Coronavirus

[Duff Man]

Thank fuck for that.

[SasaS]

Watching live, interesting questions from Good Morning Britain and The Express.

[Section_31]

E, M, A.

 

It's in the game.

[Guest]

Next topic on EMA's list is: What is the best album ever?

[easytoslip]

Just had my jab and I'm sweating my bollocks off waiting for possible adverse effects. 

[Section_31]

5 minutes ago, easytoslip said:

Just had my jab and I'm sweating my bollocks off waiting for possible adverse effects. 

 

You'll turn into a cross between The Fly and Eric Monkman. 

[easytoslip]

17 minutes ago, Section_31 said:

 

You'll turn into a cross between The Fly and Eric Monkman. 

How lovely, not sure who Mr Monkman is but I'll bet he's ghastly.

The Beechams Powder should ward it off. 

[SasaS]

It will be interesting to see reactions in Europe now. Norway apparently saying it will not be vaccinating, Slovenia's President and PM will take one AZ jab for the team each tomorrow. Or at least, that's what the label will say.

[Bjornebye]

4 minutes ago, SasaS said:

It will be interesting to see reactions in Europe now. Norway apparently saying it will not be vaccinating, Slovenia's President and PM will take one AZ jab for the team each tomorrow. Or at least, that's what the label will say.

 

 

[Curly]

3 hours ago, Bjornebye said:

 

 

What’s that gif off mate? Is it real? 

[Mudface]

3 minutes ago, belarus said:

What’s that gif off mate? Is it real? 

Yep- 

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slobodan_Praljak

[Rick Sanchez C-137]

9 minutes ago, Mudface said:

Yep- 

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slobodan_Praljak

Class

 

I mean, that's not a comment in the man. Simply the action. "Fuck this shit, I'm out".

 

 

 

[Bjornebye]

22 minutes ago, belarus said:

What’s that gif off mate? Is it real? 

Serbian war bastard wasn’t gonna let them jail him 

[SasaS]

He was not Serbian. Spent part of his career before the war working as a film and theatrical director so he was no stranger to drama.

[SasaS]

Back to the vaccination wars of '21. The US has been sitting on 7 million doses of Astra Zeneca which has not even been approved there. This is totally insane. Now they will give some to Canada and Mexico.

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56451810

 

Canada and Mexico have approved the AstraZeneca jab, but the US has not.

However, the US has a stockpile of the vaccine. Announcing the plan to distribute doses on Thursday, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said that 2.5m of the US's 7m jabs will go to Mexico and 1.5m of which will be given to Canada.

Under the agreement, the countries must return any excess doses to the US.

[Scott_M]

I've not been fully following the EU debate, but claiming the Oxford jab is unsafe but then arguing they don't have enough of it, doesn't seem to make sense.

[Scott_M]

On 18/03/2021 at 17:46, easytoslip said:

Just had my jab and I'm sweating my bollocks off waiting for possible adverse effects. 

 

It's Ok, your blood will be turning into Black Pudding already.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

[Guest]

37 minutes ago, AngryofTuebrook said:

Sense this doesn't make - 'People staying away in enough number'

[Guest]

Wealthy countries, including the UK, are blocking plans to help developing countries create vaccine manufacturing capabilities, the BBC has learned

[Vincent Vega]

Cummings is definitely on manoeuvres. @Sugar Ape - any chance mate?

 

[easytoslip]

1 hour ago, Scott_M said:

 

It's Ok, your blood will be turning into Black Pudding already.

I woke up with a tentacle instead of an arm, other than that all sound. 

[Sugar Ape]

36 minutes ago, Vincent Vega said:

Cummings is definitely on manoeuvres. @Sugar Ape - any chance mate?

 

Dominic Cummings ready to reveal all on Boris Johnson’s lockdown paralysis

 

On September 18 last year, his most senior advisers met Boris Johnson in an attempt to convince him to push ahead with a second lockdown.

 

Gathered in the cabinet room were Dominic Cummings along with Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, and others including Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, and Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England.

