vaccinated. Some professions may be more vulnerable than others, but the virus doesn’t magically stop at say, bankers.
Which is why we need to do two things:
1) Vaccinate everyone as fast as humanly possible to render it moot who gets jabbed first - which we’re doing - and;
2) Come up with an intelligent plan for managing schools until that happy moment is achieved. Which will certainly not happen as everyone at the DfE is like a drunk version of Richard Burgon.
So we will probably have lockdown, unlock, catastrophe, lockdown, unlock one more time.
Unless they delay school reopening until the vaccination programme has got to everyone who might be vulnerable, especially parents of teenage children with underlying health conditions.
Knowing the Olympics will deffo go ahead would lift the world's spirits. And be a big win with the Japanese.
And boy, would it annoy Brussels that they can't offer this.
What's not to love?
Unfortunately Brexit didn't arise ex nihilo. The EU provided it with plenty of ammunition. That has been all-too-evident this past fortnight.
Fuck you, antivaxers.
This smoke and mirrors is an attempt to cover up their own woeful inadequacies.
https://twitter.com/bbcnews/status/1355004741768638465?s=21
Either the President of the Commission, a body which of course always acts with impeccable integrity and would never, say, impose an illegal ban on British beef exports to deflect attention from a vast outbreak of BSE in France, or the CEO of AstraZeneca, a pharmaceutical company who as we know are always models of charity and honesty.
Whichever one of them is lying, however, the losers are the citizens of the EU who have found their health and economic resilience turned into a political football over greater EU integration.
Which is really quite astonishingly unedifying.
Once the pressure on the NHS has eased for this reason it is less obvious to me why age (and I am 59) continues to be the determining factor. If there are certain groups that are more at risk of either infection or infecting others providing essential public services I can see the argument for them being next. Care staff will generally have been dealt with in the first wave but any remaining pockets there, such as dentists, chiropractors etc would be a good example but so would delivery drivers, shop workers, any front facing staff who have to deal with large volumes of public.
If it was going to facilitate the opening of schools then teachers would definitely be in this category. The problem with schools, however, is that at least with this new variant and quite possibly with the old one, the problem is not just the protection of teachers but the spreading of the virus through the kids to their families. Given the virulence of the new variants I really struggle to see the schools open until we are much, much further on with vaccination and the incidence of the disease in the community is enormously reduced. If the schools are not going to be open the argument for preference for teachers rather falls apart.
I think the key is the timing, and whether the vulnerable are all done first.
Taking jabs away from 60s and 70s for young sportspeople looks really bad. Using plenty of surplus capacity when almost everyone’s been vaccinated already though, that looks great.
F1 would look awesome if they turned up at each venue with 10,000 vaccines for the local population, if it means they can take the first thousand of the total for all the people they’ve got working in the paddock.
The issue of the Olympics is much bigger. The athletes are all around the world training at the moment, the vast majority will have to compete in some sort of national competition for the right to be at the Games in the first place, and the list of attendees won’t be known until a few weeks before the event. There’s also the problem of where to do the vaccinating. Vaccinating in Japan all the local workers appears impossible due to Japanese rules on approvals, which are still potentially months away as local trials continue.
One of my colleagues went white last term at the mere thought of a second lockdown. His children are aged five and seven.
Not only are you being sold shit, the virus is also getting spread in the bloody centre selling you crap.
Before the past year, do we know how many contracts for purchase of pharmaceuticals the EU has negotiated directly? In constrast to AstraZenica’s contracts department, who we know have a very expensive team of lawyers doing just that, every day.
In general I agree with keeping spirits high but I'm not sure your enthusiasm for the Olympics over, say, soccer, NFL, baseball, cricket, rugby, darts, snooker, golf, tennis (which I accept is now a sort-of Olympic sport) would be shared by many people.
The Olympics is a spectacle and London was fantastic. But on the whole the event seems to have degenerated. The sports are often fringe or lacking professional participants and the centrepiece, athletics, is riddled with performance-enhancing drugs.
Although that option seems likely to be closed off later today.
I have stayed away from my work entirely this month. Given the virulence of the new variant it would be crazy to go to Edinburgh and mix with friends and work colleagues but this is really tough. My productivity is very low and my mood is not much better. I have never really suffered from depression in my life, even in really difficult times, but I am struggling right now. I want my life back, as do 67m others of course.
By June, the Japanese will have to have got themselves commfortable with some jab. That is an issue for their timetable. Some pressure will be brought to bear to get those rules meshed in place with an approved vaccine.
Then maybe the IOC awards the UK the 2032 games, as a thank you....(to whicever are still constituent countries in the UK by then....)
And even if it is, AZN can't magic up something that doesn't exist.
The EU is doing itself zero favours here having f***ed up the most important project in decades.
