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Getting through the second doses quickly now too. Well done to the NHS and all involved. 👍

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16 minutes ago, Herman said:

Getting through the second doses quickly now too. Well done to the NHS and all involved. 👍

Yes they seem to have ramped it up a bit despite the good data coming in for delaying both AZ and Pfizer.

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5 minutes ago, ricardo said:

Yes they seem to have ramped it up a bit despite the good data coming in for delaying both AZ and Pfizer.

Maybe they know something we dont. Anyway good that you're no longer hugging the guzzunder, all that stress aint good for nobody 😀

Edited by Van wink

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1 minute ago, keelansgrandad said:

Its good but hard to swallow that Blair suggested it.

Yeh I remeber the interview well, today program radio 4 when he first mentioned it, maybe he has something on his consience making him feel a need to preserve life.      

Edited by Van wink

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7 minutes ago, nevermind, neoliberalism has had it said:

there are two different meanings for pr..k so why does the bot moderating not recognise this, we are talking of vaccinating, not members.

😀

Luckily your doctor wasn't **** Van **** of S****horpe.

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15 hours ago, Van wink said:

Yeh I remeber the interview well, today program radio 4 when he first mentioned it, maybe he has something on his consience making him feel a need to preserve life.      

Absolutely nothing to do with Tony Blair or Johnson regards the Oxford Vaccine it was how it was presented to the MHRA that Oxford felt the missing bit of their jigsaw was an 8 - 12 week gap. This was discovered during the trial by accident and Oxford-AstraZeneca said they would release the Lancet paper as soon as they had more cases which was done yesterday via a Lancet paper. The Lancet paper is available on the internet showing it brings efficacy up.

The decision was taken to do the same with Pfizer, where the jury is out as there is no data yet. The data from Israel is based on dose 2 being given 3 weeks after dose 1 and it is 99.96 effective 2 weeks after the 2nd dose. Hopefully the same will apply for the second dose being delayed.

It is important that Oxford second dose is taken 8 -  12 weeks after the first dose, and always has been. The new efficacy is confirmed at 76% an increase from the original 62% which was exactly as expected ( although it was hoped it would be higher ). 

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The latest Israeli data shows that Pfizer is far more effective than the trials suggested. The efficacy 2 weeks after dose 2 was an overall figure of in excess of 98%. 
Crowds are now allowed back at 75% capacity ( subject to a max 500 ).

In Turkey where a similar scheme is run using Sovac ( Chinese vaccine ) it is becoming so successful they are aiming to open up again at the end of March. That efficacy is showing the same sort of results in the field.

Begining to look better around the world.

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As at yesterday 202, 354, 341 doses had been administered. 88 countries are now vaccinating. The supply is visibly moving up every day.

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1 hour ago, Well b back said:

Absolutely nothing to do with Tony Blair or Johnson regards the Oxford Vaccine it was how it was presented to the MHRA that Oxford felt the missing bit of their jigsaw was an 8 - 12 week gap. This was discovered during the trial by accident and Oxford-AstraZeneca said they would release the Lancet paper as soon as they had more cases which was done yesterday via a Lancet paper. The Lancet paper is available on the internet showing it brings efficacy up.

The decision was taken to do the same with Pfizer, where the jury is out as there is no data yet. The data from Israel is based on dose 2 being given 3 weeks after dose 1 and it is 99.96 effective 2 weeks after the 2nd dose. Hopefully the same will apply for the second dose being delayed.

It is important that Oxford second dose is taken 8 -  12 weeks after the first dose, and always has been. The new efficacy is confirmed at 76% an increase from the original 62% which was exactly as expected ( although it was hoped it would be higher ). 

Blair actually propsed a one vaccine stategy, pretty much end of, dont waste vaccine giving it to people twice was his view.😀

 Oxford had MHRA approval for a 4 to 12 week interval I believe, the decision was made to administer second dose towards the end of the 12 week schedule.

Pfizer was proposed 3 to 12 weeks by the JVC I believe and recommendation taken on board by the government and again administered towards the end of the schedule, in the face of a lot of quite warranted critisim, but data coming though would seem to support the decision made, we of course await a definitive view.

