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Scotland is now the highest covid infection country in Europe, yet Sturgeon has been draconian in her dictat.
Hi Clark, I have friends in the rainforest in Northern Queensland who I am in regular contact, they claim almost nobody they know, including themselves will take the covid vaccine, they think they are immune in the jungle because they are remote but it is a tourist area.
“The number of Covid-19 cases in Sydney has been rising recently as the highly transmissible Delta variant fuels the spread of the virus, despite Australia imposing severe lockdowns on the country’s four largest cities and parts of the outback.
Berejiklian said that, despite a two-week lockdown, people who are infected have spread the virus through community transmission in Sydney”
There comes a point in a pandemic when chasing your tail is a futile exercise. There is no longer any possibility, judging from what has happened so far, the political scenario, the command of the agenda by ‘libertarians’ converting any public health restraining issue into a political personal freedom issue, the rising tide of conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers, the incompetent Tory government and the even more loony right wing of the party, the toothless opposition and so on, to reverse any of this and produce an effective actual proper lockdown. I am afraid Boris is still after ‘herd immunity’ backed by the vaccine program. But in one of the greatest open experiments on mankind, to test how you can efficiently produce variants that are vaccine resistent, we are very far advanced now and leading the world. The purpose of lifting the restrictions now is purely to pass on all responsibility to the citizen, over to you now, no rescue, no furlough, no help for industry and may the devil take the hindmost. Vicious neoliberal capitalism has now reared its bloody fangs and is out for the cull of the weak and vulnerable.
Herd Immunity is Boris aim, always was and still is.
However, we do now have many vaccines, most of these seem to work.
Any people who have been resistant, now is your last chance, before 19th to get jabbed, before you are run down by Delta covid.– “Sturgeon has been draconian in her dictat”
She has been draconian, it’s her nature, but she hasn’t acted effectively; she hasn’t imposed effective travel restrictions when it mattered, and when travel restrictions have been implicit lockdown rules, they haven’t been enforced.
– “The number of Covid-19 cases in Sydney has been rising recently…”
Yes, it peaked at 49 in a single day, 40 per day in a seven-day average, and has held steady or possibly even fallen a bit in the last few days. Compare that with the UK’s 25,000 per day and rising fast; even allowing for the smaller Australian population it’s at least two orders of magnitude better. Sydney achieved that with a two week lockdown, compared with the UK’s four months. Test-and-trace is practicable under Australia’s numbers; there’s no way all the contacts of 25,000 people can be traced before it spreads yet further, and that 25,000 is probably between only half and a third of actual infections.
SA, it’s like global heating; the argument being lost will ensure that it will eventually be won but, unfortunately, the hard way. Eventually enough people will be personally affected that denial and dismissal will be obviously delusional. The difference from climate change is that the scale is national rather than global; China will still be there doing just fine thank you, as an example for a better approach.
Vicious neoliberal capitalism is writing its own death warrant because the weak and vulnerable are both its labour force and its market. The pyramid shall fall from the bottom up.
Spain covid-skyrocketing
“We can’t pretend to have defeated the virus,” she told a news conference.
“The pandemic has not ended, the new variants are very contagious and we still have significant segments of the population that are not vaccinated!” she exclaimed
Catalonia nightclubs will close from this weekend.
Beach parties to have no more than 500.So they are not really going to impede Delta in Spain, at all.
They are buggeredcovid-pick-a-side
it would seem that the side covid is picking
is Europemassive rocketing, especially U.K.
An old woman in Belgium has died and they have since determined that she had been infected with two different strains of covid.
“Summer turned out to be different in the Netherlands” –
https://twitter.com/HuguenotHouse/status/1414150013048004610/photo/1
Australia and the Isle of Man are both showing difficulty keeping a lid on Delta – but with single-day peak counts of 64 and 25 infections respectively, both are orders of magnitude closer to doing so than most countries. Even if they do lose control of it now, their populations will have spent a fraction of the time under lockdown until vaccination became available, and Australia will have avoided tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of cases of long term health damage.
Sweden’s famously lax approach has resulted in them becoming world leaders in long covid among the young. 33,000 children have had long covid in the UK, of whom 9,000 are still afflicted. This is nothing compared to what we will see when all restrictions are removed in just over a week. We’re looking at a devastating third wave in August, larger than anything seen to date.
This makes me particularly angry with the denialists. They bang on and on about Sweden, and they focus on death statistics only so that they can claim that the illness is of no consequence to younger people and children. Not one of them has come back to say “sorry, I was wrong”.
Thailand has changed its vaccine policy to mix China’s Sinovac with the AstraZeneca vaccine in a bid to boost protection.
The decision comes after hundreds of medical workers caught Covid despite being fully vaccinated with Sinovac.
Instead of two Sinovac shots, people will now receive the AstraZeneca vaccine after their first Sinovac shot.
Health workers already fully vaccinated with Sinovac will also receive a third booster from a different vaccine.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-57801251I believe Chile was using sinovac, yet they still had a massive upswing of covid cases.
It would seem sinovac is almost useless.Mr. Macron has yesterday announced that all health care givers in France either have to be covid vaccinated or they will get no further pay.
Personally, I think Mr. Macron has this right, we should do the same in the United Kingdom“The mandatory vaccinations will apply to anyone who comes into contact with vulnerable people, and therefore applies to everyone who works in hospitals, clinics and care homes, regardless of their role.