On schools, in England they will be closed until March 8 under present arrangements. By then it is likely that vaccinations will be up to 23-27 million or so on current trends - so we may not be that far off the point anyway. That as near as dammit covers the 27 million in groups 1-9 before the current schools reopening date.
I expect plans to be updated before then.
I know it was a very bad and obscure joke, but give me a break here guys. I was writing lessons half the night and up again at five this morning.
Customer service call centres can be done from home, but for everything I've gathered for cold calling call centres its way more profitable if everyone is in the same room.
After Easter, if your figures are correct we should be OK to reopen anyway.
The same happened to Samantha Cameron the other day.
She’s clearly under enormous pressure from somewhere. This is flailing on speed.
"The frequency of other lineages decreased from 96.3% between March and November 2020 to 8.3% in January 2021"
https://virological.org/t/genomic-characterisation-of-an-emergent-sars-cov-2-lineage-in-manaus-preliminary-findings/586/2
"Just as Brazil surpassed 200,000 deaths from COVID-19 on January 7, news from Bahia added another layer of concern: A platform case report in a preprint detailed the first case of reinfection in that state, apparently caused by a new strain, one having the E484K mutation. This new strain is now being called P.2."
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/944748
This suggests that the spike in cases in Manaus is due to infection by the new strains of the virus, and not due to reinfection by the original strains as a result of declining immunity. Perhaps we should be placing orders for vaccines against these new Brazilian variants (not with manufacturers based in the EU).
https://davidallengreen.com/2021/01/what-can-be-worked-out-about-the-best-efforts-clause-in-the-astrazeneca-vaccine-supply-agreement/
I don't totally agree, but he's crawled and trawled the detail as best we have it.
A blood test taken at the same time would do plenty to worry the cheats.
The Olympics are still THE showcase for world sport. We need to get that sport back up. It shows yes, we can beat this bug. Normality is possible. Get jabbed, and all will be well. If you cancel the Games until 2024, there will be a raft of sportsmen who will have missed the chance to compete for their country at the very highest level. They will have passed their peak by then. Them losing out is a win for the Bastard Bug that we should do all we can to prevent.
Then the EU bit and said "release the contract" - and again AZN stayed quiet, waited until the next day and then said "OK contract can be released". I would bet my bottom pound that not only did AZN lawyers know what they were doing when they drafted that contract, but that in that period of radio silence AZN have had very smart, very well paid lawyers going through that contract to double-check there's nothing in there they'd missed that would sting them now.
Quite frankly the Commission are rank amateurs at what is being done right now. This is what AZN do for a living.
What a joke.
I would hope all the drugs companies would follow the same policy of continuing to honour their deals as legally committed and let the EU make itself look foolish with threats and inflammatory speeches.
The only way that should change is if the EU does actually start to block exports or take physical action against AZN in which case they really have jumped the shark and I suspect we will then see drug companies refusing to cooperate with them.
But as I said yesterday I simply don't think that will happen. Saner heads will prevail within the EU.
It is best to keep it simple, and age works for that, as well as being clinically effective, but after the 60+ are done, there is perhaps a case for just letting anyone book in. That would build herd immunity fairly quickly. I suspect there would be continuing ethnic and socio-economic gaps, but campaigns could continue for these.
One great strength of the NHS primary care system is vaccinations. Less systematic healthcare models have their advantages, in consumerist terms, but are far behind in systematic coverage.
The sports on offer are frequently second-best and the competitors very worthy, often amateurs, some of whom may go on to do great things professionally. Some of the world's biggest sports are not represented: golf, football (let's be honest), NFL, baseball, rugby, cricket.
There is no centralised showpiece for world sport, thank god. The thought is a dystopian nightmare redolent of The Hunger Games.
You're also then pitching your argument on a vaccine the trials for which have not been published and regulation not, yet, approved. Even with a single jab it would need to be completed by May to get the athletes into their bio secure bubbles on site in time.
But aside from that, no vaccine should be diverted from the most vulnerable who are more likely to die. We know who they are: the JCVI list has a global application. That includes for sports people or social influencers.
Once the most vulnerable are jabbed then, fine, let's have a debate about who comes next.
I’m sure the amateur lawyers of the internet would be fascinated to see the contract, even knowing the language and jurisdiction would be interesting.
The problem is that’s there’s definitely confidentiality clauses galore in there, but if the language about deliveries was as bulletproof as the EU suggest, someone would have found a way to get a copy to a newspaper by now.
I’ll stick to my original belief that Big Pharma’s contracts departments know exactly what they’re doing.
“We will ban exports from the EU” and
“We will force you to export to the EU”
Let alone the issue of countries stopping supplies to the EU if they do ban exports...
But vaccinating all teachers - as I understand Keir is calling for - is unjustified and Mike is right that it would likely lead to further unnecessary deaths. Disastrous idea from Starmer.
Maybe it's popular, but it would be the wrong thing to do.