I'm pleased we made these decisions, many have been made in error  during the pandemic but this one was correct IMHO.

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4 minutes ago, Van wink said:

Blair actually propsed a one vaccine stategy, pretty much end of, dont waste vaccine giving it to people twice was his view.😀

 Oxford had MHRA approval for a 4 to 12 week interval I believe, the decision was made to administer second dose towards the end of the 12 week schedule.

Pfizer was proposed 3 to 12 weeks by the JVC I believe and recommendation taken on board by the government and again administered towards the end of the schedule, in the face of a lot of quite warranted critisim, but data coming though would seem to support the decision made, we of course await a definitive view.

I'm pleased we made these decisions, many have been made in error  during the pandemic but this one was correct IMHO.

Sorry with the Oxford vaccine it was based on data, unless Andrew Pollard lied to the world. You will note all approvals for Oxford-AstraZeneca are 8 - 12 weeks not just the U.K. 

As was known at the time because of an accident with the dosing the reason it was not so effective was either, a smaller dose first, or a delay to 8 - 12 weeks the latter the most likely.

 

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1 hour ago, Well b back said:

Sorry with the Oxford vaccine it was based on data, unless Andrew Pollard lied to the world. You will note all approvals for Oxford-AstraZeneca are 8 - 12 weeks not just the U.K. 

As was known at the time because of an accident with the dosing the reason it was not so effective was either, a smaller dose first, or a delay to 8 - 12 weeks the latter the most likely.

 

If you are correct WBB then the press release from the MHRA on the 30 Dec must be wrong, unless I have misunderstood it, when it states approval for 4-12 weeks and not 8-12 weeks. Maybe we are talking at cross purposes, I'm certainly not suggesting that Andew Pollard lied.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/oxford-universityastrazeneca-covid-19-vaccine-approved

"The Oxford University/AstraZeneca vaccine has been approved for use for people 18 years or older and consists of two doses, with the second dose administered 4-12 weeks after the first dose. The transportation and storage requirements for this vaccine mean that it needs to be kept at temperatures of 2C to 8C, which is similar to a conventional fridge for up to six months and can be administered within existing healthcare settings."

 

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Roys has always been a hotbed for mingling and drooling over the size of the sausage rolls.

Edited by Van wink

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1 hour ago, Van wink said:

Roys has always been a hotbed for mingling and drooling over the size of the sausage rolls.

I once had a jumbo sausage roll at CR and it had no sausage ! Young girl behind the counter didn’t believe me, said I had eaten it.

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5 minutes ago, CANARYKING said:

I once had a jumbo sausage roll at CR and it had no sausage ! Young girl behind the counter didn’t believe me, said I had eaten it.

Not nice 

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23 hours ago, keelansgrandad said:

Its good but hard to swallow that Blair suggested it.

Blair's organisation suggested it. I am not sure tony himself came up with the idea....

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36 minutes ago, Barbe bleu said:

Blair's organisation suggested it. I am not sure tony himself came up with the idea....

I’m pretty sure the scientists would have thought of this regardless and that it may have been first suggested via a connection with TB is irrelevant to it being adopted - which has clearly been the result of the scientific analysis and common sense.

 

the fact that an idea may have first been floated by someone I find repellant doesn’t stop it being a good idea !

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23 minutes ago, It's Character Forming said:

I’m pretty sure the scientists would have thought of this regardless and that it may have been first suggested via a connection with TB is irrelevant to it being adopted - which has clearly been the result of the scientific analysis and common sense.

 

the fact that an idea may have first been floated by someone I find repellant doesn’t stop it being a good idea !

What Blair suggested hasn’t been adopted ICF, but fully concur with your view of the man.

The decisions on vaccine policy were as you say made by government being based on advice from the JVC.

 

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21414c90-8f1a-445b-989f-74a955755b28-a9a7e63c-1c16-4858-a124-820e4d563f80

Looks like the majority of Brexiteers have been jabbed...

Pull up the drawbridge! 😆 😉 👍

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This article from the Telegraph pulls no punches when it describes the state of the vaccine rollout in Europe.

 

Costs are rising exponentially for Europe's disinformation war on vaccine science

Europe has succumbed to the nocebo effect. If people are primed to believe that something makes them ill, they discover illness. It is the reverse placebo.