 

All were convinced of the need for a “circuit breaker” lasting at least two weeks in England given the surge in the number of cases — all, that is, except the prime minister himself.

 

“Dom said that we can’t let the second wave crash, we can’t repeat the mistakes we made during the first lockdown,” a government source said. “But Boris said no.”

 

It marked the start of a critical five days in September during which Johnson’s advisers tried — and failed — to convince the prime minister to implement a lockdown. That period will now come under intense scrutiny as Cummings returns to the front line of politics.

 

*
 

On Wednesday Cummings appeared before the Commons science and technology committee, ostensibly to talk about the government’s planned new advanced research and innovation agency that he had championed as Johnson’s right hand man.

 

He could not resist the opportunity, however, to express his views about the Department of Health’s “total disaster” in the procurement of personal protective equipment during the pandemic. And that appearance, we now know, was only a warm-up for the main event.

 

On Thursday he confirmed on his newly-reactivated Twitter account that he had agreed to give evidence to a joint committee of MPs investigating the lessons that need to be learnt from Covid-19.

 

“Don’t understand why House of Commons [has] been so slow to try to understand what and why things went so catastrophically wrong but agreed today I’ll give evidence,” he said. “Learning from disaster needs extreme transparency.”

 

As the anniversary of the first lockdown, on Tuesday, approaches it is increasingly clear that Cummings will not be holding back.

 

His evidence is likely to focus on those five days in September and Johnson’s unwillingness to impose a so-called circuit-breaker lockdown.

 

At the start of that month new Covid-19 cases had been averaging about 2,200 a day but by the week of September 14 had risen to about 4,000 a day.

 

Cummings and the data teams in Downing Street along with Whitty and Vallance came to the conclusion that the UK was on the cusp of a second wave.

 

On the Friday, with new case numbers now at nearly 5,000 a day, the senior team met Johnson and attempted to press him into implementing another lockdown.

 

One government source said Johnson was “actively hostile” to the idea, raising concerns about both the impact on the economy and resistance from Tory MPs. He asked for alternative views to the lockdown, citing several experts who had been critical of the approach. “He said he needed more advice,” a government source said.

 

That Sunday, Cummings and Vallance arranged a Zoom meeting for the prime minister with prominent lockdown sceptics including Professor Sunetra Gupta and Professor Carl Heneghan of Oxford University and Professor Anders Tegnell, a leading epidemiologist from Sweden who masterminded his country’s policy of avoiding a lockdown.

 

John Edmunds, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a member of Sage, made the case for a circuit breaker. By the end of the meeting the prime minister’s views were unclear. “He wasn’t convinced by the anti-lockdowners but he wasn’t persuaded of the need for a circuit breaker either,” a source said.

 

On the Tuesday, with case numbers at more than 6,000 a day, Cummings and other advisers had one last attempt. Over the weekend data analysts in Downing Street had drawn up projections for the number of cases, hospital admissions and deaths in four to six weeks.

 

Cummings opened the meeting by asking the prime minister to imagine it was being held in mid to late October, with the projections a reality and Britain in the grip of a second wave. “Dom was making the case that you’re going to have to lock down at that point, so let’s lock down today and save lives and reduce the need for a harder lockdown later,” one government source said.

 

Johnson again resisted. “He didn’t believe that lockdowns worked, he thought that the economic damage outweighed the public health benefits. He thought things would get better,” a source said. Another source said that the data at that stage was unclear — schools had just returned and the prime minister wanted to see whether the trend would continue before locking down.

 

That evening he announced relatively minor restrictions, including banning more than six people from meeting and a 10pm curfew on pubs and restaurants. People were asked to work from home if they could.

 

It was not until the end of October, by which point case numbers had quadrupled, that Johnson eventually implemented the second lockdown. “Those five days were critical,” one Downing Street insider said. “We could have got ahead of it. Instead we let Captain Hindsight [Sir Keir Starmer] become Captain Foresight when he called for a lockdown.”

