UK politics - Dry Your Eyes Mate, ...

[The Anti-Targ]

I think the "saving on paperwork" reason for officially residing in tax havens could be completely negated if there were robust international agreements across at least the OECD countries about tax status and tax residency and tax liabilities for multi-country sources of income. But it seems not many countries are all that keen to talk about that kind of thing just yet.

[polishgenius]

I don't believe Hamilton moved to Monaco to save on his paperwork - he earns just about enough money to afford to hire people to do that paperwork for him. He did also admit one time that taxes were part of his reason for moving to Switzerland. I do believe it's perfectly plausible he doesn't do that anymore and now lives in Monaco because that's where he lives and doesn't have any obligation to move back to the UK just to pay more tax there. The plane thing was much more recent bullshit, and can't really be spun positively any way you look at it, but it's also totally believable that he was guilty of thoughtlesness and negligence (ie just nodding and signing papers when his accountants told him to) but either way not a great look.


But ultimately in the grand scheme of things even though I find him annoying on the team radio Hamilton's an iconic and genuinely important and positively influential figure within sport and complaining over him getting a knighthood when compared to some of the other people getting them - Iain Duncan Smith for fuck's sake- just seems pointless.

[The Anti-Targ]

You still pay accountants on an hourly basis, so the less paperwork they have to do the less you have to pay them, and very rich people are no different to the rest of us when it comes to paying for stuff, they still want to pay as little as possible for everything.

[mormont]

Can we just agree that honours are all classist imperialist fluff and nonsense and that the only people who have ever come out of the honours list announcements with any credibility at all are those who refuse them on principle?

[DanteGabriel]

1 hour ago, mormont said:

Can we just agree that honours are all classist imperialist fluff and nonsense and that the only people who have ever come out of the honours list announcements with any credibility at all are those who refuse them on principle?

Can we make an exception for Terry Pratchett, who forged his own sword for his knighting?

[Castellan]

What is the business I have just caught on the news about the UK deciding to vaccinate with a long interval between the two jabs? Pfizer has pointed out that they tested it on the basis of a three week interval and I think they said or someone said that a 3 month interval was too long.

Just so stupid. 

[Spockydog]

1 hour ago, Castellan said:

What is the business I have just caught on the news about the UK deciding to vaccinate with a long interval between the two jabs? Pfizer has pointed out that they tested it on the basis of a three week interval and I think they said or someone said that a 3 month interval was too long.

Just so stupid. 

I'm guessing corruption or incompetence, probably a bit of both.

[ants]

With the Brexit deal, what ended up being the position for services? Especially financial services?

[Spockydog]

2 minutes ago, ants said:

With the Brexit deal, what ended up being the position for services? Especially financial services?

Pretty bad, apparently.

[polishgenius]

1 hour ago, Castellan said:

What is the business I have just caught on the news about the UK deciding to vaccinate with a long interval between the two jabs? Pfizer has pointed out that they tested it on the basis of a three week interval and I think they said or someone said that a 3 month interval was too long.

Just so stupid. 

They've basically decided that having more people partly shielded faster is better than having some people properly shielded and it takign longer. Completely ignoring that by the time they finish partially shielding everyone it's entirely possible that they'll need to start all over again with the first lot or just have broken the chance to do it.

[Castellan]

I didn't get the details but you would think people at continuing high risk like medical staff should get the two doses and be done with it asap.

I wouldn't like the idea of a whole lot of people wandering around thinking they must be protected because the government said to do it this way, and feeling free to circulate and do what they like.

[Spockydog]

10 minutes ago, Castellan said:

I didn't get the details but you would think people at continuing high risk like medical staff should get the two doses and be done with it asap.

 

Absolutely. Especially when you read stuff like this.

 NHS staff fear speaking out over crisis in English hospitals

Quote

Nine months ago, Boris Johnson praised staff at St Thomas’ for saving his life. Now, a senior intensive care nurse at the London hospital has warned that patient care is being compromised because of staff shortages and a failure to plan for the second Covid wave.

Dave Carr, an intensive care charge nurse, is one of many NHS workers desperate for the public to know what is going on inside their hospitals at a time when misinformation and scepticism about the virus are rife.

“The public needs to be aware of what’s happening. This is worse than the first wave; we have more patients than we had in the first wave and these patients are as sick as they were in the first wave. Obviously, we’ve got additional treatments that we can use now, but patients are still dying, and they will die,” said Carr.