Tens of millions have received the AstraZeneca jab in the UK and India without meaningful side-effects beyond minor - and desirable - signs of an immune reaction. Yet frontline health workers in Germany, Austria, France, and Spain have convinced themselves that it is doing them real harm, and that it is also ineffective.

The nocebo effect is a known pathology in medical science. It has been well-documented following false reporting on statins. One clinical trial studying headaches from electric currents found that two-thirds of the volunteers in the harmless control group also had headaches. Nocebo responses can be powerful and physiological. The symptoms are real.

That is probably what has been happening with AstraZeneca in Germany where fake news has run rampant, to the point of mass hysteria. Braunschweig’s Herzogin-Elisabeth hospital reported that 37 out of 88 staff reported sick the day after receiving the jab. The same happened to a quarter of 300 ambulance workers in Dortmund. 

There can be isolated bad batches with any vaccine but this has spread into a broader "me too" epidemic. Clinics in Lower Saxony have suspended use of the jab altogether. Germany faces a systematic rejection of the vaccine, yet it lacks alternatives to plug the gap. Germany's Central Institute for Health Insurance (ZI) says the bogus AstraZeneca scare could delay the entire vaccine rollout by two months. 

That could prove to be an expensive upset at a time when the British B.1.1.1.7 variant is rapidly taking over.  France is already where the UK was in early December just before when the epidemic went parabolic. The variant was 36pc of all French cases late last week, reaching 54pc in some departments. The South African and a Brazilian variants are more than 10pc in four departments.

French epidemiologists say the apparent stability in new cases is an illusion. There are two separate epidemics: the old one is declining with the current partial restrictions; the new B.1.1.1.7 epidemic is relentlessly rising. The numbers seem to knock each other out for a while until the variant reaches an inflexion point and goes wild.

This effect is nicely described by Gary Dagorn in Le Monde, one of the best pieces of reporting so far in the European press on Britain’s epidemic. It concludes that France is “highly likely” to follow the UK into the same furnace unless there is immediate counter-action.

“I think we’re in a situation pretty similar to what happened in England in December,” said Marc Baguelin, a French epidemiologist at Imperial College, London. The French national health and research institute has reached the same conclusion. 

Emmanuel Macron has taken a gamble by defying his scientific advisers and resisting a fresh lockdown. His stand seems popular. He is enjoying a small bounce in the polls. But if the bet goes wrong he - and France - are in serious trouble. He will have to impose the third great national lockdown in worse circumstances, after the new variant has become prevalent. Mr Macron will then need the AstraZeneca vaccine urgently. 

But having falsely declared it “quasi-ineffective” among those over 65 — for whatever political motive — he has poisoned the well. The French no longer want to take the vaccine. Hospital workers in Perigueux are demanding that they be given the Pfizer jab instead.

Italy is further behind France but on the same trajectory. The British variant is a quarter of cases in parts of the Mezzogiorno. Prof Andrea Crisanti, hero of the successful Veneto containment last year, says a fourth wave is now avoidable and is calling for an “immediate national lockdown”.

Germany is still at the bottom of this U-shaped epidemiological curve. It looks stable, but it is treacherous. The new variant is creeping up towards critical thresholds.  The difficulty is that the German press has now completely trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine, and in doing so fed the broader anti-vax movement.

No matter that the data pouring in from the UK’s mass vaccination campaign has beaten expectations. It has demonstrated near total efficacy against death and serious disease, protecting the elderly as presumed, and all without meaningful side-effects. A false story in Handelsblatt, citing government sources, has been echoed across the German media, and neither retracted nor adequately rebutted. Where there is smoke, there must be fire. Such is the national angst. 

Professor Christian Drosten, Angela Merkel’s Covid guru, is battling valiantly against disinformation. “There is always a fly in the ointment somewhere and people are looking at it with a magnifying glass. It is essential that we vaccinate as many people as quickly as possible,” he said.

It is the same message from Carsten Watzl from the German Society for Immunology. “To say that the AstraZeneca vaccine is second rate is completely off the mark, both scientifically and in terms of actual effects,” he said.

