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A Butcher’s Bill for EU – politicalbetting.com

SystemSystem Posts: 11,002
edited February 2021 in General
imageA Butcher’s Bill for EU – politicalbetting.com

On Thursday morning the number of “EU Citizens” who have been killed by COVID, based on current official counts, stood at 500,809. It has broken the big half-million.

Read the full story here

«134567

Comments

  • Ooh, could I nick a first?
  • All that pseudo-science....

    Life savers: the amazing story of the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid vaccine

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/14/life-savers-story-oxford-astrazeneca-coronavirus-vaccine-scientists
  • FPT (and on cricket, so not for Cyclefree)

    Andy_JS said:

    The paradoxical thing is that TV replays have had the (in most peoples opinions positive) effect of stopping batsman playing with their pads when the ball is on the stumps. But this seemingly doesnt extend to using your pads when the ball is outside the off stump to any greater extent than was already the case before TV replays were introduced, since its still the onfield umpire making that decision as it was before — because it looks like the TV replay cant overturn the original decision on whether a shot was played or not.

    A change in the law is required there Andy. The whole decision should be allocated to the off-field umpire.

    The standard of the umpiring has been extremely good so far. Perversely, two of the three palpable errors in this match have been down to the third umpire - the stumping and the pad onto bat incident. Both may have been partly down to deficient technology.

    Rohit definitely wasn't playing a shot but it's hard to judge in real time and different umpires have different ideas of what is constitutes a shot and what is just play acting. You would be more likely to get a consistent standard if the assessment were handed over the off-field man.
  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941
    Thank you, Matt!
  • FPT
    MaxPB said:

    algarkirk said:

    algarkirk said:


    Not quite. A Royal Commission would be a UK one dealing with the implications of E/W/NI independence from Scotland as much as the other way round. And it would not be dealing with the indefinite future but the actual severance.

    As I said, I can see how the UK might set out its negotiating parameters via a Royal Commission. As this thread has shown, it is easy to see how that would be a great recruiting sergeant for the SNP. Nothing is more calculated to dissipate bonhomie and goodwill among Scots towards the union than telling them that if they leave, the UK will try to nail them to the floor.
    The Tory party purpose of a RC would be to embarrass separatist opinion if possible. Obvs. Its national purpose would be to maximise the areas of agreement, including on big ticket questions so that the Scottish voters know what it is about beyond flag waving. Neither politics nor party politics can be removed from politics.

    It is in rUK's interest, should Scotland decide to go independent, to have a good neighbour. That means trying to set up an amicable divorce settlement. rUK would do well to be open-handed in those circumstances.

    But in practice, chippy English nationalism would win out in any attempt to set the terms in advance, to the great benefit of the SNP. Concessions could not be made in advance, because they would be unsaleable to the English nationalist public in advance of a vote for independence - they'd be difficult to sell afterwards, but marginally easier. You can already see the "not a ha'penny more" school of thought dominating on here. The whole thing would degenerate into an orgy of jock-bashing (no doubt with its counterpart of SNP grievance-mongering).
    It is in EU's interest, should the UK to go independent, to have a good neighbour. That means trying to set up an amicable divorce settlement. The EU would do well to be open-handed in those circumstances.

    But in practice, chippy EU bruised egos would win out in any attempt to set the terms in advance, to the great benefit of the UK Brexiteers. Concessions could not be made in advance, because they would be unsaleable to the European public in advance of a vote for independence - they'd be difficult to sell afterwards, but marginally easier. You can already see the "not a ha'penny more" school of thought dominating within the EU. The whole thing would degenerate into an orgy of Britain-bashing (no doubt with its counterpart of Brexiteer grievance-mongering).
    What's worse for Alastair is that the rUK-Scotland negotiation is even more one sided. The UK was and is a very powerful nation in or out of the EU. It has natural allies in the world, a very strong diplomatic and intelligence network and a top tier economy both in absolute and relative terms. Scotland would be starting that process from scratch, it's not impossible but the nature of how it potentially leaves the UK will determine the near future for it and an England hating process of leaving will make things a lot harder. I don't see how it can be avoided, as you pointed out it couldn't be avoided with the UK leaving the EU.
    Scotland has one tremendous advantage over the UK: they won't be led by May and Hammond.

    The worst elements of the UK/EU negotiations were a result of the 2017 elections leading to the paralysis of the 2017/19 Parliament. The UK had just about the worst possible Prime Minister and worst possible Chancellor for the negotiations as neither of them actually believed in what was being done.

    Scottish independence won't be tackled from a "let's get this bloody stupid thing done, how can we minimise it's damage" perspective that May and especially Hammond and the 2017-19 Parliament had.

    Scottish independence negotiations would be the pinnacle of the life's work for the SNP politicians who would be masters of all they survey politically.
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 19,598
    RobD said:
    Where Gye is wrong is with the “two days early” point. It’s one day early. The 15th is a counting day only.

    Still, who cares? Great job.
  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941

    RobD said:
    Where Gye is wrong is with the “two days early” point. It’s one day early. The 15th is a counting day only.

    Still, who cares? Great job.
    Isn't there a two day lag in reporting the numbers?
  • isamisam Posts: 40,721
    Klopp is EVS from 50/1 yesterday to be the next Prem manager to leave his job
  • FishingFishing Posts: 4,555
    Germany is led by a woman, so must have done better than every other country in Europe. The second wave deaths have to be an illusion.
  • tlg86tlg86 Posts: 25,164
    isam said:

    Klopp is EVS from 50/1 yesterday to be the next Prem manager to leave his job

    He wouldn't run away from Liverpool like he ran away from Dortmund, would he?
  • Amazing that an entity with a population of 440m has a total of Covid deaths higher than a state with a population of 68m, took me a while to get my head round that.
  • YBarddCwscYBarddCwsc Posts: 7,172

    All that pseudo-science....

    Life savers: the amazing story of the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid vaccine

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/14/life-savers-story-oxford-astrazeneca-coronavirus-vaccine-scientists

    A wonderful story to inspire female scientists as well.

    A PhD from Hull and a Professor at Oxford.

    "I asked if he'd been to one of the great universities: Oxford, Cambridge, Hull .... You failed to spot that only two of those are great universities ... "
  • Andy_CookeAndy_Cooke Posts: 4,793
    FPT:

    There's so much of this virus that has nuanced elements.

    On the one hand, seasonality of SARS-CoV-2 seems pretty limited at best, with the outbreaks north and south of the equator and during spring, summer, autumn, and winter being largely based on mobility data (official and de facto restrictions/lockdowns) rather than the season - but on the other hand, one would expect some benefit to weather that encourages people being outside and/or with windows open. It could be wishful thinking, of course, but I'd be a bit surprised if there was none.

    Even if it's not very visible when R0 is high, we would expect the benefits to be considerably stronger when vaccines push transmission down such that the R without restrictions would be a lot lower.

    On the cross-reactive coronaviruses - after some excitement in autumn when activity was seen (albeit the scientists involved strongly warned that inhibition of transmission and effective boosts to herd immunity were so unlikely as to be implausible), further study has shown no real discernable benefit. T-cells get a bit excited, but then don't actually do anything useful - they have low avidity for the virus (there's some weak evidence that it can make things worse - almost as if they assume they've recognised it, decided it's not a big deal, and buggered off again). Still, it would just have been a bonus if it had come off, and now we have something (vaccines) that DOES give real immunity.

    Herd immunity-wise - they've found that antibody levels decline slower than expected, which is good for avoidance of re-infection or even transmission of the virus by the infected-and-recovered; bad for assumptions of higher levels of infection-and-recovery.

    But while the levels of herd immunity will be lower than we'd have hoped from infection, restrictions act to multiply the effect of whatever herd immunity there is. If there's 25% immunity, that means R is pushed down to three quarters of what it would be without it. So restrictions that would otherwise push R down to 1.2 (September growth levels) would actually put it down to 0.9 (comfortably declining). I wouldn't be surprised if this was what had made the difference with controlling the B.1.1.7 variant (about four-thirds more infections, coupled with about 25% immunity leads to a wash - restrictions that would have controlled the original variant can now control the new one)
  • BluestBlueBluestBlue Posts: 4,556

    RH1992 said:
    Target achieved a day early.

    No need for the Vaxometer today!

    Absolutely excellent work by the NHS in all four nations.
    Veni, vidi, pupugi! (I came, I saw, I jabbed!)

    Some wags will no doubt wish to rearrange the order of the words.
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 49,950
    RobD said:
    One previous, careless owner....
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 49,950
    RobD said:

    RobD said:
    Where Gye is wrong is with the “two days early” point. It’s one day early. The 15th is a counting day only.

    Still, who cares? Great job.
    Isn't there a two day lag in reporting the numbers?
    Yes - these are the numbers for Friday 12th.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603
    Very interesting article, Matt. Thanks.

    I think I agree with the central idea of it too, across the western world there isn't going to be a lot of difference in the final infection and death rates or the economic picture either.

    Every leader in the west needs to pay for the failure to put up border restrictions in February of last year whether it's Boris or Macron or Merkel, all of them have failed the people and thousands of people died unnecessarily to protect this nebulous idea of being "open for business" or not to be seen as racist by closing the border to China and other infected countries.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,279
    Great achievement, but can we get it up to a million jabs a day with younger people?
  • RH1992 said:
    Target achieved a day early.

    No need for the Vaxometer today!

    Absolutely excellent work by the NHS in all four nations.
    Absolutely.