They must be vaccinated by 15 September or risk not being paid”
A response from ‘J’ has not been forthcoming, though there have been some attempts which were deemed unacceptable. Please note that ‘J’ wasn’t banned, but seems to be self-excluding.
You may recall that ‘J’ was notified about being placed on pre-moderation, in the comment dated June 23 @ 7:32pm, due to a string of violations of commenting guidelines and etiquette along with attacks on the integrity of moderators. Minutes later ‘J’ posted a brief reply which merely expressed “contempt” for moderation decisions – it wasn’t published, for obvious reasons. The next reply comprised only a link to a news story about cases of post-vaccination heart inflammation in 8 boys in San Diego; this too was deleted for making no original argument.
‘J’ posted again 5 days later, and the next five replies (28 June 28 – 1 July) were approved for publication because they were judged to be meaningful contributions to the debate.
‘J’s subsequent reply on 2 July was not approved as it was simply a jeering provocation devoid of any argumentative content: “Very much enjoying the spectacle of this circle jerk. It’s been very revealing so far.” It also suggested that ‘J’ did not intend to engage other commenters in good faith.
‘J’ then tried to post a complaint about that comment being censored by the mods, along with yet another insult directed towards the other participants in the discussion. There was no reason for a moderator to approve that one for publication either.
The next proffered reply (on 5 July) comprised 3 web links to information about a Board member of Pfizer, followed by a note for moderators: “[Mods, I’ve copied the post and I’ll keep reposting it till everyone on this blog has seen it.]”.
It was quickly followed by two identical replies exclaiming: “Oh look at that photo —–> He’s also a board member at the World Economic Forum: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/authors/jim-smith”
‘J’ has not tried to post any replies in the 10 days since then. Despite those complaints about being blocked and censored, ‘J’ is still allowed to make a contribution to the debate, provided there is a genuine attempt to engage in the discussion without jeering, false accusations or snide remarks. As that possibility seems quite remote now, this discussion may have run its course.
Mods, thanks for the info.
The link to weforum.org returns “Sorry, but we can’t find the page you were looking for”, but it appears to be wrongly formatted – the “”” seems wrong. “&” in a link generally specifies an additional parameter, and is inappropriate unless an initial parameter had been specified with a “?”. I therefore removed “””, and discovered a link that works:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/authors/jim-smith
– “Jim began his career as a journalist and rose through the ranks at Thomson Newspapers to become responsible for operations in North America. He then led a number of professional publishing businesses serving the legal, regulatory and academic markets. He served as global head of Human Resources before becoming Chief Operating Officer of The Thomson Corporation. Following the acquisition of Reuters in 2008, Jim ran the Professional division of the combined company. He was named Chief Executive Officer in January 2012.
– Jim is a director of Pfizer, Inc. He also serves on the board of the World Economic Forum’s Partnering Against Corruption Initiative and is a member of the Forum’s International Business Council, as well as on the International Advisory Boards of British American Business and the Atlantic Council.”
This may well be what J would like us to see.
J, I’m not sure what to say to you. Personally I’m furious that so many governments are letting a virus with which we have zero experience run through the population, with unknown effects for decades to come. Appropriate social measures could virtually stamp it out in five weeks and indeed did so in China; it seems that the only obstacle is neoliberal ideology.
This makes getting infected almost certain, just a matter of time, placing enormous pressure upon people’s choices of whether or not to get vaccinated – with the only vaccines being very new and thus lacking long term data. The pharmaceutical companies are thus guaranteed immediate profit.
It’s a very unpleasant situation to be in, but please don’t rant at people like me because we’re stuck with it just the same as you.
This is all helping me clarify my ideas about conspiracy theory.
Conspiracy theory is in a sense the ultimate politicisation of argument, because it insists that we must consider nothing but political information about its chosen issues. J has just given us an example – Jim Smith has been senior in the “MSM”, and is on the World Economic Forum, the Atlantic Council and the board of Pfizer (these all being political issues); therefore the vaccines must be dangerous and/or the pandemic a hoax or whatever (which are medical/scientific matters).
In conspiracy theory, all non-political evidence must be dismissed as fake due to the aforesaid political issues – unless it happens to support the conspiracists’ contention, in which case it’s slam-dunk unarguable Truth. If it’s marginal or contested evidence, expert opinion contradicting the consensus, or from a professor speaking outside his field, it becomes “what they don’t want you to know”.
[ Mod: Here’s another offering from ‘J’, returning after a long absence. Once again it’s a procedural complaint rather than a substantive contribution to the debate. ]
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‘J’ is still allowed to make a contribution to the debate, provided there is a genuine attempt to engage in the discussion without jeering, false accusations or snide remarks.
@Mod. You haven’t bothered to comment on the extremely substantive posts which you censored before the responses you selectively quote and allude to, so what would be the point?
I continue to write, but where it is possible to develop an argument that isn’t butchered or censored entirely by bullies with a badge.
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[ Mod: J, moderators aren’t going to engage with the arguments you put forward in your “substantive posts”. That’s not what moderators are for. The other contributors here are perfectly capable of doing so if they feel it’s necessary.Your replies were removed not for the arguments you put forward, but for infringing the commenting etiquette – as you’ve just done again by posting a moan about moderation in a thread about covid.
“bullies with a badge”.
(“We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!”) If you think you’re being bullied, please start a new topic in the Blog Support Forum and make your case there. It will be visible to the system admin and to Craig, even if it doesn’t appear publicly. Thanks. ]