However, the damage is done. The concept of efficacy has been misunderstood. People think that if the rate is 70pc it means that 30pc are unprotected. If they were instead told that it is almost 100pc effective against serious illness, worries would ebb away - unless people have completely lost their sense of perspective.

Germany’s own regulators have contributed to the mistrust by withholding approval of the AstraZeneca jab for those over 65 on grounds of inadequate trial data. This was ‘t’ crossing and 'i’ dotting pedantry, a path followed by the French, Italians, and Spanish, who will not even allow it for the over-55s. 

There were no compelling reasons to argue that a standard viral vector vaccine would not be effective for the elderly.  The European Medicines Agency understood this and gave the green light. We now have fuller data confirming the validity of this hypothesis but it is too late. The rejectionists have already dug in their heels. 

The result is that Germany has used just 87,000 of the 736,800 AstraZeneca doses received so far. Spain had used 35,000 doses out of 418,000 delivered as of late last week. The precautionary principle has run amok. 

Where did this squalid saga begin? One could point the finger at Ursula von der Leyen. In December she sought to deflect criticism from the EU’s slow approval process and roll-out by trying to discredit British regulators. “Some countries started to vaccinate a little before Europe, it is true. But they resorted to emergency, 24-hour marketing authorisation procedures. The Commission and the member states agreed not to compromise on the safety and efficacy requirements,” she said.

This was false, irresponsible, and disgraceful. Europe will not suffer as many Covid deaths from the B.1.1.1.7 variant as the UK because some of its elderly are at least vaccinated, but it will pay a high economic price for wasting three months on the rollout before full reopening. 

The pandemic will not be contained in time to avert an extra quarter of double-dip slump. There will be deeper labour hysteresis and economic scarring. Thousands more businesses will be pushed over the edge into insolvency once loan moratoria expire. 

Southern Europe risks losing a second tourist season, or much of it. Public debt ratios will be further beyond the point of no return later this year. The EU’s €750bn Recovery Fund  - in reality €390bn of grants spread across 27 states over five years - is trivial by US standards and is rapidly being overtaken by events.

There will have to be a much larger package to avert another lost decade, but the North is going to resist. Fiscal settings are already turning contractionary in Germany and Holland.  

The European Central Bank is holding the edifice together by chronic monetisation of Club Med debt issuance. This is an unstable equilibrium. It will not be tolerated indefinitely by the German people or the Verfassungsgericht once German inflation revives.

In short, there will have to be an internal eurozone restructuring of Italian, Portuguese and Spanish sovereign debt.  Covid policy failures have made this almost ineluctable. Europe has condemned itself to another traumatic financial and political moment.

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1 hour ago, Rock The Boat said:

This article from the Telegraph pulls no punches when it describes the state of the vaccine rollout in Europe.

 

Costs are rising exponentially for Europe's disinformation war on vaccine science

Europe has succumbed to the nocebo effect. If people are primed to believe that something makes them ill, they discover illness. It is the reverse placebo.

Tens of millions have received the AstraZeneca jab in the UK and India without meaningful side-effects beyond minor - and desirable - signs of an immune reaction. Yet frontline health workers in Germany, Austria, France, and Spain have convinced themselves that it is doing them real harm, and that it is also ineffective.

The nocebo effect is a known pathology in medical science. It has been well-documented following false reporting on statins. One clinical trial studying headaches from electric currents found that two-thirds of the volunteers in the harmless control group also had headaches. Nocebo responses can be powerful and physiological. The symptoms are real.

That is probably what has been happening with AstraZeneca in Germany where fake news has run rampant, to the point of mass hysteria. Braunschweig’s Herzogin-Elisabeth hospital reported that 37 out of 88 staff reported sick the day after receiving the jab. The same happened to a quarter of 300 ambulance workers in Dortmund. 

There can be isolated bad batches with any vaccine but this has spread into a broader "me too" epidemic. Clinics in Lower Saxony have suspended use of the jab altogether. Germany faces a systematic rejection of the vaccine, yet it lacks alternatives to plug the gap. Germany's Central Institute for Health Insurance (ZI) says the bogus AstraZeneca scare could delay the entire vaccine rollout by two months. 