    A vindication too for the "it's a sprint, not a marathon" strategy. Every person jabbed is sprinting against death itself.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited February 2021

    Sadiq is not very good.

    twitter.com/martha_gill/status/1360569949492813824?s=21

    Its classic Sadiq Khan. He looks good, makes all the carefully picked right noises, knowing when to pop up and who to attack, but is utterly woeful at getting anything done. He was the same in government.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,747
    So the "butcher's bill" for the delays in vaccination in the EU is going to be somewhere between 150 and 200k EU citizens. Wow.

    What is the counterfactual though? We did well in contracting to get vaccines early. Had the EU done the same would we have had less? Would we not have made our 15m target? Or would there simply be more vaccine being manufactured right now on our part of the planet? My guess is a bit of both.
  • MaxPB said:

    Very interesting article, Matt. Thanks.

    I think I agree with the central idea of it too, across the western world there isn't going to be a lot of difference in the final infection and death rates or the economic picture either.

    Every leader in the west needs to pay for the failure to put up border restrictions in February of last year whether it's Boris or Macron or Merkel, all of them have failed the people and thousands of people died unnecessarily to protect this nebulous idea of being "open for business" or not to be seen as racist by closing the border to China and other infected countries.

    I disagree. With the benefit of handsight it would have been better to do that but hindsight is 2020.

    This was at least the seventh major potential pandemic this century alone, but the first serious one it turned out in a century. It was the boy who cried wolf, eventually the wolf arrived but if we shut the country down every time one of these potential pandemics came around we'd be shutting down virtually every other year.

    Is that how you want to live the rest of your life? Not for me thanks. We should learn lessons but I'd rather not be shutting down every time someone sneezes funny in years to come.
  • Excellent thread piece, Matt. Why you never done one before?

    I agree with the main thrust of your argument. You shouldn't draw too many conclusions from the bare figures, especially as we don't know where it all ends yet. I do however think it is reasonable to pause over the current results and reflect that the UK's vaccination roll-out probably would almost certainly have gone less well had the country still been part of the EU.

    This gives unreconstructed Europhiles like myself food for thought. My habit has been to mock Leavers over the absence of palpable benefits of leaving the EU. Now we appear to have a very tangible one.

    Of course nobody could have foreseen this, but it would be dishonest of Remainers to deny these very real consequences. If it can be reasonably argued that they derive from the very nature of the EU, and therefore further benefits of leaving the EU are likely to accrue in due course, there will be a lot of humble pie to be eaten, not least on this site.

    I might even have some myself.
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 20,812

    Sadiq is not very good.

    twitter.com/martha_gill/status/1360569949492813824?s=21

    Its classic Sadiq Khan. He looks good, makes all the right noises, great at PR side of politics, knowing when to pop up and who to attack, but is utterly woeful at getting anything done. He was the same in government.
    I am not even sure he makes the right noises. I find him largely invisible, with occasional whingeing noises.

    The article goes on to explain that he has received a bad hand, ie next to no legacy projects from Boris and a non-sympathetic government - but also that his working style is totally ineffective with allies and opponents alike.
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 19,598
    edited February 2021

    RobD said:

    RobD said:
    Where Gye is wrong is with the “two days early” point. It’s one day early. The 15th is a counting day only.

    Still, who cares? Great job.
    Isn't there a two day lag in reporting the numbers?
    Yes - these are the numbers for Friday 12th.
    Nope. Not according to the NHS itself they aren’t. They might, in all reality, be from 48 hours past, but as the NHS itself assigns them to the previous day, the target is midnight tonight (with a final day of counting tomorrow).
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,578

    RobD said:

    RobD said:
    Where Gye is wrong is with the “two days early” point. It’s one day early. The 15th is a counting day only.

    Still, who cares? Great job.
    Isn't there a two day lag in reporting the numbers?
    Yes - these are the numbers for Friday 12th.
    I would rather say that that is what most people think the delay is - we haven't had confirmation. But it makes sense.

    The numbers reported today are actually up to yesterday, midday.

    A probable working assumption is that nearly all of that is end of day returns from the day before - Friday.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603

    FPT:

    There's so much of this virus that has nuanced elements.

    On the one hand, seasonality of SARS-CoV-2 seems pretty limited at best, with the outbreaks north and south of the equator and during spring, summer, autumn, and winter being largely based on mobility data (official and de facto restrictions/lockdowns) rather than the season - but on the other hand, one would expect some benefit to weather that encourages people being outside and/or with windows open. It could be wishful thinking, of course, but I'd be a bit surprised if there was none.

    Even if it's not very visible when R0 is high, we would expect the benefits to be considerably stronger when vaccines push transmission down such that the R without restrictions would be a lot lower.

    On the cross-reactive coronaviruses - after some excitement in autumn when activity was seen (albeit the scientists involved strongly warned that inhibition of transmission and effective boosts to herd immunity were so unlikely as to be implausible), further study has shown no real discernable benefit. T-cells get a bit excited, but then don't actually do anything useful - they have low avidity for the virus (there's some weak evidence that it can make things worse - almost as if they assume they've recognised it, decided it's not a big deal, and buggered off again). Still, it would just have been a bonus if it had come off, and now we have something (vaccines) that DOES give real immunity.

    Herd immunity-wise - they've found that antibody levels decline slower than expected, which is good for avoidance of re-infection or even transmission of the virus by the infected-and-recovered; bad for assumptions of higher levels of infection-and-recovery.

    But while the levels of herd immunity will be lower than we'd have hoped from infection, restrictions act to multiply the effect of whatever herd immunity there is. If there's 25% immunity, that means R is pushed down to three quarters of what it would be without it. So restrictions that would otherwise push R down to 1.2 (September growth levels) would actually put it down to 0.9 (comfortably declining). I wouldn't be surprised if this was what had made the difference with controlling the B.1.1.7 variant (about four-thirds more infections, coupled with about 25% immunity leads to a wash - restrictions that would have controlled the original variant can now control the new one)

    But this falls into the same trap as the original COVID actuaries report which just assumed that the vaccine programme stops at 25% of the population, in reality around 1% of the adult population are being added to the "newly immunised" everyday further decreasing the potential reservoir of non-immune hosts that can end up on hospital.

    Tbh, it doesn't matter if the R hits 4 or 5 in the summer as long as it doesn't result in hospitalisations/death so I don't think having a high infection rate should be an impediment to reopening the economy fully.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,578

    All that pseudo-science....

    Life savers: the amazing story of the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid vaccine

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/14/life-savers-story-oxford-astrazeneca-coronavirus-vaccine-scientists

    A wonderful story to inspire female scientists as well.

    A PhD from Hull and a Professor at Oxford.

    "I asked if he'd been to one of the great universities: Oxford, Cambridge, Hull .... You failed to spot that only two of those are great universities ... "
    Too right. Fenland Polytechnic Spy School is a frightful hole.
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 19,598

    RobD said:

    RobD said:
    Where Gye is wrong is with the “two days early” point. It’s one day early. The 15th is a counting day only.

    Still, who cares? Great job.
    Isn't there a two day lag in reporting the numbers?
    Yes - these are the numbers for Friday 12th.
    I would rather say that that is what most people think the delay is - we haven't had confirmation. But it makes sense.

    The numbers reported today are actually up to yesterday, midday.

    A probable working assumption is that nearly all of that is end of day returns from the day before - Friday.
    Indeed a fair assumption but as the NHS itself assigns them to yesterday the target is tonight.

    However, this is the ultimate pedanticbetting.com discussion.

    Target beaten with room to spare.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,747
    And yet he is going to win by a mile, almost certainly on the first count. Doesn't say much for our political class, does it?
  • DavidL said:

    So the "butcher's bill" for the delays in vaccination in the EU is going to be somewhere between 150 and 200k EU citizens. Wow.

    What is the counterfactual though? We did well in contracting to get vaccines early. Had the EU done the same would we have had less? Would we not have made our 15m target? Or would there simply be more vaccine being manufactured right now on our part of the planet? My guess is a bit of both.

    There would have been more manufacturing.

    A little remarked upon fact is that the UK spent more on developing vaccines, priming manufacturing etc than the entire EU combined. The UK spent more per capita than the USA and about 7x more per capita than the EU and the output now scales almost perfectly to the per capita spending of all the countries concerned.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,836
    @MattW - thanks and good first header. I hope the EU gets rolling on vaccination and I think they will.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,578

    RobD said:

    RobD said:
    Where Gye is wrong is with the “two days early” point. It’s one day early. The 15th is a counting day only.

    Still, who cares? Great job.
    Isn't there a two day lag in reporting the numbers?
    Yes - these are the numbers for Friday 12th.
    I would rather say that that is what most people think the delay is - we haven't had confirmation. But it makes sense.

    The numbers reported today are actually up to yesterday, midday.

    A probable working assumption is that nearly all of that is end of day returns from the day before - Friday.
    Indeed a fair assumption but as the NHS itself assigns them to yesterday the target is tonight.

    However, this is the ultimate pedanticbetting.com discussion.

    Target beaten with room to spare.
    A day either way doesn't really make much odds on a fairly continuous process.

    Can we have a panic for 10 past 2 tomorrow, about the "collapse" in figures? I'll put out the folding chairs and the tea. Could someone else bring the biscuits, please?
  • isamisam Posts: 40,721
    tlg86 said:

    isam said:

    Klopp is EVS from 50/1 yesterday to be the next Prem manager to leave his job

    He wouldn't run away from Liverpool like he ran away from Dortmund, would he?
    His Mum just passed away and he couldn't go to the funeral, that must be tough. The rumour I heard was he was having time off to get over that, but I don't trust it really.

