Maybe he'll appear in his favourite Hi-Viz and helmet at the sinkhole that has opened up in the Manston Farage-Garage, blaming it on Horrid Foreign Saboteurs, or something.
From the JCVI statement that was linked earlier, for the Oxford vaccine:
MHRA Information for Healthcare Professionals on COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca states:
The level of protection gained from a single dose of COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca was assessed in an exploratory analysis that included participants who had received one dose. Participants were censored from the analysis at the earliest time point of when they received a second dose or at 12 weeks post dose 1. [62% of the population had at least 6 weeks between vaccine doses (Voysey et al)] In this population, vaccine efficacy from 22 days post dose 1 was 73.00% (95% CI: 48.79; 85.76 [COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca 12/7,998 vs control 44/7,982]).
Exploratory analyses showed that increased immunogenicity was associated with a longer dose interval. Efficacy is currently demonstrated with more certainty for dose intervals from 8 to 12 weeks. Data for intervals longer than 12 weeks are limited.
There's also data from the Moderna vaccine showing ~90% efficacy starting 2 weeks after the first dose. There are indications that this single-dose efficacy might persist for 100 days or so, but that's a fairly weak statement.
As vaccines prompt the immune system to do stuff - rather than sitting in one’s blood stream to fight the virus themselves; why then would we expect the immune system’s memory to be different between different vaccines ?
The first point is that the Oxford vaccine is very different from the Pfizer and Moderna ones (modified adenovirus vs mRNA vaccine) so it's perfectly plausible that they generate different immunogenic responses. I'd expect the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to behave in a very similar way to each other.
Just got the Downing Street briefing on in the background. Classic confused answer to a question from our PM, in this case relating to schools and whether parents can keep their children out of school if they don't think it's safe. Paraphrase of his answer: schools are safe, the problem is the mixing between households that inevitably happens at school.
That has to go down as one of the - if not the - stupidest things I’ve ever heard a national leader say.
And we’ve just had four years of Trump.
Even worse than him saying it in the first place, he's just repeated the same message - "schools are safe the problem is children from different households mixing". We know he has a tendency to say the first thing that comes to mind and bluster around, and if we were feeling generous we can put a stupid statement down to that. But, to still say the same thing several days later ...
But totally undoing all the preparations made by schools and others, at the government's behest, during a Christmas holiday when teachers and others could and shoul dd have been preparing for online teaching rather than running a testing centre etc. This utter cluelessness is infuriating, when SAGE had made the relevant recommendation on 22 December.
Surprisingly good statement from him tonight, almost waffless.
He even managed to clarify his "schools are safe" and "children mixing spreads the virus" statements over the last few days. Whereas most of us were thinking of safety in terms of restricting the spread of the virus (thus anything which increases the spread is not safe), he has been equating safe in this context with "children won't get ill and die" - safe for children, maybe, not safe for teachers and other staff at schools, not safe for parents and other adults in the households of children.
Yup, I notice his current scapegoat for his incompetence is the new variant - makes a change from the general public I suppose.
It's worth noting that mutations of a virus are a function of number of infections not time. What I mean is that if a virus infects a small number of people it has relatively little chance to evolve. It is has a large growth medium (i.e. lots of us) then it's far, far more likely to mutate successfully. Covid-19 is not a fast-mutating virus; it just feels like it is because the huge number of total infections gives it the opportunity to evolve in this way.
Why I am I saying this here?
Well, it is also Boris's responsibility. I have posted previously the data on how the government's poor and slow decision-making cost thousands of lives (literally). Whilst I cannot prove it, there is a very good argument that the so-called 'Uk-variant' would not have arisen in Kent in December 2020 if the total number of UK infections had not be so large. Hence, whilst it's still unfortunate that this has arisen now, it is also the case that it may simply be yet another reflection of how poorly managed this whole thing has been.
There are no scapegoats. Johnson and his government are to blame.
