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Dom gets the front pages that he clearly wanted – politicalbetting.com
Dom gets the front pages that he clearly wanted – politicalbetting.com
As expected the appearance by Dominic Cummings before the Commons committee yesterday totally dominates the front pages. The big question is what will be the political impact.
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Cummings is too obviously out to get revenge and many people accept that mistakes were made early in the pandemic.
But the popular mood is of course quite difficult to read - I still can't understand what so many people see in hip-hop, Eurovision, organised sport, McDonald's, etc. etc. etc.
"Funny how things have run on rails since he left, eh?"
'I am not sure what purpose the Dominic Cummings saga is serving. It is obvious the pandemic was not handled well at the start. But the vaccine roll out has been excellent and we need to move on."
If his view is widely held, which I suspect to be the case, then this won't have an impact. In some ways Cummings wildly overplayed his hand. Instead of the focus being on Johnson and Hancock, the take away is of someone who is so embittered that he is hell bent on revenge. And we're talking about a man who broke lockdown in such a spectacular manner that it spawned a thousand memes.
It's all rather sad really. Hell hath no fury.
I'm afraid that Cummings will have to watch on whilst Boris Johnson continues to win big. His fall will come, of course, but not for some years.
One is to do a New Zealand: hermetically seal the country. There is absolutely no way that Britain would have put up with this for 18 months (likely 3 or 4 years in NZ's case) nor would it even have been feasible, despite this being the Labour Party policy in opposition.
The other is to manage it as best as you can, accepting inevitable waves and deaths, like every other country in the world.
The Gov't decided to go for the second whilst pile-driving the development of vaccines which would, ultimately, save lives and get us back on track.
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-558954/v1
... Here, we present first molecular evidence that vector-based vaccines encoding the Spike protein exhibit a problem that is completely absent in mRNA-based vaccines. This is due to the fact that during the vaccination step, the adenoviral DNA enters the nucleus and use the host machinery to transcribe its (trans)genes inside the nucleus. However, RNA viruses have evolved in the absence of any post-transcriptional modification systems that are usually enabled to process the primary RNA transcripts of nuclear encoded genes.
In this study, we experimentally validated our assumption that potential splice events cause the production of Spike protein variants that have lost the important membrane anchor, resulting in secreted, soluble Spike protein variants. We could show that (1) predicted splice donor sites are used to create Spike-Luciferase fusion proteins, that Luciferase activity can be measured intra- and extracellularly which was a clear indication that splice reactions are occurring, and (3) that codon-optimized Spike protein – that exhibits more and stronger splice donor sites – was able to fuse with the pIX gene either by transcriptional read-through and splicing, or by a trans-splicing event. All these results indicate that splice reactions occur and create soluble Spike protein. Soluble Spike protein has been described to cause adverse effects, e.g. a strong inflammatory response on endothelial cells [13–16]. Moreover, nearly all severe cases of SARS-CoV-2 infections (COVID-19) suffer from life-threatening thromboembolic events due to the many viruses with Spike surface protein in the blood stream. Even pseudoviruses with Spike protein on the surface cause strong inflammatory reactions in tissues and endothelial cells, indicating the danger of this protein when available in a systemic fashion [17]....
https://bg.hbr.org/2021/05/what-the-west-gets-wrong-about-china#
I don't expect the general and voting public's reaction to be much different.
It confirms to me how unsuitable Boris was and is to be prime minister but equally voters don't seem to care.
For example, it was widely rumoured that it was Cummings himself who was opposed to lockdowns and tried to pursue herd immunity. (He was also thought to be one of the strongest advocates of reopening schools and unis, and look how that turned out.)
If Hancock has evidence of the former and is allowed to publish it Cummings’ limited remaining credibility will sink faster than the Titanic.
Moreover, it would allow the government to blame somebody they have now removed for all their cockups.
It wouldn’t address the essential question over Johnson’s judgement - why did he hire somebody so manifestly unsuitable for an executive role and back him when he should have been fired? - but it would buy time for the media circus to move on to unlocking, particularly if they brought the easing of restrictions forward a couple of weeks.
If there is, you’ve experienced that rarest of events, a prediction genuinely made by LeadronicT ahead of an event, actually coming true!
I guess there’s a second chance for him if beyond the curtains you see stacks of bodies piled at street corners, but that now seems an even longer shot....