As a representative for the union Unite, Carr feels emboldened to speak out. But across the NHS, many more staff claim they have been threatened with disciplinary action or even dismissal if they put their head above the parapet.

“People need to understand the problems we are having and the situations we are facing, rather than this ridiculous notion that we are all in empty hospitals learning TikTok dances, which couldn’t be further from the truth,” said an occupational therapist in Hampshire. “We’re being pressured into pretending everything is all right for the benefit of the popularity of the government. They are trying to underplay the situation so that people don’t look behind the curtain and see what’s happening.”

Carr, who has been an intensive care specialist for 21 years, said that while more lives were being saved at St Thomas’, those patients have to be in hospital for longer, leading to more pressure on hospitals, “because we can actually fix more patients than we could the first time round”.

He warned that St Thomas’ was now treating patients from other hospitals in the area that were near collapse.

For the past nine months they've been telling us, "PROTECT THE NHS. PROTECT THE NHS".

And now they can actually do that, quite easily it would seem, they're doing this.

The only people advocating this are the morons in charge, along with the Chief Medical Mouthpiece. 

[Liffguard]

9 hours ago, Castellan said:

What is the business I have just caught on the news about the UK deciding to vaccinate with a long interval between the two jabs? Pfizer has pointed out that they tested it on the basis of a three week interval and I think they said or someone said that a 3 month interval was too long.

Just so stupid. 

I'm not a microbiologist, but a friend of mine is. She tells me that if you wanted to deliberately engineer a vaccine resistant virus then this would be a pretty good way to go about it.

I'm not saying that the conservatives actually are trying to do this. Merely that in their desperate, callous, incompetent scrambling they don't actually care how many people they end up killing.

[ljkeane]

Hmm, they're clearly doing it because they think the NHS is going to be overwhelmed by the number of covid patients over the next couple of months and as a consequence a lot of people are going to die. I don't know how much of a risk this is but I don't think it's as straightforward a choice as people here are making out. 

[Heartofice]

I think there is enough evidence that the majority of the protection comes from the first jab, and the second jab adds to that. 
 

If it means you can get far more people with a high level of immunity in a shorter amount of time then it looks like a good decision.

[BigFatCoward]

15 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

I think there is enough evidence that the majority of the protection comes from the first jab, and the second jab adds to that. 
 

If it means you can get far more people with a high level of immunity in a shorter amount of time then it looks like a good decision.

The Pfizer one I think it was something like 90% after first jab.  If that is the case and there are limited negatives, it seems crazy not to. It buys us more time if nothing else. 

[ljkeane]

On the other hand with the Pfizer one they are very much rolling the dice. There's apparently at least some evidence the AstraZenica vaccine works (maybe it even works better) with a 12 week gap between doses. With the Pfizer vaccine it's based on just assuming it should work.

It's definitely a risk but we shouldn't ignore that there's significant risks involved the other way too.

[DaveSumm]

1 hour ago, ljkeane said:

It's definitely a risk but we shouldn't ignore that there's significant risks involved the other way too.

Yea, I think this is a long way from clear cut. I wouldn’t like to have to make this call. My gut says that right now, the priority is to reduce numbers as much as possible and a longer gap seems to be the way to do that. If we weren’t looking at over 1000 deaths a day again soon, then maybe play it safer. But if the first dose is over 50% effective, then (very crude maths that I’m happy to be corrected on) I’d rather two people were less than half as likely to get the virus than one person was 90% less likely. That seems to be the greater good at the moment.

[Which Tyler]

IIRC, we'd been told that the AstraZeneca vaccine was most effective with somewhere around an 8-10 week gap.
The trouble is, they were subdividing their groups, rather than having full groups for each dose strategy, so it's in the secondary data analysis, and with correspondingly low confidence intervals (and being not-yet published, and therefore peer-reviewed).
If we waited for this sort of thing, you'd need full sample sizes for each sub division - so single dose, half dose-full dose, full dose-half dose, full dose-full dose for each of 2 week, 4 week, 6 week, 8 week, 10 week and 12 week intervals. So 24 times the number of volunteers (or waiting 24 times as long - so 12 years rather than 6 months).

This is relatively normal in medical trials (though I'm far from an expert in vaccines specifically). You answer your primary researrch question, but design your trial to allow for further, deeper anaylsis of the data collected - but that secondary, with all the problems associated with being secondary.

However, it's an educated guess that the same applies to the Pfizer vaccine, as they didn't try different dosage regimes (but immune responces are still immune responces).