    I was thinking of backing Mourinho as next one to go to be honest, so this has just stopped me doing that. Changing the formation to include more attacking players but still losing, and letting in 8 goals in 2 games, upsetting Alli and Bale, the ingredients are there. I can't imagine Tottenham fans are happy with the football they play under him, they have a reputation as a flair club, and if they aren't really progressing success wise either what's the point?
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 19,598
    MaxPB said:

    FPT:

    There's so much of this virus that has nuanced elements.

    On the one hand, seasonality of SARS-CoV-2 seems pretty limited at best, with the outbreaks north and south of the equator and during spring, summer, autumn, and winter being largely based on mobility data (official and de facto restrictions/lockdowns) rather than the season - but on the other hand, one would expect some benefit to weather that encourages people being outside and/or with windows open. It could be wishful thinking, of course, but I'd be a bit surprised if there was none.

    Even if it's not very visible when R0 is high, we would expect the benefits to be considerably stronger when vaccines push transmission down such that the R without restrictions would be a lot lower.

    On the cross-reactive coronaviruses - after some excitement in autumn when activity was seen (albeit the scientists involved strongly warned that inhibition of transmission and effective boosts to herd immunity were so unlikely as to be implausible), further study has shown no real discernable benefit. T-cells get a bit excited, but then don't actually do anything useful - they have low avidity for the virus (there's some weak evidence that it can make things worse - almost as if they assume they've recognised it, decided it's not a big deal, and buggered off again). Still, it would just have been a bonus if it had come off, and now we have something (vaccines) that DOES give real immunity.

    Herd immunity-wise - they've found that antibody levels decline slower than expected, which is good for avoidance of re-infection or even transmission of the virus by the infected-and-recovered; bad for assumptions of higher levels of infection-and-recovery.

    But while the levels of herd immunity will be lower than we'd have hoped from infection, restrictions act to multiply the effect of whatever herd immunity there is. If there's 25% immunity, that means R is pushed down to three quarters of what it would be without it. So restrictions that would otherwise push R down to 1.2 (September growth levels) would actually put it down to 0.9 (comfortably declining). I wouldn't be surprised if this was what had made the difference with controlling the B.1.1.7 variant (about four-thirds more infections, coupled with about 25% immunity leads to a wash - restrictions that would have controlled the original variant can now control the new one)

    But this falls into the same trap as the original COVID actuaries report which just assumed that the vaccine programme stops at 25% of the population, in reality around 1% of the adult population are being added to the "newly immunised" everyday further decreasing the potential reservoir of non-immune hosts that can end up on hospital.

    Tbh, it doesn't matter if the R hits 4 or 5 in the summer as long as it doesn't result in hospitalisations/death so I don't think having a high infection rate should be an impediment to reopening the economy fully.
    This needs saying more often. We need to give Zero Fucks if some people contract mild covid. This is why the mad Zero Covidians should be ignored.
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 20,812
    edited February 2021
    DavidL said:

    And yet he is going to win by a mile, almost certainly on the first count. Doesn't say much for our political class, does it?
    The Tories can no longer compete in London, post Brexit. London is dead then for a generation, maybe forever.

    That leaves the Lib Dems.
    I’ve seen one very short clip of their candidate where she appears to be about 13 years old.

    The rule for London so far is don’t bother competing unless you are a v big beast.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,578

    Sadiq is not very good.

    twitter.com/martha_gill/status/1360569949492813824?s=21

    Its classic Sadiq Khan. He looks good, makes all the right noises, great at PR side of politics, knowing when to pop up and who to attack, but is utterly woeful at getting anything done. He was the same in government.
    I am not even sure he makes the right noises. I find him largely invisible, with occasional whingeing noises.

    The article goes on to explain that he has received a bad hand, ie next to no legacy projects from Boris and a non-sympathetic government - but also that his working style is totally ineffective with allies and opponents alike.
    I've just realised who Khan reminds me of - David Aceveda, the police captain in The Shield.
  • I am pleasantly surprised that the target has been hit. I really thought they would take an extra couple of weeks.

    BUT....it again looks like ~500k per day is the ceiling. We need to see that really cranked up otherwise we will be waiting until very late in the year before the population is vaccinated.
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 39,742
    edited February 2021
    DavidL said:

    And yet he is going to win by a mile, almost certainly on the first count. Doesn't say much for our political class, does it?
    Well, not the section of it that thought Shaun Bailey was a goer. Or Zac for that matter.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited February 2021

    Sadiq is not very good.

    twitter.com/martha_gill/status/1360569949492813824?s=21

    Its classic Sadiq Khan. He looks good, makes all the right noises, great at PR side of politics, knowing when to pop up and who to attack, but is utterly woeful at getting anything done. He was the same in government.
    I am not even sure he makes the right noises. I find him largely invisible, with occasional whingeing noises.

    The article goes on to explain that he has received a bad hand, ie next to no legacy projects from Boris and a non-sympathetic government - but also that his working style is totally ineffective with allies and opponents alike.
    I've just realised who Khan reminds me of - David Aceveda, the police captain in The Shield.
    Good show that. Vastly under rated, due to the popularity of the Wire.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603

    MaxPB said:

    Very interesting article, Matt. Thanks.

    I think I agree with the central idea of it too, across the western world there isn't going to be a lot of difference in the final infection and death rates or the economic picture either.

    Every leader in the west needs to pay for the failure to put up border restrictions in February of last year whether it's Boris or Macron or Merkel, all of them have failed the people and thousands of people died unnecessarily to protect this nebulous idea of being "open for business" or not to be seen as racist by closing the border to China and other infected countries.

    I disagree. With the benefit of handsight it would have been better to do that but hindsight is 2020.

    This was at least the seventh major potential pandemic this century alone, but the first serious one it turned out in a century. It was the boy who cried wolf, eventually the wolf arrived but if we shut the country down every time one of these potential pandemics came around we'd be shutting down virtually every other year.

    Is that how you want to live the rest of your life? Not for me thanks. We should learn lessons but I'd rather not be shutting down every time someone sneezes funny in years to come.
    But we didn't do the after the first wave either. I don't want to live my whole life cut off from the rest of the world and I'm definitely not suggesting that as an idea. What I'm saying is that all European leaders decided that having open borders was more important than having an open internal economy. That's been a huge error and the lessons should have been learned before the second wave.

    I completely agree with Matt Hancock who said recently the ultimate aim should be to turn COVID into a flu like disease where people are simply vaccinated once a year in September and October. We can't have another lockdown like this ever again, all of the zero COVID strategies still need lockdowns even with vaccines and that's unacceptable.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,747

    DavidL said:

    So the "butcher's bill" for the delays in vaccination in the EU is going to be somewhere between 150 and 200k EU citizens. Wow.

    What is the counterfactual though? We did well in contracting to get vaccines early. Had the EU done the same would we have had less? Would we not have made our 15m target? Or would there simply be more vaccine being manufactured right now on our part of the planet? My guess is a bit of both.

    There would have been more manufacturing.

    A little remarked upon fact is that the UK spent more on developing vaccines, priming manufacturing etc than the entire EU combined. The UK spent more per capita than the USA and about 7x more per capita than the EU and the output now scales almost perfectly to the per capita spending of all the countries concerned.
    Yes, but would that have been enough to keep us in our favoured position? I suspect that our willingness to commit money and resources up front meant that we scooped the pool on available vaccine from either existing or new sources. So, as I said, a bit of both.

    What is clear is that if the EU had invested on anything like the scale that we did in vaccine production they would be vaccinating a lot faster now and fewer EU citizens would be about to die of this terrible illness. No one sane takes any satisfaction from that, only regret.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,279
    15 million in 67 days. Average = c. 225,000 a day since 8th December.
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 20,812

    Sadiq is not very good.

    twitter.com/martha_gill/status/1360569949492813824?s=21

    Its classic Sadiq Khan. He looks good, makes all the right noises, great at PR side of politics, knowing when to pop up and who to attack, but is utterly woeful at getting anything done. He was the same in government.
    I am not even sure he makes the right noises. I find him largely invisible, with occasional whingeing noises.

    The article goes on to explain that he has received a bad hand, ie next to no legacy projects from Boris and a non-sympathetic government - but also that his working style is totally ineffective with allies and opponents alike.
    I've just realised who Khan reminds me of - David Aceveda, the police captain in The Shield.
    Good show that. Vastly under rated, due to the popularity of the Wire.
    Excellent show.
    Cartoony, but only in the very best sense.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603

    DavidL said:

    And yet he is going to win by a mile, almost certainly on the first count. Doesn't say much for our political class, does it?
    The Tories can no longer compete in London, post Brexit. London is dead then for a generation, maybe forever.

    That leaves the Lib Dems.
    I’ve seen one very short clip of their candidate where she appears to be about 13 years old.

    The rule for London so far is don’t bother competing unless you are a v big beast.
    It needs a big beast independent candidate. I was hoping Rory would run again. Would be more than happy to donate my time and effort for his campaign. Sadly it was not to be.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,578
    kinabalu said:

    @MattW - thanks and good first header. I hope the EU gets rolling on vaccination and I think they will.

    I have seen no sign, in much of Europe, of a big distribution effort being setup. There has been some stuff in Germany... but without a coordinated supply chain and delivery system....
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 19,598
    Andy_JS said:

    Great achievement, but can we get it up to a million jabs a day with younger people?

    Once we start vaccinating the young, fit and healthy, we can have them queue up outside. So I see no reason why 1 million / day should be beyond us. Plenty of liquid on its way!
  • I am pleasantly surprised that the target has been hit. I really thought they would take an extra couple of weeks.

