COVID-19

Hope not.... I'm gagging for a feckin pint...

 

Watching Bradford City take on Port Vale on December 29th will do for me, the grandson might not be happy, or Fordy come to think of it .

 

I'm printing out some Covid passports as we speak.. !!

 

Nothing like putting pressure on the regulatory bodies to pass the Pfizer vaccine

 

I hope they aren’t making promises and setting targets they can’t keep, again. This is really quite important.

 

Yeah they've already fecked up a lot of simpler things than this. However I do think we've done pretty good at getting the vaccines so if we can have a bit of that urgency and joined up thinking in on the rollout side of things we should be ok. I really dont get why we haven't used the military's planning people more throughout this,large scale flexible logistics is kind of their thing. Would have saved a shit load on consultants

 

I don't know about the Germany example. I would expect PT to have done her research.

I think the biggest point to take from this article is that this government has been prepared to 'spaff up the wall' billions of taxpayers' money on a plethora of unresearched/untried schemes run by companies with zero experience in the field. But somehow 'forgot' to consult the established national experts in screening, or the established local track and trace experts. They'd rather we pay through the nose for them to reinvent the wheel as a triangle than venture out of their private sector favouritism bubble.

 

Although as usual there are factors involved in it once I'd done my own research. Bob Steele (sorry @Offcomedun, I meant Muir Grey, the guy who wrote the piece) was no longer directly involved in any official areas so I'm not sure why he would have been asked to contribute and the committee only sat 3 times a year, one of them being on the 28th October (no meeting notes available) so maybe it was brought up there.....the initial article it linked to was from September so would have been before that meeting.

But yes, the government have been willing to rush things through and forego the usual checks and double checks. Thank God in some respect but also worthy of scrutiny of course.

Still interested in that Germany thing. Can't find anything about it, whenever I assume the Guardian have done their research I usually end up disappointed so I'd like to know the details.

 

For gods sake keep it away from Dido Harding,
BTW For safety's sake why not try on the Scottish or Welsh first just to make sure it has no side effects?

 

I guess the reason Polly Toynbee is suggesting that they should have consulted Muir Grey is because he is clearly an authoritative expert who wrote the standard textbook in the field. And he's still contributing articles to The Lancet so he obviously hasn't just toddled off in his dotage to go fishing. It's just part of a broader picture.
The point is that this government did zero planning back in February, when they had several weeks clear notice that the virus was on its way to us. They should have been using that time to consult experts and put viable plans in place for screening, track & trace etc. Instead of which, they dithered and put their heads in the sand. Once it was too late to ignore, they fired off a raft of ill though out initiatives at massive public expense without bothering to utilise the best expertise available.

 

Well maybe, I've never heard of him before and have zero idea of his credentials. If you were so minded - which the Guardian clearly is - then you can always find an expert that hasn't been consulted? Even if they consulted 10 you could find the 11th.

If you read the actual BMJ article it is much less emotive than the Guardian one which cascades from this - https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4436

But yes, they should be consulting their own committee of experts.Fully agree with that but I would say that in such pressurized times holding them to the "normal" procedures for these types of thing seems completely pointless. They're doing things that have never been done before at an abnormal speed so the process should be expected to be different.

And yes, we can keep going back to February where they did consult experts (SAGE) where many of them turned out to be wrong anyway. But no country was truly knowledgeable about what was coming so making out like all the solutions were simple and that anybody could have just planned through the situation with absolute clarity is borderline laughable.

I can't remember any posts from you in February advocating locksdowns, T&T necessity, screening etc but I guess it's a little bit easier to forget how lightly everyone around the world took it at the time.

 

Yeah they knocked those up in a really short timescale with 0 mistakes, so we decide never to involve them with anything else and rely on the inefficient and expensive private sector. I know they won't do because we'd rather pay companies with no prior experience in logistics but my vote for any logistical stuff has always been to get the military involved. The problem being Boris is a libertarian alongside being quite corrupt, so won't use any mechanisms of the state if he can absolutely help it not to.

 

Number of cases seem to be coming back down but will probably go back up as soon as lockdown ends