 

Another source said: “The reality was even worse than the projections.”

 

One supporter of Cummings said that his frustration with Johnson had been evident at the time and insisted that the decision to speak out was not as a result of the pair’s later parting of the ways. “Dom was definitely pushing for lockdown earlier,” the supporter said. “He was also pushing to close the borders. These things are true and I don’t see how they’ll be able to deny any of it either because Dom is not the only person who knows this. Dom may be the first person to come out and say it publicly but others also know.

 

“Simon Case was in these meetings and so were others. They may have to couch their words — but they are not going to lie. The trouble is it’s true. It’s quite well known. The difference is that for the first time someone who was in the room is going to say it publicly.” The source added that it was well known in Whitehall at the time that Cummings was frustrated with the prime minister. “He could see what the right thing to do was — and he [Johnson] wouldn’t do it. There was evidence for it. There was evidence coming in from the NHS.

 

“If you’re pushing hard and the prime minister says no then I don’t think it’s crazy that at some point you want to come out and say I pushed for this thing.”

 

Yet others take a different view. One of the people involved in the discussions at the time said that Cummings had not been a big presence and that Johnson was far from alone in being sceptical about another lockdown.

 

They pointed out that case numbers were still very small and that there was limited evidence — either then or now — that the two-week circuit-break lockdown, which was being proposed would have been effective.

 

“He’s looking to rewrite history — and obviously in a certain way,” they said. “It certainly wasn’t the case that it was only the prime minister holding out against the lockdown. There were a lot of others who were against it as well and in fact the cabinet was pretty split. I’d hear him [Cummings] occasionally on calls chip in from the corner of the room. But he wasn’t deeply involved in it. He was off doing his basic crackpot ideas — like moonshot testing and stuff like that.”

 

Another source involved in the discussions agreed. “Cummings was absolutely pivotal before Barnard Castle. After that he receded and wasn’t driving things in the same way he was previously,” they said.

“A lot of this is just Dom being a dick. I don’t know what he told the prime minister privately but I don’t think anybody believes a word he says.” Another source pointed out that Wales, which imposed a circuit-breaker lockdown in mid-October, had not fared noticeably better than England.

 

Others question Cummings’s motivation. Having been in effect dismissed by Johnson in November some see this as score-settling rather than an objective exercise in learning lessons from Covid.

 

An MP on the committee to which he will give evidence made clear that he was far from reluctant about appearing. “He is not being summoned against his will shall we say,” the MP said. He said, however, that the committee would not let Cummings use his appearance to settle scores.

 

“Cummings has been invited to the committee to answer our questions and they’ll be our questions,” the MP said. “It’s not going to be a press conference.”

 

An ally of Cummings insisted that he was not driven by a desire for revenge but genuinely believed that bad decisions had been made.

 

“He’s a big boy. The game’s the game to Dom. He knew he was there because he was useful to the prime minister and he was got rid of when he wasn’t.” The question is how much damage Cummings’s re-emergence and his testimony about what did or did not happen in the run-up to the second lockdown will do the prime minister politically.

 

The second wave was far worse than the first — and any suggestion by those “in the room” that it could have been avoided if Johnson had taken a different approach will worry Downing Street.

 

The vaccine rollout has blunted some of the criticism of the prime minister and it is arguable, at least, that it was the emergence of the new variant in November rather than the decisions made in September and October that caused the real damage.

 

As one source sympathetic to Cummings put it: “Politically the sun is shining for Boris. The vaccine is going dambusters, and any problems seem to be more with supply than how they’re rolling it out and the supply thing will be sorted in a few weeks. It will be a negative day or two of stories. Is it more than that right now? Not really.”

[Guest]

16 minutes ago, Sugar Ape said:

Dominic Cummings ready to reveal all on Boris Johnson’s lockdown paralysis

 

On September 18 last year, his most senior advisers met Boris Johnson in an attempt to convince him to push ahead with a second lockdown.

 

Gathered in the cabinet room were Dominic Cummings along with Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, and others including Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, and Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England.