    BUT....it again looks like ~500k per day is the ceiling. We need to see that really cranked up otherwise we will be waiting until very late in the year before the population is vaccinated.

    There's 50,000,000 to go, even including children. That's three months.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,747

    DavidL said:

    And yet he is going to win by a mile, almost certainly on the first count. Doesn't say much for our political class, does it?
    Well, not the section of it that thought Shaun Bailey was a goer. Or Zac for that matter.
    A Tory has as much chance of winning the Mayor of London as being Provost of Glasgow. You sign yourself up for ritual humiliation, do your best and then lose with good grace. Unless you are Boris, of course.
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 19,598
    Andy_JS said:

    15 million in 67 days. Average = c. 225,000 a day since 8th December.

    That’s true but the run rate in the early date was very low, which skews the figures. Will be interesting to calculate the run rate since, say, Burn’s Night.
  • Andy_JS said:

    Great achievement, but can we get it up to a million jabs a day with younger people?

    Once we start vaccinating the young, fit and healthy, we can have them queue up outside. So I see no reason why 1 million / day should be beyond us. Plenty of liquid on its way!
    Drive thrus.....especially with one shot vaccine. Get jabbed as you roll through for your Starbucks or McDonalds.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,747

    DavidL said:

    And yet he is going to win by a mile, almost certainly on the first count. Doesn't say much for our political class, does it?
    The Tories can no longer compete in London, post Brexit. London is dead then for a generation, maybe forever.

    That leaves the Lib Dems.
    I’ve seen one very short clip of their candidate where she appears to be about 13 years old.

    The rule for London so far is don’t bother competing unless you are a v big beast.
    I don't think Brexit has made that much of a difference. No Tory has got close to being Mayor other than Boris. The Tories did win the GLC much longer ago but times have changed.

    I would agree that if you have to tell Londoners who you are you have already lost.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603

    MaxPB said:

    FPT:

    There's so much of this virus that has nuanced elements.

    On the one hand, seasonality of SARS-CoV-2 seems pretty limited at best, with the outbreaks north and south of the equator and during spring, summer, autumn, and winter being largely based on mobility data (official and de facto restrictions/lockdowns) rather than the season - but on the other hand, one would expect some benefit to weather that encourages people being outside and/or with windows open. It could be wishful thinking, of course, but I'd be a bit surprised if there was none.

    Even if it's not very visible when R0 is high, we would expect the benefits to be considerably stronger when vaccines push transmission down such that the R without restrictions would be a lot lower.

    On the cross-reactive coronaviruses - after some excitement in autumn when activity was seen (albeit the scientists involved strongly warned that inhibition of transmission and effective boosts to herd immunity were so unlikely as to be implausible), further study has shown no real discernable benefit. T-cells get a bit excited, but then don't actually do anything useful - they have low avidity for the virus (there's some weak evidence that it can make things worse - almost as if they assume they've recognised it, decided it's not a big deal, and buggered off again). Still, it would just have been a bonus if it had come off, and now we have something (vaccines) that DOES give real immunity.

    Herd immunity-wise - they've found that antibody levels decline slower than expected, which is good for avoidance of re-infection or even transmission of the virus by the infected-and-recovered; bad for assumptions of higher levels of infection-and-recovery.

    But while the levels of herd immunity will be lower than we'd have hoped from infection, restrictions act to multiply the effect of whatever herd immunity there is. If there's 25% immunity, that means R is pushed down to three quarters of what it would be without it. So restrictions that would otherwise push R down to 1.2 (September growth levels) would actually put it down to 0.9 (comfortably declining). I wouldn't be surprised if this was what had made the difference with controlling the B.1.1.7 variant (about four-thirds more infections, coupled with about 25% immunity leads to a wash - restrictions that would have controlled the original variant can now control the new one)

    But this falls into the same trap as the original COVID actuaries report which just assumed that the vaccine programme stops at 25% of the population, in reality around 1% of the adult population are being added to the "newly immunised" everyday further decreasing the potential reservoir of non-immune hosts that can end up on hospital.

    Tbh, it doesn't matter if the R hits 4 or 5 in the summer as long as it doesn't result in hospitalisations/death so I don't think having a high infection rate should be an impediment to reopening the economy fully.
    This needs saying more often. We need to give Zero Fucks if some people contract mild covid. This is why the mad Zero Covidians should be ignored.
    Yup, the last piece of the puzzle for me is to prove there is no link between severe mutations and mild COVID. It just doesn't make any sense from a scientific perspective that mutations would occur to an immune response evading extent with mild COVID that implies a 6-7 day infection period.
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 20,812
    DavidL said:

    DavidL said:

    And yet he is going to win by a mile, almost certainly on the first count. Doesn't say much for our political class, does it?
    Well, not the section of it that thought Shaun Bailey was a goer. Or Zac for that matter.
    A Tory has as much chance of winning the Mayor of London as being Provost of Glasgow. You sign yourself up for ritual humiliation, do your best and then lose with good grace. Unless you are Boris, of course.
    There are - were - sufficient suburbanites to deliver a Tory Mayor in 2008 and 2012.

    However, Londoners will not vote for you if you are an economy-wrecking xenophobe, so that rules out today’s Tory Party.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited February 2021
    When Khan wins in a few months, he is going to have an even bigger pile of steaming poo on his plate.

    700k left London, lets say remote working continues (even 3 days a week), little tourism for the next year or two, that it going to huge pressures on a city based on so many people spending. And of course things like violent crime has already been rising before COVID.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,539

    Excellent thread piece, Matt. Why you never done one before?

    I agree with the main thrust of your argument. You shouldn't draw too many conclusions from the bare figures, especially as we don't know where it all ends yet. I do however think it is reasonable to pause over the current results and reflect that the UK's vaccination roll-out probably would almost certainly have gone less well had the country still been part of the EU.

    This gives unreconstructed Europhiles like myself food for thought. My habit has been to mock Leavers over the absence of palpable benefits of leaving the EU. Now we appear to have a very tangible one.

    Of course nobody could have foreseen this, but it would be dishonest of Remainers to deny these very real consequences. If it can be reasonably argued that they derive from the very nature of the EU, and therefore further benefits of leaving the EU are likely to accrue in due course, there will be a lot of humble pie to be eaten, not least on this site.

    I might even have some myself.

    That’s a fair argument, but it also need to incorporate the counter-factual of what the response might have been had the perpetually awkward and non communitaire UK remained part of the EU.
    I cannot see that we’d happily have acquiesced to the current EU scheme - and it’s quite conceivable we’d still have gone our own way.

    We might even have persuaded the EU to have been more proactive.
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 19,598

    Andy_JS said:

    15 million in 67 days. Average = c. 225,000 a day since 8th December.

    That’s true but the run rate in the early date was very low, which skews the figures. Will be interesting to calculate the run rate since, say, Burn’s Night.

    I am pleasantly surprised that the target has been hit. I really thought they would take an extra couple of weeks.

    BUT....it again looks like ~500k per day is the ceiling. We need to see that really cranked up otherwise we will be waiting until very late in the year before the population is vaccinated.

    There's 50,000,000 to go, even including children. That's three months.
    Second doses though...
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited February 2021

    I am pleasantly surprised that the target has been hit. I really thought they would take an extra couple of weeks.

    BUT....it again looks like ~500k per day is the ceiling. We need to see that really cranked up otherwise we will be waiting until very late in the year before the population is vaccinated.

    There's 50,000,000 to go, even including children. That's three months.
    No, because we have to start giving people their second doses. Its why we really need a capacity of a million a day, because that would enable us to get through the population in 2-3 months.
  • tlg86tlg86 Posts: 25,164
    isam said:

    tlg86 said:

    isam said:

    Klopp is EVS from 50/1 yesterday to be the next Prem manager to leave his job

    He wouldn't run away from Liverpool like he ran away from Dortmund, would he?
    His Mum just passed away and he couldn't go to the funeral, that must be tough. The rumour I heard was he was having time off to get over that, but I don't trust it really.

    I was thinking of backing Mourinho as next one to go to be honest, so this has just stopped me doing that. Changing the formation to include more attacking players but still losing, and letting in 8 goals in 2 games, upsetting Alli and Bale, the ingredients are there. I can't imagine Tottenham fans are happy with the football they play under him, they have a reputation as a flair club, and if they aren't really progressing success wise either what's the point?
    Mourinho had a resigned look yesterday. I actually think Spurs were unlucky - that was never a penalty and before that they looked as likely to score as City.
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 19,598

    Andy_JS said:

    Great achievement, but can we get it up to a million jabs a day with younger people?

    Once we start vaccinating the young, fit and healthy, we can have them queue up outside. So I see no reason why 1 million / day should be beyond us. Plenty of liquid on its way!
    Drive thrus.....especially with one shot vaccine. Get jabbed as you roll through for your Starbucks or McDonalds.
    Fair play. I keep forgetting that the J&J jab is one shot.
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 24,583

    Excellent thread piece, Matt. Why you never done one before?

    I agree with the main thrust of your argument. You shouldn't draw too many conclusions from the bare figures, especially as we don't know where it all ends yet. I do however think it is reasonable to pause over the current results and reflect that the UK's vaccination roll-out probably would almost certainly have gone less well had the country still been part of the EU.

    This gives unreconstructed Europhiles like myself food for thought. My habit has been to mock Leavers over the absence of palpable benefits of leaving the EU. Now we appear to have a very tangible one.

    Of course nobody could have foreseen this, but it would be dishonest of Remainers to deny these very real consequences. If it can be reasonably argued that they derive from the very nature of the EU, and therefore further benefits of leaving the EU are likely to accrue in due course, there will be a lot of humble pie to be eaten, not least on this site.