Bright sunlight, and thermometer on my iPhone indicates 8.4degC
That's a minority of gas and it's falling fast. If you're looking at a 25 year lifespan then how many of those years do you think that will be true for?
In 2010 coal was about 80% of electricity. It's now about 0% most if the time. The same thing will happen now to gas within the next decade, not the next 25 years.
The future of greenery is surely in this country more stuff like wind and tidal etc than solar.
So individual mistakes such as the care homes fiasco where hospitals were cleared of bed blockers or the unending failure to secure borders or the fiasco of the early T&T changed the shape of our death toll but I remain to be convinced that it affected the final result. The brutal truth was that pre vaccines somewhere between 0.5 and 1% of us were going to die of this disease, mainly the old, the obese and those with impaired immune systems with the odd unlucky other as well. This is the reality and pretending that this could be magicked away by some clever policy is delusional.
We still have a real problem in recognising that we are vulnerable to nature, that there are things that we simply cannot prevent. Its a bit weird.
Great for virtue signalling though, to show the neighbours how ‘green’ you are.
"Boris Johnson: a more effective Covid response than Hungary" isn't quite the zinger some might hope.
Think of BoJo like the manager of a struggling league team that gets drawn against a non-league club in the cup and avoids being giant-killed. It's nice, but it doesn't alter the fundamentals.
He does however have a third chance to win, if anyone upon opening the curtains sees a flying saucer landing in the garden.....
Left hand, right hand.
In fact the best thing would be if the Chinese kept all the panels they made and use them to replace energy produced from coal rather than selling them to us to reduce the amount of gas we burn.
Domestic measures may have contained and limited the spread much more effectively, allowing time to prepare the NHS. The first wave was chaotically scary to be in hospital. Testing was hard to obtain for either patients or staff, segregation of cases impossible, PPE in short supply, and PPE protocols regularly downgraded to what was available rather than what was appropriate. Then there was the discharges to care homes.
Locking down a few weeks earlier is not the same as permanent lockdown.
I see today’s max temp forecast for Paris is 20C.
Secondly, it is almost twenty years since was, most days, concerned with the interface between care homes and hospitals, but then, and I suspect now, it was by no means unknown for the disruption of the transfer, particularly if 'out of hours' to result in a the patient's death. And that could be transfer either way!
And, of course, when the authorities were counting, they rarely included as a baseline the deaths one might expect anyway. On a normal day people die, simply because, at the end of life, systems just shut down, as in the case of Prince Philip.
Mrs Foxy off to the Isle of Wight for the long weekend. The Red Funnel sold out for most Southampton sailings Friday and Saturday. Looks to be busy over there.
Had my first jab yesterday. Pfizer (I think they were using AstraZeneca for second shots of older people). Got rained on a bit in the outside waiting tent, post-shot, but otherwise seems fine.
Relieved to not, as yet, have any side-effects beyond a mild ache in the shoulder.
Yes, everything has been pretty much full here since Tuesday last week. If you plan on eating out, book ahead.
The forecast for the weekend looks great; light winds, lots of sunshine, just a bit of light cloud on the Saturday. Temps in the high teens even by the sea.
As I said beforehand I have no interest in the word of Cummings as I don't trust him. The afternoon session that I saw was compelling. It told me a lot that I thought was true. But as I trust the person saying it almost as little as the people he accuses, meh.
It won't make any difference to the Cult.
I have done some work for the Care Inspectorate and this is a significant concern: they recognise that if they close down a poorly performing care home several of the residents will die shortly thereafter. Its a dilemma.
https://www.eqmagpro.com/financing-completed-for-564m-fifth-phase-of-mbr-solar-park/
$500m, 900MW solar farm, phase 5 of the massive desert site, with a generation price of 1.7 cents a kWh.
The biggest challenge is keeping them clean of sand!
Investing in vaccines was THE long term solution to the pandemic and this Government did it.
The EU shows what happens when there is no substantial media. They don't have any proper democratic accountability and no EU wide media either. So the pressures that our governments are forced to deal with don't exist, leaving the EU as a sclerotic, slow institution that doesn't deal with issues ending up with stuff like the vaccines debacle.
Yes our media can be a bit shit, it's obsession with holidays has been weird. But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
And closing down a Home was not a decision to be taken lightly.
The three major factors affecting spreads and death are: obesity rates, population density and rate of intergenerational households.