 

IIRC (my virology was 20 years ago, and cursory), typically when vaccines require 2nd doses, the first gives you a decent response, and immunity; but the second gives you both a top-up, and prolonged immunity. As far as these vaccines are concerned, we simply don't know - we cannot know anything "long-term" about a virus that was first identified about a year ago.

 

Personally, I'm instinctively uncomfortable with a 12 week wait between doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine - but that's based on gut feel, with no evidence - whilst if AstraZeneca and Oxford University themselves are comfortable with 12 weeks, then they know a fuck load more than anyone here.

For the Pfizer vaccine, they haven't tested anyone at all with a 12 week wait; so that doesn't sound worth the risk - but it's still an educated guess based on how vaccines work, not just a panic measure pulled out of Johnson's johnson (NB this is a unique vaccine in humans, and I'm entirely unfamiliar with the history of this type of vaccine in vetinary medicine).

 

As ever with this unpresidented pandemic, I'm not going to overly castigate anyone for making mistakes, or taking a risk that doesn't pay off - I reserve that for entirely foreseeable mistakes (such as directly undermining their own message and eroding confidence in the advice), going explicitly against the advice of those who know (which sounds like it includes Pfizer, but I'd need to see their wording), and repeating previous mistakes (delaying inevitable action).

For AstraZeneca this is a calculated risk, based on (low-confidence) evidence. For Pfizer this is a calculated risk based on immune responces to vaccines.

The upside is that we get immunity into twice as many of our most vulnerable people.
Potential downside is that those same people may need a 3rd dose (once we've secured enough, and rolled out vaccination programmes nationally, and can be done with much less hassle).
Other risks are from the repeated mistake of muddled messaging and eroding confidence / support of recommended measures. I'm not worried about "vaccine resistant viruses" as (again, my virology is out of date, and cursory) that's a major concern for antibiotics/antivirals, but not for vaccines.

[The Anti-Targ]

3 hours ago, Liffguard said:

I'm not a microbiologist, but a friend of mine is. She tells me that if you wanted to deliberately engineer a vaccine resistant virus then this would be a pretty good way to go about it.

I'm not saying that the conservatives actually are trying to do this. Merely that in their desperate, callous, incompetent scrambling they don't actually care how many people they end up killing.

I don't think you heard her right. A microorganism can't be resistant to a vaccine since a vaccine has no direct effect on them. A vaccine primes the immune system to fight off a disease before you become seriously sick and more importantly before you become infectious. Ineffective use of a vaccine makes the recipient's immune system less prepared for disease challenge, but it doesn't make the virus resistant to anything. A vaccine can become ineffective if a virus mutates to the extent that the parts of the virus the immune system recognises and neutralises change sufficiently that the immune response in the vaccine no longer works. But that is a function of the rate of mutation of a virus, not the effectiveness of the vaccination programme. This virus does not mutate in the important ways (i.e. the spike protein) that would make the vaccines ineffective. Poor deployment of the vaccination programme will simply not stop many vaccinated people from getting sick. Indirectly this increases the chance for a mutation to occur against which the vaccine is not effective because more people are getting infected than would if the vaccination programme is properly deployed. However this is only a marginal increase in risk, since we've had millions of people all around the world already get the disease, and so far AFAIK the vaccine is effective against every identified strain is

It should be noted that IIRC there is a strong immune response to the vaccine (i.e. people are maximally protected) in about 70% [EDIT: 90%? OK I'll buy it because I haven't read the vaccination reporting for a while and my memory might be off, that makes a one shot programme even more sensible to maximise coverage in as short a time as possible (and saves money)] of people after the first dose. This is not good enough for a proper vaccination programme hence the need for a second shot to get it up to 95% maximally protected. There may be a situation where to give a larger number of people a single dose of the vaccine with a 70% immunity rate is better than giving a smaller number of people 2 shots at the recommended interval. And given it's possible herd immunity kicks in at about 70% immunity it might not be entirely dumb to go for a single shot if logistics of a 2 shot programme is proving difficult (why it's proving difficult is a whole different discussion on resourcing and competence). Maybe a mix of both could be most effective, two shot programme for the vulnerable populations and healthcare workers, one shot programme for everyone else. Not ideal but if you want to get the whole population (other than the anti-vaxx brigade) through in as short a period of time as possible then people in the everyone else group only getting one shot, until everyone in the everyone else group has had one shot might be the way to go. You could then do the second shot in that group in a semi-reverse order.