I realised today that in the past 12 months, our government has an incredible record of doing exactly the right thing in response to Covid-19, just two weeks late every time. It is that delay that is so, so deadly.
I realised today that in the past 12 months, our government has an incredible record of doing exactly the right thing in response to Covid-19, just two weeks late every time. It is that delay that is so, so deadly.
And yet, because of a mostly compliant press, no one will care once this is done, they'll just be glad it's over.
I realised today that in the past 12 months, our government has an incredible record of doing exactly the right thing in response to Covid-19, just two weeks late every time. It is that delay that is so, so deadly.
And yet, because of a mostly compliant press, no one will care once this is done, they'll just be glad it's over.
I'm not so sure. Whilst there are some who think this way, there is also a simmering anger out there.
I realised today that in the past 12 months, our government has an incredible record of doing exactly the right thing in response to Covid-19, just two weeks late every time. It is that delay that is so, so deadly.
With the exception of any steps to ease back on restrictions and restart economic activity ... which tends to be two weeks early.
I realised today that in the past 12 months, our government has an incredible record of doing exactly the right thing in response to Covid-19, just two weeks late every time. It is that delay that is so, so deadly.
And yet, because of a mostly compliant press, no one will care once this is done, they'll just be glad it's over.
I'm not so sure. Whilst there are some who think this way, there is also a simmering anger out there.
There's some simmering anger, but look at the polls. Without a clear view of what an alternative could look like, people find it difficult to think in terms of counterfactuals, especially ones that are a difference of degree rather than kind (this is also why the lower GDP growth from Brexit will not have much of a political impact in the short to mid term).
The opposition had the first few months to set out their stall in terms of alternate strategy, due to timidity that chance was missed, arguments afterwards that the UK did somewhat worse than France and Germany won't cut it. The government is fortunate in that even if the UK is a - bad - outlier - it is in a part of the world containing a number of countries which broadly failed to tackle the virus in similar ways.
I realised today that in the past 12 months, our government has an incredible record of doing exactly the right thing in response to Covid-19, just two weeks late every time. It is that delay that is so, so deadly.
And yet, because of a mostly compliant press, no one will care once this is done, they'll just be glad it's over.
I'm not so sure. Whilst there are some who think this way, there is also a simmering anger out there.
There's some simmering anger, but look at the polls. Without a clear view of what an alternative could look like, people find it difficult to think in terms of counterfactuals, especially ones that are a difference of degree rather than kind (this is also why the lower GDP growth from Brexit will not have much of a political impact in the short to mid term).
The opposition had the first few months to set out their stall in terms of alternate strategy, due to timidity that chance was missed, arguments afterwards that the UK did somewhat worse than France and Germany won't cut it. The government is fortunate in that even if the UK is a - bad - outlier - it is in a part of the world containing a number of countries which broadly failed to tackle the virus in similar ways.
True.
But most people vote emotionally rather than intellectually. There's really good data on this. There is a really simple predictor of who will win an election - and that is how the economy performs in the 6 months leading up to an election. (Which is a big part of how the Tories won in 2015, despite ruining the economy for 4 1/2 years). It's not an absolute rule though as Major lost the voters in '92/'93 and never got them back despite decent economic performance throughout '95-'97.
Johnson's big selling point is that he is an emblematic leader and he's lost that. I don't think he can get it back.
Johnson's big selling point is that he is an emblematic leader and he's lost that. I don't think he can get it back.
And they'll replace him with Sunak (for example) who is all wonderfully shiny and new (and bears a large share of the blame for the current fiasco - but who the BBC portrays as a superhero).
Johnson's big selling point is that he is an emblematic leader and he's lost that. I don't think he can get it back.
And they'll replace him with Sunak (for example) who is all wonderfully shiny and new (and bears a large share of the blame for the current fiasco - but who the BBC portrays as a superhero).
The economy won't shrink forever post Covid and with the FTPA up for the chop they can pick their moment. Major's defeat represents one of the three times Labour has got back into government in the post-war era, so not quite the statistical outlier. Not doing anything and waiting for a fuck up is not a strategy, people forget how hard Blair ran against Major.