2. The borders allowed in off-shore variants which tore through chunks of the community and led to more regional lockdowns due to spikes in death rates
Both of these were avoidable
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/29/the-air-conditioning-trap-how-cold-air-is-heating-the-world
As British houses and offices get more effectively insulated, it does create problems in warm weather. British buildings are generally designed to keep heat in rather than out. Air-conditioning on the rise here too.
Before that, the previous instance of such late snowfall was 1888.
When I was 18-19 I was part of a chatroom type locale and when the conversation turned to age I was amused the consensus was I was 30-40 (with a few thinking I was 50, 60, or even older).
And one factor we've little discussed but we know how many died within 28 days of a positive test but how many died from not seeing their family and loved ones?
I have to wonder if what we've done, keeping the old and infirm isolated and away from their loved ones has itself led to them atrophying, shutting down and dying brokenhearted. 😢
The reason that these offshore variants tore through chunks of the community was because those communities had a higher than average multigenerational mix so the young would bring the virus back to the vulnerable who would succumb.
Without vaccines all of this was inevitable. Only the timing would vary.
UK media have been uniformly terrible, uninformed and focussed on the wrong things during the pandemic - but the alternative is worse.
There is a bit of a logical fallacy: something must be done, this is something, therefore this must be done.
Worth considering that when we discuss politics (although the site is still way ahead of others due to the nature of betting and credibility depending on being right rather than a rambling newspaper or broadcast pundit).
So no, Boris just keeps rolling along.
What this has again shown is the Tory Party at its ugliest. Power at all costs. We chose a useless lying charlatan but as long as they like him in Hartlepool who cares....It may take some time but it'll catch up with him. The voters now have several more pieces of the jigsaw. It was arrogance and insensitivity that brought down the great leaderene and he is by some measure worse.
I have said that it is inflationary but it doesn't automatically mean inflation because we also have deflationary pressures to take into account.
If the inflationary pressures and deflationary ones cancel each other out then the net result is no inflation. As we've seen for the past decade.
What part of that are you struggling with? Do you need smaller words? 🤦♂️
But, I think you could compare mortality rate from COVID in regions in France, Germany and the UK with similar population density/demography (eg Greater Birmingham with parts of the Ruhr, etc). I am sure these studies will be done. The results will be interesting.
But, I suspect none of the UK, Italy, Spain, France & Germany have much to brag about. These countries have all done pretty much the same. About 6 months ago, I would have said Germany was doing markedly better, but no longer.
In retrospect, I think the major mistake that the Government made was lateness in the first/second lockdowns. In the case of the first lockdown, it is clear that this mistake arose from modelling errors in SAGE. The modellers originally though the disease would spread more slowly than it actually did, so the first wave would peak later.
The borders I think are more arguable -- it is noticeable on pb.com that it is often the same people shrieking about the borders who can't wait to travel (@Leon). I think it is a lose-lose situation for any Government.
I would have done more to shut the borders, but there would have been the inevitable shrieks and hollers ... especially from the ranting hypocrites in the press.
I think our rate of morality (deaths per million) was actually worse than India's? so although we didnt have the same images of overrun clinics and lack of oxygen I am no sure we can say it wasnt as bad here.
If we'd just locked down in September (2 months earlier as advised) and changed nothing else... still made all those other mistakes.... those 'deaths' would shift backwards in time by 2 months.
To mid-March by which time we had given about half the population a first dose.
It does take a few weeks for protection to kick-in but that's >10k deaths averted without a single extra day of lockdown.
I return to the point that Cummings' complaints were historical. The period he has spent a day claiming government was not fit for purpose is when he was part of it. Since he left, we've been doing just fine on fighting Covid.
What is unusual about the current government is that it is a major change of direction by a party that has already been in power for more than a decade. Have they restarted the clock on inevitable decline? Is it possible, post Boris, that they could do so again?
EU officials have publicly said the bloc is better off anyway without the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab in its future vaccine portfolio, the drugmaker's lawyers pointed out.
As Boularbah put it, it's “shocking that some members are asking for doses of a vaccine they have said they will no longer use.”....
.....The pharma company’s lawyers concluded that the EU was now trying to essentially rewrite the contract by asking the court to impose new, strict delivery deadlines and penalties.
https://www.politico.eu/article/european-commission-astrazeneca-court-coronavirus-vaccines/