    I might even have some myself.

    An excellent response to a very thoughtful header.

    I suspect you are right about the vaccination programme struggling to get off the ground were we still in the EU, but one swallow does not a summer make. Although, it's a pretty big swallow!

    I suspect a Labour Government would also have been considerably slower in mobilising vaccine procurement and delivery (although it may have done better in other areas of Covid- not that Wales necessarily confirms that notion). For my own part I think vaccine policy has probably been something of a happy accident, but that takes nothing away from its success and the Government's role in that success.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 25,042
    DavidL said:

    DavidL said:

    And yet he is going to win by a mile, almost certainly on the first count. Doesn't say much for our political class, does it?
    The Tories can no longer compete in London, post Brexit. London is dead then for a generation, maybe forever.

    That leaves the Lib Dems.
    I’ve seen one very short clip of their candidate where she appears to be about 13 years old.

    The rule for London so far is don’t bother competing unless you are a v big beast.
    I don't think Brexit has made that much of a difference. No Tory has got close to being Mayor other than Boris. The Tories did win the GLC much longer ago but times have changed.

    I would agree that if you have to tell Londoners who you are you have already lost.
    You would have thought it might attract some higher profile Tories who've been left out of the Boris cabinet. Your Jeremy Hunts, Justine Greenings, Amber Rudds, Tobias Ellwoods. Mind you they'd probably be too scared of losing.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603

    Andy_JS said:

    Great achievement, but can we get it up to a million jabs a day with younger people?

    Once we start vaccinating the young, fit and healthy, we can have them queue up outside. So I see no reason why 1 million / day should be beyond us. Plenty of liquid on its way!
    Drive thrus.....especially with one shot vaccine. Get jabbed as you roll through for your Starbucks or McDonalds.
    Fair play. I keep forgetting that the J&J jab is one shot.
    No point in waiting for them and a single AZ jab has higher efficacy anyway at 76% vs 67% for J&J. I expect under 50s will get one a combination of AZ, Novavax and Moderna, basically whatever is available.
  • Andy_JS said:

    Great achievement, but can we get it up to a million jabs a day with younger people?

    Once we start vaccinating the young, fit and healthy, we can have them queue up outside. So I see no reason why 1 million / day should be beyond us. Plenty of liquid on its way!
    Drive thrus.....especially with one shot vaccine. Get jabbed as you roll through for your Starbucks or McDonalds.
    Fair play. I keep forgetting that the J&J jab is one shot.
    I'll have a trenta vanilla sweet cream cold brew with two pumps of vanilla, three pumps of caramel syrup, two pumps of cinnamon dolce syrup, two pumps of hazelnut, two pumps of toffee nut syrup, two pumps of mocha, two pumps of white mocha, two pumps of pumpkin sauce, three pumps of maple pecan syrup, and five shots of espresso......and a jab...please.
  • twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1360962200714764290?s=20

    Another example of the improved PR game at #10.
  • MaxPB said:

    FPT:

    There's so much of this virus that has nuanced elements.

    On the one hand, seasonality of SARS-CoV-2 seems pretty limited at best, with the outbreaks north and south of the equator and during spring, summer, autumn, and winter being largely based on mobility data (official and de facto restrictions/lockdowns) rather than the season - but on the other hand, one would expect some benefit to weather that encourages people being outside and/or with windows open. It could be wishful thinking, of course, but I'd be a bit surprised if there was none.

    Even if it's not very visible when R0 is high, we would expect the benefits to be considerably stronger when vaccines push transmission down such that the R without restrictions would be a lot lower.

    On the cross-reactive coronaviruses - after some excitement in autumn when activity was seen (albeit the scientists involved strongly warned that inhibition of transmission and effective boosts to herd immunity were so unlikely as to be implausible), further study has shown no real discernable benefit. T-cells get a bit excited, but then don't actually do anything useful - they have low avidity for the virus (there's some weak evidence that it can make things worse - almost as if they assume they've recognised it, decided it's not a big deal, and buggered off again). Still, it would just have been a bonus if it had come off, and now we have something (vaccines) that DOES give real immunity.

    Herd immunity-wise - they've found that antibody levels decline slower than expected, which is good for avoidance of re-infection or even transmission of the virus by the infected-and-recovered; bad for assumptions of higher levels of infection-and-recovery.

    But while the levels of herd immunity will be lower than we'd have hoped from infection, restrictions act to multiply the effect of whatever herd immunity there is. If there's 25% immunity, that means R is pushed down to three quarters of what it would be without it. So restrictions that would otherwise push R down to 1.2 (September growth levels) would actually put it down to 0.9 (comfortably declining). I wouldn't be surprised if this was what had made the difference with controlling the B.1.1.7 variant (about four-thirds more infections, coupled with about 25% immunity leads to a wash - restrictions that would have controlled the original variant can now control the new one)

    But this falls into the same trap as the original COVID actuaries report which just assumed that the vaccine programme stops at 25% of the population, in reality around 1% of the adult population are being added to the "newly immunised" everyday further decreasing the potential reservoir of non-immune hosts that can end up on hospital.

    Tbh, it doesn't matter if the R hits 4 or 5 in the summer as long as it doesn't result in hospitalisations/death so I don't think having a high infection rate should be an impediment to reopening the economy fully.
    This needs saying more often. We need to give Zero Fucks if some people contract mild covid. This is why the mad Zero Covidians should be ignored.
    Has anyone advocated post vaccination zero Covid?

    Ultimately even if people are getting Covid, if the hospital's aren't filling up let alone the morgues then nobody will care besides cranks.
  • Andy_CookeAndy_Cooke Posts: 4,793
    MaxPB said:

    FPT:

    There's so much of this virus that has nuanced elements.

    On the one hand, seasonality of SARS-CoV-2 seems pretty limited at best, with the outbreaks north and south of the equator and during spring, summer, autumn, and winter being largely based on mobility data (official and de facto restrictions/lockdowns) rather than the season - but on the other hand, one would expect some benefit to weather that encourages people being outside and/or with windows open. It could be wishful thinking, of course, but I'd be a bit surprised if there was none.

    Even if it's not very visible when R0 is high, we would expect the benefits to be considerably stronger when vaccines push transmission down such that the R without restrictions would be a lot lower.

    On the cross-reactive coronaviruses - after some excitement in autumn when activity was seen (albeit the scientists involved strongly warned that inhibition of transmission and effective boosts to herd immunity were so unlikely as to be implausible), further study has shown no real discernable benefit. T-cells get a bit excited, but then don't actually do anything useful - they have low avidity for the virus (there's some weak evidence that it can make things worse - almost as if they assume they've recognised it, decided it's not a big deal, and buggered off again). Still, it would just have been a bonus if it had come off, and now we have something (vaccines) that DOES give real immunity.

    Herd immunity-wise - they've found that antibody levels decline slower than expected, which is good for avoidance of re-infection or even transmission of the virus by the infected-and-recovered; bad for assumptions of higher levels of infection-and-recovery.

    But while the levels of herd immunity will be lower than we'd have hoped from infection, restrictions act to multiply the effect of whatever herd immunity there is. If there's 25% immunity, that means R is pushed down to three quarters of what it would be without it. So restrictions that would otherwise push R down to 1.2 (September growth levels) would actually put it down to 0.9 (comfortably declining). I wouldn't be surprised if this was what had made the difference with controlling the B.1.1.7 variant (about four-thirds more infections, coupled with about 25% immunity leads to a wash - restrictions that would have controlled the original variant can now control the new one)

    But this falls into the same trap as the original COVID actuaries report which just assumed that the vaccine programme stops at 25% of the population, in reality around 1% of the adult population are being added to the "newly immunised" everyday further decreasing the potential reservoir of non-immune hosts that can end up on hospital.

    Tbh, it doesn't matter if the R hits 4 or 5 in the summer as long as it doesn't result in hospitalisations/death so I don't think having a high infection rate should be an impediment to reopening the economy fully.
    Oh, absolutely - I'm only looking at the benefit conveyed to date.
    As we add 1% per day to it - by the time we reach 50%, R is pushed down to half the previous value. At 75%, it's pushed down to a quarter.

    In addition, dispersion, k, is a factor.

    That is - most people spread to considerably less than R, made up by the few superspreaders. If R is pushed down significantly, the underspreaders get pushed to pretty much zero, and the superspreaders get pegged a long way back. If we get prevalence down a long way, this can make outbreaks really difficult to occur: in early stages, superspreaders seem to need to hit on other superspreaders to get it to "spark" (which is why it can seemingly bubble along at very low levels before surging out - when a spark like that occurs).

    With R pushed down like that by vaccines, the possibility of such sparking becomes a lot less - sort of like making tinder damp.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603
    Nigelb said:

    Excellent thread piece, Matt. Why you never done one before?

    I agree with the main thrust of your argument. You shouldn't draw too many conclusions from the bare figures, especially as we don't know where it all ends yet. I do however think it is reasonable to pause over the current results and reflect that the UK's vaccination roll-out probably would almost certainly have gone less well had the country still been part of the EU.

    This gives unreconstructed Europhiles like myself food for thought. My habit has been to mock Leavers over the absence of palpable benefits of leaving the EU. Now we appear to have a very tangible one.

    Of course nobody could have foreseen this, but it would be dishonest of Remainers to deny these very real consequences. If it can be reasonably argued that they derive from the very nature of the EU, and therefore further benefits of leaving the EU are likely to accrue in due course, there will be a lot of humble pie to be eaten, not least on this site.