The economy won't shrink forever post Covid and with the FTPA up for the chop they can pick their moment. Major's defeat represents one of the three times Labour has got back into government in the post-war era, so not quite the statistical outlier. Not doing anything and waiting for a fuck up is not a strategy, people forget how hard Blair ran against Major.
Nope, not forgotten. Are you suggesting that having been leader for less than a year, and consistently shown himself to have a complete grasp of how to deal with Covid-19, that Starmer is not running hard against Johnson?
The economy won't shrink forever post Covid and with the FTPA up for the chop they can pick their moment. Major's defeat represents one of the three times Labour has got back into government in the post-war era, so not quite the statistical outlier. Not doing anything and waiting for a fuck up is not a strategy, people forget how hard Blair ran against Major.
Nope, not forgotten. Are you suggesting that having been leader for less than a year, and consistently shown himself to have a complete grasp of how to deal with Covid-19
I would debate this. As an example; Labour were briefing over the weekend that schools should stay open, and then pivoted yesterday at about the same time that the government started leaking their plans via Peston and others.
It says something that the person most visibly pushing for support for the least in society is a 22 year old footballer.
I realised today that in the past 12 months, our government has an incredible record of doing exactly the right thing in response to Covid-19, just two weeks late every time. It is that delay that is so, so deadly.
AFZ
That's not fair! They've given contracts to their cronies with no experience, expertise or even competence at a phenomenal rate.
Firstly, it's not so much that the government have made some mistakes as that they reliably make the same mistakes. It's like Groundhog Day.
Secondly, people who carelessly spread the virus are doing so in part because of mixed and unclear messages from the government, and in part because the government was actively encouraging them to do so (remember 'eat out to help out'). (That's not to mention the sterling example of the government taking its own measures seriously set by the Barnard Castle eyetest.)
This article was written with the Canadian context in mind (where a number of politicians have now been found to have travelled out of the country despite all advice to not do so). But it applies just as much to Boris and his chums:
While this was in the first week of March, if I recall, his reply was in response to a question about the increasingly urgent calls from medical officials to stop people shaking hands and hugging when greeting each other. So a reporter was chasing up a report that the PM had been handshaking in hospital when, by then, the general - though not official - guidance was not to. In church, eg, we had stopped sharing the peace by handshakes at that stage on statutory medical advice.
While this was in the first week of March, if I recall, his reply was in response to a question about the increasingly urgent calls from medical officials to stop people shaking hands and hugging when greeting each other. So a reporter was chasing up a report that the PM had been handshaking in hospital when, by then, the general - though not official - guidance was not to. In church, eg, we had stopped sharing the peace by handshakes at that stage on statutory medical advice.
People have known of the dangers for 10 months. There is no excuse for not acting responsibly.
People have known of the dangers for 10 months. There is no excuse for not acting responsibly.
People are stupid - at least in so far as the average person doesn't have much understanding of how viruses work, or even that an antibiotic won't help you with one. The average person doesn't have the background to form their own reasonable assessment of how safe, or unsafe, particular things are, so they rely on being told what to do.
The Prime Minister has spent a long time telling people that schools are safe, only to qualify that what he meant by "safe" is very different from what normal humans understand it to mean. The guidance about "bubbles" has been confusing, and changed for no obvious reason. First 2 metres was a safe distance, then 1 metre was a safe distance, basically because owners of pubs and restaurants liked that number better. Outdoor meetings were safer than indoor ones, and then they weren't. And of course, everyone likes to point out the confusing variation in which shops are deemed "essential" and open, and which shops are closed, and how that variation doesn't seem to align with a normal person's idea of "essential". Over the summer, instead of trying to consolidate the gains and reduce the incidence of Covid to a level that's manageable with track, trace, and quarantine, the government was encouraging people to go back to work in their office so that the local Pret and the guy shining shoes at the station could stay in business.