 

All were convinced of the need for a “circuit breaker” lasting at least two weeks in England given the surge in the number of cases — all, that is, except the prime minister himself.

 

“Dom said that we can’t let the second wave crash, we can’t repeat the mistakes we made during the first lockdown,” a government source said. “But Boris said no.”

 

It marked the start of a critical five days in September during which Johnson’s advisers tried — and failed — to convince the prime minister to implement a lockdown. That period will now come under intense scrutiny as Cummings returns to the front line of politics.

 

*
 

On Wednesday Cummings appeared before the Commons science and technology committee, ostensibly to talk about the government’s planned new advanced research and innovation agency that he had championed as Johnson’s right hand man.

 

He could not resist the opportunity, however, to express his views about the Department of Health’s “total disaster” in the procurement of personal protective equipment during the pandemic. And that appearance, we now know, was only a warm-up for the main event.

 

On Thursday he confirmed on his newly-reactivated Twitter account that he had agreed to give evidence to a joint committee of MPs investigating the lessons that need to be learnt from Covid-19.

 

“Don’t understand why House of Commons [has] been so slow to try to understand what and why things went so catastrophically wrong but agreed today I’ll give evidence,” he said. “Learning from disaster needs extreme transparency.”

 

As the anniversary of the first lockdown, on Tuesday, approaches it is increasingly clear that Cummings will not be holding back.

 

His evidence is likely to focus on those five days in September and Johnson’s unwillingness to impose a so-called circuit-breaker lockdown.

 

At the start of that month new Covid-19 cases had been averaging about 2,200 a day but by the week of September 14 had risen to about 4,000 a day.

 

Cummings and the data teams in Downing Street along with Whitty and Vallance came to the conclusion that the UK was on the cusp of a second wave.

 

On the Friday, with new case numbers now at nearly 5,000 a day, the senior team met Johnson and attempted to press him into implementing another lockdown.

 

One government source said Johnson was “actively hostile” to the idea, raising concerns about both the impact on the economy and resistance from Tory MPs. He asked for alternative views to the lockdown, citing several experts who had been critical of the approach. “He said he needed more advice,” a government source said.

 

That Sunday, Cummings and Vallance arranged a Zoom meeting for the prime minister with prominent lockdown sceptics including Professor Sunetra Gupta and Professor Carl Heneghan of Oxford University and Professor Anders Tegnell, a leading epidemiologist from Sweden who masterminded his country’s policy of avoiding a lockdown.

 

John Edmunds, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a member of Sage, made the case for a circuit breaker. By the end of the meeting the prime minister’s views were unclear. “He wasn’t convinced by the anti-lockdowners but he wasn’t persuaded of the need for a circuit breaker either,” a source said.

 

On the Tuesday, with case numbers at more than 6,000 a day, Cummings and other advisers had one last attempt. Over the weekend data analysts in Downing Street had drawn up projections for the number of cases, hospital admissions and deaths in four to six weeks.

 

Cummings opened the meeting by asking the prime minister to imagine it was being held in mid to late October, with the projections a reality and Britain in the grip of a second wave. “Dom was making the case that you’re going to have to lock down at that point, so let’s lock down today and save lives and reduce the need for a harder lockdown later,” one government source said.

 

Johnson again resisted. “He didn’t believe that lockdowns worked, he thought that the economic damage outweighed the public health benefits. He thought things would get better,” a source said. Another source said that the data at that stage was unclear — schools had just returned and the prime minister wanted to see whether the trend would continue before locking down.

 

That evening he announced relatively minor restrictions, including banning more than six people from meeting and a 10pm curfew on pubs and restaurants. People were asked to work from home if they could.

 

It was not until the end of October, by which point case numbers had quadrupled, that Johnson eventually implemented the second lockdown. “Those five days were critical,” one Downing Street insider said. “We could have got ahead of it. Instead we let Captain Hindsight [Sir Keir Starmer] become Captain Foresight when he called for a lockdown.”