    I might even have some myself.

    That’s a fair argument, but it also need to incorporate the counter-factual of what the response might have been had the perpetually awkward and non communitaire UK remained part of the EU.
    I cannot see that we’d happily have acquiesced to the current EU scheme - and it’s quite conceivable we’d still have gone our own way.

    We might even have persuaded the EU to have been more proactive.
    I don't think that the EU scheme would have changed significantly. Ultimately the issue with it is that they were spending EU money and that means using it to invest in manufacturing is impossible without interminable arguments about which countries/companies receive the subsidies. It's why the EU took the approach it did, to avoid three day summits and one minute to midnight decisions as is usually the case with spending money.

    Our whole approach would have been simply impossible within the confines of the EU and our scheme would have been pre-empted with the commission ruling that these deals are subject to state aid rules and not possible as they are reliant on huge subsidies for UK industry and it has given the UK a long term leg up on the rest of the EU for vaccine development and manufacturing for the next decade.
  • I am pleasantly surprised that the target has been hit. I really thought they would take an extra couple of weeks.

    BUT....it again looks like ~500k per day is the ceiling. We need to see that really cranked up otherwise we will be waiting until very late in the year before the population is vaccinated.

    There's 50,000,000 to go, even including children. That's three months.
    No, because we have to start giving people their second doses. Its why we really need a capacity of a million a day, because that would enable us to get through the population in 2-3 months.
    Yes I forgot that. Although we can probably get through most of the over-50s before we need to start giving too many second shits. But we do have greater capacity: it was just under 600,000 a couple of Saturdays ago and we have opened more vaccine centres since then. The limiting factor is vaccine supply which appears lumpy, to say the least.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,578

    MaxPB said:

    FPT:

    There's so much of this virus that has nuanced elements.

    On the one hand, seasonality of SARS-CoV-2 seems pretty limited at best, with the outbreaks north and south of the equator and during spring, summer, autumn, and winter being largely based on mobility data (official and de facto restrictions/lockdowns) rather than the season - but on the other hand, one would expect some benefit to weather that encourages people being outside and/or with windows open. It could be wishful thinking, of course, but I'd be a bit surprised if there was none.

    Even if it's not very visible when R0 is high, we would expect the benefits to be considerably stronger when vaccines push transmission down such that the R without restrictions would be a lot lower.

    On the cross-reactive coronaviruses - after some excitement in autumn when activity was seen (albeit the scientists involved strongly warned that inhibition of transmission and effective boosts to herd immunity were so unlikely as to be implausible), further study has shown no real discernable benefit. T-cells get a bit excited, but then don't actually do anything useful - they have low avidity for the virus (there's some weak evidence that it can make things worse - almost as if they assume they've recognised it, decided it's not a big deal, and buggered off again). Still, it would just have been a bonus if it had come off, and now we have something (vaccines) that DOES give real immunity.

    Herd immunity-wise - they've found that antibody levels decline slower than expected, which is good for avoidance of re-infection or even transmission of the virus by the infected-and-recovered; bad for assumptions of higher levels of infection-and-recovery.

    But while the levels of herd immunity will be lower than we'd have hoped from infection, restrictions act to multiply the effect of whatever herd immunity there is. If there's 25% immunity, that means R is pushed down to three quarters of what it would be without it. So restrictions that would otherwise push R down to 1.2 (September growth levels) would actually put it down to 0.9 (comfortably declining). I wouldn't be surprised if this was what had made the difference with controlling the B.1.1.7 variant (about four-thirds more infections, coupled with about 25% immunity leads to a wash - restrictions that would have controlled the original variant can now control the new one)

    But this falls into the same trap as the original COVID actuaries report which just assumed that the vaccine programme stops at 25% of the population, in reality around 1% of the adult population are being added to the "newly immunised" everyday further decreasing the potential reservoir of non-immune hosts that can end up on hospital.

    Tbh, it doesn't matter if the R hits 4 or 5 in the summer as long as it doesn't result in hospitalisations/death so I don't think having a high infection rate should be an impediment to reopening the economy fully.
    This needs saying more often. We need to give Zero Fucks if some people contract mild covid. This is why the mad Zero Covidians should be ignored.
    Has anyone advocated post vaccination zero Covid?

    Ultimately even if people are getting Covid, if the hospital's aren't filling up let alone the morgues then nobody will care besides cranks.
    A sensible concern is the "long COVID" issue - how mild a case can cause long term damage? Do the vaccines prevent this?

    Long flu, for the regular flu, is a apparently a thing.....
  • Excellent debut piece @MattW
  • Andy_CookeAndy_Cooke Posts: 4,793

    Andy_JS said:

    15 million in 67 days. Average = c. 225,000 a day since 8th December.

    That’s true but the run rate in the early date was very low, which skews the figures. Will be interesting to calculate the run rate since, say, Burn’s Night.
    Around 425,000 per day.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603

    MaxPB said:

    FPT:

    There's so much of this virus that has nuanced elements.

    On the one hand, seasonality of SARS-CoV-2 seems pretty limited at best, with the outbreaks north and south of the equator and during spring, summer, autumn, and winter being largely based on mobility data (official and de facto restrictions/lockdowns) rather than the season - but on the other hand, one would expect some benefit to weather that encourages people being outside and/or with windows open. It could be wishful thinking, of course, but I'd be a bit surprised if there was none.

    Even if it's not very visible when R0 is high, we would expect the benefits to be considerably stronger when vaccines push transmission down such that the R without restrictions would be a lot lower.

    On the cross-reactive coronaviruses - after some excitement in autumn when activity was seen (albeit the scientists involved strongly warned that inhibition of transmission and effective boosts to herd immunity were so unlikely as to be implausible), further study has shown no real discernable benefit. T-cells get a bit excited, but then don't actually do anything useful - they have low avidity for the virus (there's some weak evidence that it can make things worse - almost as if they assume they've recognised it, decided it's not a big deal, and buggered off again). Still, it would just have been a bonus if it had come off, and now we have something (vaccines) that DOES give real immunity.

    Herd immunity-wise - they've found that antibody levels decline slower than expected, which is good for avoidance of re-infection or even transmission of the virus by the infected-and-recovered; bad for assumptions of higher levels of infection-and-recovery.

    But while the levels of herd immunity will be lower than we'd have hoped from infection, restrictions act to multiply the effect of whatever herd immunity there is. If there's 25% immunity, that means R is pushed down to three quarters of what it would be without it. So restrictions that would otherwise push R down to 1.2 (September growth levels) would actually put it down to 0.9 (comfortably declining). I wouldn't be surprised if this was what had made the difference with controlling the B.1.1.7 variant (about four-thirds more infections, coupled with about 25% immunity leads to a wash - restrictions that would have controlled the original variant can now control the new one)

    But this falls into the same trap as the original COVID actuaries report which just assumed that the vaccine programme stops at 25% of the population, in reality around 1% of the adult population are being added to the "newly immunised" everyday further decreasing the potential reservoir of non-immune hosts that can end up on hospital.

    Tbh, it doesn't matter if the R hits 4 or 5 in the summer as long as it doesn't result in hospitalisations/death so I don't think having a high infection rate should be an impediment to reopening the economy fully.
    This needs saying more often. We need to give Zero Fucks if some people contract mild covid. This is why the mad Zero Covidians should be ignored.
    Has anyone advocated post vaccination zero Covid?

    Ultimately even if people are getting Covid, if the hospital's aren't filling up let alone the morgues then nobody will care besides cranks.
    A sensible concern is the "long COVID" issue - how mild a case can cause long term damage? Do the vaccines prevent this?

    Long flu, for the regular flu, is a apparently a thing.....
    I don't think mild cases are currently linked to long COVID, I think it's people who experience severe symptoms due to very high viral load that get it.
  • Thanks @MattW - Interesting summary. Congrats on your first header!!
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,539
    edited February 2021
    MaxPB said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Great achievement, but can we get it up to a million jabs a day with younger people?

    Once we start vaccinating the young, fit and healthy, we can have them queue up outside. So I see no reason why 1 million / day should be beyond us. Plenty of liquid on its way!
    Drive thrus.....especially with one shot vaccine. Get jabbed as you roll through for your Starbucks or McDonalds.
    Fair play. I keep forgetting that the J&J jab is one shot.
    No point in waiting for them and a single AZ jab has higher efficacy anyway at 76% vs 67% for J&J. I expect under 50s will get one a combination of AZ, Novavax and Moderna, basically whatever is available.
    Is there not a differential effectiveness against some variants in favour of the Janssen vaccine, though ?
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 24,583
    A cleverly crafted statement, taking no hostages to fortune ( i.e for when Peston, for it will be him, reveals 10% or whatever the figure might be, of care home staff are yet to receive a vaccine).

    Allegra and NutNuts are doing a significantly better Comms job than Cummings managed.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,578
    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    FPT:

    There's so much of this virus that has nuanced elements.

    On the one hand, seasonality of SARS-CoV-2 seems pretty limited at best, with the outbreaks north and south of the equator and during spring, summer, autumn, and winter being largely based on mobility data (official and de facto restrictions/lockdowns) rather than the season - but on the other hand, one would expect some benefit to weather that encourages people being outside and/or with windows open. It could be wishful thinking, of course, but I'd be a bit surprised if there was none.

    Even if it's not very visible when R0 is high, we would expect the benefits to be considerably stronger when vaccines push transmission down such that the R without restrictions would be a lot lower.