Is it any wonder that, faced with this confusion of messaging, people's idea of "acting responsibly" is a little woolly?
Just wondering what the headlines would be if a PM from any other party was failing to tackle a public health emergency partly because of nutters among his MPs.
Just wondering what the headlines would be if a PM from any other party was failing to tackle a public health emergency partly because of nutters among his MPs.
Oh but isn't he a great leader!
(Hollow laugh)
Oh and wouldn't Corbyn be so much worse....*
Coming back to planet earth for a moment, the best description of Johnson's 'leadership' is the classic, that he checks which way the wind is blowing first but I'd take it a bit further than that. I think he's looking for a mob to lead. In Brexit, he famously had two columns and published the one that best served his own ambition. He looked for the Tory Mob - saw that Brexit was the easy way to go and then ran to the front of the crowd and claimed he was leading...
His approach to Covid-19 has been strikingly similar.
AFZ
*I am so bored of hearing this argument. Two things to note here:
1. If 'Corbyn would have been even worse' is your best argument then it's time to admit that you don't have any argument that Johnson is doing anything well. Especially when you spent 4 years demonising Corbyn.
2. As more confidential stuff comes out, we get a fuller picture of Corbyn's leadership rather than the contemporary media lens. Corbyn is not as decisive as I would like but his stubbornness has a corollary to it: If Corbyn was PM in Feb '20, as the Brexit 2nd referendum had to be put on hold; he would have done the right thing on Covid, regardless of who opposed him. (This is especially true as he would have been in coalition with the SNP). I cannot prove the counterfactual, of course but the notion that we dodged a bullet by electing the fucking incompetent is so laughable. It's not quite the Thank God we got Trump and not Hilary stupidity but it's close. You worst you can say about Corbyn is that he does not have a track record in government. Whereas even pre-2020, Johnson's record in executive offices was one of almost unmitigated failure. To think he's the best bet is beyond stupid.
I don't have a high estimate of Corbyn but he didn't share Johnson's aversion to talent in those surrounding him. If you picked a member of Corbyn's shadow cabinet at random you'd get someone with a competence level of at least mediocrity, even after most of his first cabinet resigned, which one cannot say of Johnson.
I don't have a high estimate of Corbyn but he didn't share Johnson's aversion to talent in those surrounding him. If you picked a member of Corbyn's shadow cabinet at random you'd get someone with a competence level of at least mediocrity, even after most of his first cabinet resigned, which one cannot say of Johnson.
Also quite a lot of his manifesto’s detailed policies would be quite useful at the moment, which is why the Tory government has been implementing them (though uncredited).
For example you may have failed to notice / remember because fuck 2020 - but the nationalisation of the railways has happened.
Also quite a lot of his manifesto’s detailed policies would be quite useful at the moment, which is why the Tory government have been implementing them (though uncredited).
For example you may have failed to notice / remember because fuck 2020 - but the nationalisation of the railways has happened.
Indeedy. Not to mention how NO ONE now claims that broadband isn't an essential utility...
If we don't see a new case figure above 50k and numbers in hospital north of 30k before New Year I'll be very surprised, with daily deaths peaking above 1000 by mid-January.
The hospital figures went missing for about a week (28th December to 4th January) but the 4th has them above 30 000, and new cases topped 50k comfortably before the 1st. Deaths, meanwhile, passed 1000 today. I hope, but have no reason to believe, that that's the peak.
Comments
https://kentonline.co.uk/kent/news/hole-at-manston-airport-may-be-man-made-240093/
The Guardian had a report, too, but I think that's behind a paywall.
There's also data from the Moderna vaccine showing ~90% efficacy starting 2 weeks after the first dose. There are indications that this single-dose efficacy might persist for 100 days or so, but that's a fairly weak statement.
The first point is that the Oxford vaccine is very different from the Pfizer and Moderna ones (modified adenovirus vs mRNA vaccine) so it's perfectly plausible that they generate different immunogenic responses. I'd expect the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to behave in a very similar way to each other.