 

Another source said: “The reality was even worse than the projections.”

 

One supporter of Cummings said that his frustration with Johnson had been evident at the time and insisted that the decision to speak out was not as a result of the pair’s later parting of the ways. “Dom was definitely pushing for lockdown earlier,” the supporter said. “He was also pushing to close the borders. These things are true and I don’t see how they’ll be able to deny any of it either because Dom is not the only person who knows this. Dom may be the first person to come out and say it publicly but others also know.

 

“Simon Case was in these meetings and so were others. They may have to couch their words — but they are not going to lie. The trouble is it’s true. It’s quite well known. The difference is that for the first time someone who was in the room is going to say it publicly.” The source added that it was well known in Whitehall at the time that Cummings was frustrated with the prime minister. “He could see what the right thing to do was — and he [Johnson] wouldn’t do it. There was evidence for it. There was evidence coming in from the NHS.

 

“If you’re pushing hard and the prime minister says no then I don’t think it’s crazy that at some point you want to come out and say I pushed for this thing.”

 

Yet others take a different view. One of the people involved in the discussions at the time said that Cummings had not been a big presence and that Johnson was far from alone in being sceptical about another lockdown.

 

They pointed out that case numbers were still very small and that there was limited evidence — either then or now — that the two-week circuit-break lockdown, which was being proposed would have been effective.

 

“He’s looking to rewrite history — and obviously in a certain way,” they said. “It certainly wasn’t the case that it was only the prime minister holding out against the lockdown. There were a lot of others who were against it as well and in fact the cabinet was pretty split. I’d hear him [Cummings] occasionally on calls chip in from the corner of the room. But he wasn’t deeply involved in it. He was off doing his basic crackpot ideas — like moonshot testing and stuff like that.”

 

Another source involved in the discussions agreed. “Cummings was absolutely pivotal before Barnard Castle. After that he receded and wasn’t driving things in the same way he was previously,” they said.

“A lot of this is just Dom being a dick. I don’t know what he told the prime minister privately but I don’t think anybody believes a word he says.” Another source pointed out that Wales, which imposed a circuit-breaker lockdown in mid-October, had not fared noticeably better than England.

 

Others question Cummings’s motivation. Having been in effect dismissed by Johnson in November some see this as score-settling rather than an objective exercise in learning lessons from Covid.

 

An MP on the committee to which he will give evidence made clear that he was far from reluctant about appearing. “He is not being summoned against his will shall we say,” the MP said. He said, however, that the committee would not let Cummings use his appearance to settle scores.

 

“Cummings has been invited to the committee to answer our questions and they’ll be our questions,” the MP said. “It’s not going to be a press conference.”

 

An ally of Cummings insisted that he was not driven by a desire for revenge but genuinely believed that bad decisions had been made.

 

“He’s a big boy. The game’s the game to Dom. He knew he was there because he was useful to the prime minister and he was got rid of when he wasn’t.” The question is how much damage Cummings’s re-emergence and his testimony about what did or did not happen in the run-up to the second lockdown will do the prime minister politically.

 

The second wave was far worse than the first — and any suggestion by those “in the room” that it could have been avoided if Johnson had taken a different approach will worry Downing Street.

 

The vaccine rollout has blunted some of the criticism of the prime minister and it is arguable, at least, that it was the emergence of the new variant in November rather than the decisions made in September and October that caused the real damage.

 

As one source sympathetic to Cummings put it: “Politically the sun is shining for Boris. The vaccine is going dambusters, and any problems seem to be more with supply than how they’re rolling it out and the supply thing will be sorted in a few weeks. It will be a negative day or two of stories. Is it more than that right now? Not really.”

As much as it's hoped Boris will be forced to fall on his own sword, Cummings has some kind of neck on him to accuse others of fucking up lockdowns after his actions basically nullified their full effect. 

[Guest]

54 minutes ago, easytoslip said:

I woke up with a tentacle instead of an arm, other than that all sound. 

I read this in a Murray Walker voice.