    On the cross-reactive coronaviruses - after some excitement in autumn when activity was seen (albeit the scientists involved strongly warned that inhibition of transmission and effective boosts to herd immunity were so unlikely as to be implausible), further study has shown no real discernable benefit. T-cells get a bit excited, but then don't actually do anything useful - they have low avidity for the virus (there's some weak evidence that it can make things worse - almost as if they assume they've recognised it, decided it's not a big deal, and buggered off again). Still, it would just have been a bonus if it had come off, and now we have something (vaccines) that DOES give real immunity.

    Herd immunity-wise - they've found that antibody levels decline slower than expected, which is good for avoidance of re-infection or even transmission of the virus by the infected-and-recovered; bad for assumptions of higher levels of infection-and-recovery.

    But while the levels of herd immunity will be lower than we'd have hoped from infection, restrictions act to multiply the effect of whatever herd immunity there is. If there's 25% immunity, that means R is pushed down to three quarters of what it would be without it. So restrictions that would otherwise push R down to 1.2 (September growth levels) would actually put it down to 0.9 (comfortably declining). I wouldn't be surprised if this was what had made the difference with controlling the B.1.1.7 variant (about four-thirds more infections, coupled with about 25% immunity leads to a wash - restrictions that would have controlled the original variant can now control the new one)

    But this falls into the same trap as the original COVID actuaries report which just assumed that the vaccine programme stops at 25% of the population, in reality around 1% of the adult population are being added to the "newly immunised" everyday further decreasing the potential reservoir of non-immune hosts that can end up on hospital.

    Tbh, it doesn't matter if the R hits 4 or 5 in the summer as long as it doesn't result in hospitalisations/death so I don't think having a high infection rate should be an impediment to reopening the economy fully.
    This needs saying more often. We need to give Zero Fucks if some people contract mild covid. This is why the mad Zero Covidians should be ignored.
    Has anyone advocated post vaccination zero Covid?

    Ultimately even if people are getting Covid, if the hospital's aren't filling up let alone the morgues then nobody will care besides cranks.
    A sensible concern is the "long COVID" issue - how mild a case can cause long term damage? Do the vaccines prevent this?

    Long flu, for the regular flu, is a apparently a thing.....
    I don't think mild cases are currently linked to long COVID, I think it's people who experience severe symptoms due to very high viral load that get it.
    Do we have any data on this? I recall some anecdotal press reports of US doctors seeing lung clouding on X-rays from people with "mild" symptoms....
  • FloaterFloater Posts: 14,195
    Thanks for the interesting article
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 24,583

    Andy_JS said:

    Great achievement, but can we get it up to a million jabs a day with younger people?

    Once we start vaccinating the young, fit and healthy, we can have them queue up outside. So I see no reason why 1 million / day should be beyond us. Plenty of liquid on its way!
    Drive thrus.....especially with one shot vaccine. Get jabbed as you roll through for your Starbucks or McDonalds.
    Fair play. I keep forgetting that the J&J jab is one shot.
    The Stan and Boris vaccine.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 25,042

    Andy_JS said:

    Great achievement, but can we get it up to a million jabs a day with younger people?

    Once we start vaccinating the young, fit and healthy, we can have them queue up outside. So I see no reason why 1 million / day should be beyond us. Plenty of liquid on its way!
    Drive thrus.....especially with one shot vaccine. Get jabbed as you roll through for your Starbucks or McDonalds.
    Fair play. I keep forgetting that the J&J jab is one shot.
    I'll have a trenta vanilla sweet cream cold brew with two pumps of vanilla, three pumps of caramel syrup, two pumps of cinnamon dolce syrup, two pumps of hazelnut, two pumps of toffee nut syrup, two pumps of mocha, two pumps of white mocha, two pumps of pumpkin sauce, three pumps of maple pecan syrup, and five shots of espresso......and a jab...please.
    And type 1 diabetes.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,539
    MaxPB said:

    Nigelb said:

    Excellent thread piece, Matt. Why you never done one before?

    I agree with the main thrust of your argument. You shouldn't draw too many conclusions from the bare figures, especially as we don't know where it all ends yet. I do however think it is reasonable to pause over the current results and reflect that the UK's vaccination roll-out probably would almost certainly have gone less well had the country still been part of the EU.

    This gives unreconstructed Europhiles like myself food for thought. My habit has been to mock Leavers over the absence of palpable benefits of leaving the EU. Now we appear to have a very tangible one.

    Of course nobody could have foreseen this, but it would be dishonest of Remainers to deny these very real consequences. If it can be reasonably argued that they derive from the very nature of the EU, and therefore further benefits of leaving the EU are likely to accrue in due course, there will be a lot of humble pie to be eaten, not least on this site.

    I might even have some myself.

    That’s a fair argument, but it also need to incorporate the counter-factual of what the response might have been had the perpetually awkward and non communitaire UK remained part of the EU.
    I cannot see that we’d happily have acquiesced to the current EU scheme - and it’s quite conceivable we’d still have gone our own way.

    We might even have persuaded the EU to have been more proactive.
    I don't think that the EU scheme would have changed significantly. Ultimately the issue with it is that they were spending EU money and that means using it to invest in manufacturing is impossible without interminable arguments about which countries/companies receive the subsidies. It's why the EU took the approach it did, to avoid three day summits and one minute to midnight decisions as is usually the case with spending money.

    Our whole approach would have been simply impossible within the confines of the EU and our scheme would have been pre-empted with the commission ruling that these deals are subject to state aid rules and not possible as they are reliant on huge subsidies for UK industry and it has given the UK a long term leg up on the rest of the EU for vaccine development and manufacturing for the next decade.
    There is an exception to state aid rules in response to natural disasters. We could have ignored them if we so chose.
  • TimTTimT Posts: 6,328

    Excellent thread piece, Matt. Why you never done one before?

    I agree with the main thrust of your argument. You shouldn't draw too many conclusions from the bare figures, especially as we don't know where it all ends yet. I do however think it is reasonable to pause over the current results and reflect that the UK's vaccination roll-out probably would almost certainly have gone less well had the country still been part of the EU.

    This gives unreconstructed Europhiles like myself food for thought. My habit has been to mock Leavers over the absence of palpable benefits of leaving the EU. Now we appear to have a very tangible one.

    Of course nobody could have foreseen this, but it would be dishonest of Remainers to deny these very real consequences. If it can be reasonably argued that they derive from the very nature of the EU, and therefore further benefits of leaving the EU are likely to accrue in due course, there will be a lot of humble pie to be eaten, not least on this site.

    I might even have some myself.

    It is true, PtP, that no-one could have predicted precisely the timing of this pandemic. But predict a pandemic most advanced nations did. It has been the highest non-war risk on the UK's national risk register for well over a decade.

    What was also predictable is that some form of Black Swan would eventually appear, and that agile nations would be able to respond better to the completely new than slower entities. Brexit did not guarantee that the UK would be more agile than the EU, but it did give it the opportunity to be.

    I can't be bothered to find my old posts, but that was always my justification for supporting Brexit: the world is changing at an ever more rapid pace, which given the complexity of human society's interactions with technology, the planet and itself, means that governments must be able to react swiftly to unexpected new challenges characterized by high degrees of uncertainty and large areas of ignorance. Agility will be ever more important. The EU is not good at agile.
  • DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,059
    Nigelb said:

    Excellent thread piece, Matt. Why you never done one before?

    I agree with the main thrust of your argument. You shouldn't draw too many conclusions from the bare figures, especially as we don't know where it all ends yet. I do however think it is reasonable to pause over the current results and reflect that the UK's vaccination roll-out probably would almost certainly have gone less well had the country still been part of the EU.

    This gives unreconstructed Europhiles like myself food for thought. My habit has been to mock Leavers over the absence of palpable benefits of leaving the EU. Now we appear to have a very tangible one.

    Of course nobody could have foreseen this, but it would be dishonest of Remainers to deny these very real consequences. If it can be reasonably argued that they derive from the very nature of the EU, and therefore further benefits of leaving the EU are likely to accrue in due course, there will be a lot of humble pie to be eaten, not least on this site.

    I might even have some myself.

    That’s a fair argument, but it also need to incorporate the counter-factual of what the response might have been had the perpetually awkward and non communitaire UK remained part of the EU.
    I cannot see that we’d happily have acquiesced to the current EU scheme - and it’s quite conceivable we’d still have gone our own way.

    We might even have persuaded the EU to have been more proactive.
    I agree with all of this. The takeaway for me, as I said yesterday, is that the EU is fantastic at running an extremely effective free trade area. It’s trying to be a federal government in waiting though and is pants at that. It was less the vaccine cock up, any individual government could screw that up, as the Hungary situation. Orban is a dictator, Hungary is at best a semi-democracy, and the EU can/will do nothing while Poland is still there to veto any Art 7 proceedings. And visa versa. So it is an extremely less effective guarantor of democratic values on the Continent than I believed it to have been.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,279
    Well done NHS.
  • FloaterFloater Posts: 14,195
    edited February 2021
    More on the situation in France with relation to the Interior minister and his comments on Islam- worth reading down the thread

    https://twitter.com/b_judah/status/1360958966273110019
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 49,950
    Andy_JS said:

    Well done NHS.

    Now let's REALLY hammer Phase 2.....
  • DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,059

    MaxPB said:

    FPT:

    There's so much of this virus that has nuanced elements.

    On the one hand, seasonality of SARS-CoV-2 seems pretty limited at best, with the outbreaks north and south of the equator and during spring, summer, autumn, and winter being largely based on mobility data (official and de facto restrictions/lockdowns) rather than the season - but on the other hand, one would expect some benefit to weather that encourages people being outside and/or with windows open. It could be wishful thinking, of course, but I'd be a bit surprised if there was none.