Yes, that's the one - thanks.
If they intend filling it with concrete today, the weather is not exactly auspicious - it's pouring with rain, and blowing a hoolie...
The irony is that Niggly Fartrage was desperate to get Manston open as a commercial airport once more.
O - I see that the Lord Protector was honouring a hospital in North London with His Exalted Presence. Lucky them. Not.
Tier 5, here we come...?
Swinging garlic and praying for deliverance from evil spirits at the very idea.
It's worth noting that mutations of a virus are a function of number of infections not time. What I mean is that if a virus infects a small number of people it has relatively little chance to evolve. It is has a large growth medium (i.e. lots of us) then it's far, far more likely to mutate successfully. Covid-19 is not a fast-mutating virus; it just feels like it is because the huge number of total infections gives it the opportunity to evolve in this way.
Why I am I saying this here?
Well, it is also Boris's responsibility. I have posted previously the data on how the government's poor and slow decision-making cost thousands of lives (literally). Whilst I cannot prove it, there is a very good argument that the so-called 'Uk-variant' would not have arisen in Kent in December 2020 if the total number of UK infections had not be so large. Hence, whilst it's still unfortunate that this has arisen now, it is also the case that it may simply be yet another reflection of how poorly managed this whole thing has been.
There are no scapegoats. Johnson and his government are to blame.
I realised today that in the past 12 months, our government has an incredible record of doing exactly the right thing in response to Covid-19, just two weeks late every time. It is that delay that is so, so deadly.
AFZ
Which would be funnier if it weren't so accurate, and the consequences so desperate.
And yet, because of a mostly compliant press, no one will care once this is done, they'll just be glad it's over.
I'm not so sure. Whilst there are some who think this way, there is also a simmering anger out there.
There's some simmering anger, but look at the polls. Without a clear view of what an alternative could look like, people find it difficult to think in terms of counterfactuals, especially ones that are a difference of degree rather than kind (this is also why the lower GDP growth from Brexit will not have much of a political impact in the short to mid term).
The opposition had the first few months to set out their stall in terms of alternate strategy, due to timidity that chance was missed, arguments afterwards that the UK did somewhat worse than France and Germany won't cut it. The government is fortunate in that even if the UK is a - bad - outlier - it is in a part of the world containing a number of countries which broadly failed to tackle the virus in similar ways.
True.
But most people vote emotionally rather than intellectually. There's really good data on this. There is a really simple predictor of who will win an election - and that is how the economy performs in the 6 months leading up to an election. (Which is a big part of how the Tories won in 2015, despite ruining the economy for 4 1/2 years). It's not an absolute rule though as Major lost the voters in '92/'93 and never got them back despite decent economic performance throughout '95-'97.
Johnson's big selling point is that he is an emblematic leader and he's lost that. I don't think he can get it back.
AFZ
And they'll replace him with Sunak (for example) who is all wonderfully shiny and new (and bears a large share of the blame for the current fiasco - but who the BBC portrays as a superhero).
Quite possibly.
It may work.
It may not.
AFZ
The economy won't shrink forever post Covid and with the FTPA up for the chop they can pick their moment. Major's defeat represents one of the three times Labour has got back into government in the post-war era, so not quite the statistical outlier. Not doing anything and waiting for a fuck up is not a strategy, people forget how hard Blair ran against Major.
Nope, not forgotten. Are you suggesting that having been leader for less than a year, and consistently shown himself to have a complete grasp of how to deal with Covid-19, that Starmer is not running hard against Johnson?
I would debate this. As an example; Labour were briefing over the weekend that schools should stay open, and then pivoted yesterday at about the same time that the government started leaking their plans via Peston and others.
It says something that the person most visibly pushing for support for the least in society is a 22 year old footballer.
There's a very good reason for that and it's not the one you're intimating.
AFZ
This particular thread was originally a place in which to vent wrath and spleen against the person and character of Boris Johnson.