    Even if it's not very visible when R0 is high, we would expect the benefits to be considerably stronger when vaccines push transmission down such that the R without restrictions would be a lot lower.

    On the cross-reactive coronaviruses - after some excitement in autumn when activity was seen (albeit the scientists involved strongly warned that inhibition of transmission and effective boosts to herd immunity were so unlikely as to be implausible), further study has shown no real discernable benefit. T-cells get a bit excited, but then don't actually do anything useful - they have low avidity for the virus (there's some weak evidence that it can make things worse - almost as if they assume they've recognised it, decided it's not a big deal, and buggered off again). Still, it would just have been a bonus if it had come off, and now we have something (vaccines) that DOES give real immunity.

    Herd immunity-wise - they've found that antibody levels decline slower than expected, which is good for avoidance of re-infection or even transmission of the virus by the infected-and-recovered; bad for assumptions of higher levels of infection-and-recovery.

    But while the levels of herd immunity will be lower than we'd have hoped from infection, restrictions act to multiply the effect of whatever herd immunity there is. If there's 25% immunity, that means R is pushed down to three quarters of what it would be without it. So restrictions that would otherwise push R down to 1.2 (September growth levels) would actually put it down to 0.9 (comfortably declining). I wouldn't be surprised if this was what had made the difference with controlling the B.1.1.7 variant (about four-thirds more infections, coupled with about 25% immunity leads to a wash - restrictions that would have controlled the original variant can now control the new one)

    But this falls into the same trap as the original COVID actuaries report which just assumed that the vaccine programme stops at 25% of the population, in reality around 1% of the adult population are being added to the "newly immunised" everyday further decreasing the potential reservoir of non-immune hosts that can end up on hospital.

    Tbh, it doesn't matter if the R hits 4 or 5 in the summer as long as it doesn't result in hospitalisations/death so I don't think having a high infection rate should be an impediment to reopening the economy fully.
    This needs saying more often. We need to give Zero Fucks if some people contract mild covid. This is why the mad Zero Covidians should be ignored.
    Has anyone advocated post vaccination zero Covid?

    Ultimately even if people are getting Covid, if the hospital's aren't filling up let alone the morgues then nobody will care besides cranks.
    I think recent lockdowns in Aus and NZ will dent the Zero Coviders. With everything they have in place they cannot prevent outbreaks. Vaccination is the only game in town if you want to avoid achieving population level immunity via more lethal methods.
  • Andy_CookeAndy_Cooke Posts: 4,793

    Andy_JS said:

    15 million in 67 days. Average = c. 225,000 a day since 8th December.

    That’s true but the run rate in the early date was very low, which skews the figures. Will be interesting to calculate the run rate since, say, Burn’s Night.
    Around 425,000 per day.
    Which means that if we sustain that average, we'll have completed Groups 1-6 (24.8 million total) by the 8th of March. And Groups 1-9 (31.8 million total) by the 25th of March.
    Which gives a week or so to start on the under 50s before second doses start being necessary (down to over 45s?) and even then, the rate of second doses starts off low as the first doses in early January were slow. We could probably do all over 40s by mid-to-late April.
  • DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,059
    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    FPT:

    There's so much of this virus that has nuanced elements.

    On the one hand, seasonality of SARS-CoV-2 seems pretty limited at best, with the outbreaks north and south of the equator and during spring, summer, autumn, and winter being largely based on mobility data (official and de facto restrictions/lockdowns) rather than the season - but on the other hand, one would expect some benefit to weather that encourages people being outside and/or with windows open. It could be wishful thinking, of course, but I'd be a bit surprised if there was none.

    Even if it's not very visible when R0 is high, we would expect the benefits to be considerably stronger when vaccines push transmission down such that the R without restrictions would be a lot lower.

    On the cross-reactive coronaviruses - after some excitement in autumn when activity was seen (albeit the scientists involved strongly warned that inhibition of transmission and effective boosts to herd immunity were so unlikely as to be implausible), further study has shown no real discernable benefit. T-cells get a bit excited, but then don't actually do anything useful - they have low avidity for the virus (there's some weak evidence that it can make things worse - almost as if they assume they've recognised it, decided it's not a big deal, and buggered off again). Still, it would just have been a bonus if it had come off, and now we have something (vaccines) that DOES give real immunity.

    Herd immunity-wise - they've found that antibody levels decline slower than expected, which is good for avoidance of re-infection or even transmission of the virus by the infected-and-recovered; bad for assumptions of higher levels of infection-and-recovery.

    But while the levels of herd immunity will be lower than we'd have hoped from infection, restrictions act to multiply the effect of whatever herd immunity there is. If there's 25% immunity, that means R is pushed down to three quarters of what it would be without it. So restrictions that would otherwise push R down to 1.2 (September growth levels) would actually put it down to 0.9 (comfortably declining). I wouldn't be surprised if this was what had made the difference with controlling the B.1.1.7 variant (about four-thirds more infections, coupled with about 25% immunity leads to a wash - restrictions that would have controlled the original variant can now control the new one)

    But this falls into the same trap as the original COVID actuaries report which just assumed that the vaccine programme stops at 25% of the population, in reality around 1% of the adult population are being added to the "newly immunised" everyday further decreasing the potential reservoir of non-immune hosts that can end up on hospital.

    Tbh, it doesn't matter if the R hits 4 or 5 in the summer as long as it doesn't result in hospitalisations/death so I don't think having a high infection rate should be an impediment to reopening the economy fully.
    This needs saying more often. We need to give Zero Fucks if some people contract mild covid. This is why the mad Zero Covidians should be ignored.
    Yup, the last piece of the puzzle for me is to prove there is no link between severe mutations and mild COVID. It just doesn't make any sense from a scientific perspective that mutations would occur to an immune response evading extent with mild COVID that implies a 6-7 day infection period.
    Eventually the numbers will speak for themselves.
  • felixfelix Posts: 15,122

    kinabalu said:

    @MattW - thanks and good first header. I hope the EU gets rolling on vaccination and I think they will.

    I have seen no sign, in much of Europe, of a big distribution effort being setup. There has been some stuff in Germany... but without a coordinated supply chain and delivery system....
    There are signs of plans here in Spain - here the big and now oft repeated complaint is of the paucity of supply.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,539
    DougSeal said:

    Nigelb said:

    Excellent thread piece, Matt. Why you never done one before?

    I agree with the main thrust of your argument. You shouldn't draw too many conclusions from the bare figures, especially as we don't know where it all ends yet. I do however think it is reasonable to pause over the current results and reflect that the UK's vaccination roll-out probably would almost certainly have gone less well had the country still been part of the EU.

    This gives unreconstructed Europhiles like myself food for thought. My habit has been to mock Leavers over the absence of palpable benefits of leaving the EU. Now we appear to have a very tangible one.

    Of course nobody could have foreseen this, but it would be dishonest of Remainers to deny these very real consequences. If it can be reasonably argued that they derive from the very nature of the EU, and therefore further benefits of leaving the EU are likely to accrue in due course, there will be a lot of humble pie to be eaten, not least on this site.

    I might even have some myself.

    That’s a fair argument, but it also need to incorporate the counter-factual of what the response might have been had the perpetually awkward and non communitaire UK remained part of the EU.
    I cannot see that we’d happily have acquiesced to the current EU scheme - and it’s quite conceivable we’d still have gone our own way.

    We might even have persuaded the EU to have been more proactive.
    I agree with all of this. The takeaway for me, as I said yesterday, is that the EU is fantastic at running an extremely effective free trade area. It’s trying to be a federal government in waiting though and is pants at that. It was less the vaccine cock up, any individual government could screw that up, as the Hungary situation. Orban is a dictator, Hungary is at best a semi-democracy, and the EU can/will do nothing while Poland is still there to veto any Art 7 proceedings. And visa versa. So it is an extremely less effective guarantor of democratic values on the Continent than I believed it to have been.
    I only present it as a possible counter argument; none of the counterfactuals are certain.

    What’s certain is that the EU would be significantly different, had we remained a member. Just how different is unknowable.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603
    Nigelb said:

    MaxPB said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Great achievement, but can we get it up to a million jabs a day with younger people?

    Once we start vaccinating the young, fit and healthy, we can have them queue up outside. So I see no reason why 1 million / day should be beyond us. Plenty of liquid on its way!
    Drive thrus.....especially with one shot vaccine. Get jabbed as you roll through for your Starbucks or McDonalds.
    Fair play. I keep forgetting that the J&J jab is one shot.
    No point in waiting for them and a single AZ jab has higher efficacy anyway at 76% vs 67% for J&J. I expect under 50s will get one a combination of AZ, Novavax and Moderna, basically whatever is available.
    Is there not a differential effectiveness against some variants in favour of the Janssen vaccine, though ?
    The study for AZ in South Africa was very messy, I'm not sure how much utility it has in figuring out the efficacy against the E484K mutation, I haven't read anything on the J&J efficacy against it either, just that it had combined efficacy of 67%. I also don't know if the trial had a huge overlap with the mutation as the AZ study did in SA. If it does then it is good news, but as it stands I think we'll be relying on Novavax at 60% efficacy to beat that mutation in the short term, maybe even as a single jab booster for people who have had two AZ doses.
  • felixfelix Posts: 15,122

    Amazing that an entity with a population of 440m has a total of Covid deaths higher than a state with a population of 68m, took me a while to get my head round that.

    Amazing that an entity of 440m people has spent barely a seventh of the the one with 68m people on securing the necessary supplies to vaccinate its population so quickly. And less on supporting Covax too.
This discussion has been closed.