Secondly, people who carelessly spread the virus are doing so in part because of mixed and unclear messages from the government, and in part because the government was actively encouraging them to do so (remember 'eat out to help out'). (That's not to mention the sterling example of the government taking its own measures seriously set by the Barnard Castle eyetest.)
Done with political turkeys
I love it. It is both funny and biting.
Just fixing that little oversight!
While this was in the first week of March, if I recall, his reply was in response to a question about the increasingly urgent calls from medical officials to stop people shaking hands and hugging when greeting each other. So a reporter was chasing up a report that the PM had been handshaking in hospital when, by then, the general - though not official - guidance was not to. In church, eg, we had stopped sharing the peace by handshakes at that stage on statutory medical advice.
People have known of the dangers for 10 months. There is no excuse for not acting responsibly.
People are stupid - at least in so far as the average person doesn't have much understanding of how viruses work, or even that an antibiotic won't help you with one. The average person doesn't have the background to form their own reasonable assessment of how safe, or unsafe, particular things are, so they rely on being told what to do.
The Prime Minister has spent a long time telling people that schools are safe, only to qualify that what he meant by "safe" is very different from what normal humans understand it to mean. The guidance about "bubbles" has been confusing, and changed for no obvious reason. First 2 metres was a safe distance, then 1 metre was a safe distance, basically because owners of pubs and restaurants liked that number better. Outdoor meetings were safer than indoor ones, and then they weren't. And of course, everyone likes to point out the confusing variation in which shops are deemed "essential" and open, and which shops are closed, and how that variation doesn't seem to align with a normal person's idea of "essential". Over the summer, instead of trying to consolidate the gains and reduce the incidence of Covid to a level that's manageable with track, trace, and quarantine, the government was encouraging people to go back to work in their office so that the local Pret and the guy shining shoes at the station could stay in business.
Is it any wonder that, faced with this confusion of messaging, people's idea of "acting responsibly" is a little woolly?
Oh but isn't he a great leader!
(Hollow laugh)
Oh and wouldn't Corbyn be so much worse....*
Coming back to planet earth for a moment, the best description of Johnson's 'leadership' is the classic, that he checks which way the wind is blowing first but I'd take it a bit further than that. I think he's looking for a mob to lead. In Brexit, he famously had two columns and published the one that best served his own ambition. He looked for the Tory Mob - saw that Brexit was the easy way to go and then ran to the front of the crowd and claimed he was leading...
His approach to Covid-19 has been strikingly similar.
AFZ
*I am so bored of hearing this argument. Two things to note here:
1. If 'Corbyn would have been even worse' is your best argument then it's time to admit that you don't have any argument that Johnson is doing anything well. Especially when you spent 4 years demonising Corbyn.
2. As more confidential stuff comes out, we get a fuller picture of Corbyn's leadership rather than the contemporary media lens. Corbyn is not as decisive as I would like but his stubbornness has a corollary to it: If Corbyn was PM in Feb '20, as the Brexit 2nd referendum had to be put on hold; he would have done the right thing on Covid, regardless of who opposed him. (This is especially true as he would have been in coalition with the SNP). I cannot prove the counterfactual, of course but the notion that we dodged a bullet by electing the fucking incompetent is so laughable. It's not quite the Thank God we got Trump and not Hilary stupidity but it's close. You worst you can say about Corbyn is that he does not have a track record in government. Whereas even pre-2020, Johnson's record in executive offices was one of almost unmitigated failure. To think he's the best bet is beyond stupid.
Yep. Precisely
For example you may have failed to notice / remember because fuck 2020 - but the nationalisation of the railways has happened.
Indeedy. Not to mention how NO ONE now claims that broadband isn't an essential utility...
AFZ
The hospital figures went missing for about a week (28th December to 4th January) but the 4th has them above 30 000, and new cases topped 50k comfortably before the 1st. Deaths, meanwhile, passed 1000 today. I hope, but have no reason to believe, that that's the peak.