That could prove to be an expensive upset at a time when the British B.1.1.1.7 variant is rapidly taking over.  France is already where the UK was in early December just before when the epidemic went parabolic. The variant was 36pc of all French cases late last week, reaching 54pc in some departments. The South African and a Brazilian variants are more than 10pc in four departments.

French epidemiologists say the apparent stability in new cases is an illusion. There are two separate epidemics: the old one is declining with the current partial restrictions; the new B.1.1.1.7 epidemic is relentlessly rising. The numbers seem to knock each other out for a while until the variant reaches an inflexion point and goes wild.

This effect is nicely described by Gary Dagorn in Le Monde, one of the best pieces of reporting so far in the European press on Britain’s epidemic. It concludes that France is “highly likely” to follow the UK into the same furnace unless there is immediate counter-action.

“I think we’re in a situation pretty similar to what happened in England in December,” said Marc Baguelin, a French epidemiologist at Imperial College, London. The French national health and research institute has reached the same conclusion. 

Emmanuel Macron has taken a gamble by defying his scientific advisers and resisting a fresh lockdown. His stand seems popular. He is enjoying a small bounce in the polls. But if the bet goes wrong he - and France - are in serious trouble. He will have to impose the third great national lockdown in worse circumstances, after the new variant has become prevalent. Mr Macron will then need the AstraZeneca vaccine urgently. 

But having falsely declared it “quasi-ineffective” among those over 65 — for whatever political motive — he has poisoned the well. The French no longer want to take the vaccine. Hospital workers in Perigueux are demanding that they be given the Pfizer jab instead.

Italy is further behind France but on the same trajectory. The British variant is a quarter of cases in parts of the Mezzogiorno. Prof Andrea Crisanti, hero of the successful Veneto containment last year, says a fourth wave is now avoidable and is calling for an “immediate national lockdown”.

Germany is still at the bottom of this U-shaped epidemiological curve. It looks stable, but it is treacherous. The new variant is creeping up towards critical thresholds.  The difficulty is that the German press has now completely trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine, and in doing so fed the broader anti-vax movement.

No matter that the data pouring in from the UK’s mass vaccination campaign has beaten expectations. It has demonstrated near total efficacy against death and serious disease, protecting the elderly as presumed, and all without meaningful side-effects. A false story in Handelsblatt, citing government sources, has been echoed across the German media, and neither retracted nor adequately rebutted. Where there is smoke, there must be fire. Such is the national angst. 

Professor Christian Drosten, Angela Merkel’s Covid guru, is battling valiantly against disinformation. “There is always a fly in the ointment somewhere and people are looking at it with a magnifying glass. It is essential that we vaccinate as many people as quickly as possible,” he said.

It is the same message from Carsten Watzl from the German Society for Immunology. “To say that the AstraZeneca vaccine is second rate is completely off the mark, both scientifically and in terms of actual effects,” he said.

However, the damage is done. The concept of efficacy has been misunderstood. People think that if the rate is 70pc it means that 30pc are unprotected. If they were instead told that it is almost 100pc effective against serious illness, worries would ebb away - unless people have completely lost their sense of perspective.

Germany’s own regulators have contributed to the mistrust by withholding approval of the AstraZeneca jab for those over 65 on grounds of inadequate trial data. This was ‘t’ crossing and 'i’ dotting pedantry, a path followed by the French, Italians, and Spanish, who will not even allow it for the over-55s. 

There were no compelling reasons to argue that a standard viral vector vaccine would not be effective for the elderly.  The European Medicines Agency understood this and gave the green light. We now have fuller data confirming the validity of this hypothesis but it is too late. The rejectionists have already dug in their heels. 

The result is that Germany has used just 87,000 of the 736,800 AstraZeneca doses received so far. Spain had used 35,000 doses out of 418,000 delivered as of late last week. The precautionary principle has run amok. 

Where did this squalid saga begin? One could point the finger at Ursula von der Leyen. In December she sought to deflect criticism from the EU’s slow approval process and roll-out by trying to discredit British regulators. “Some countries started to vaccinate a little before Europe, it is true. But they resorted to emergency, 24-hour marketing authorisation procedures. The Commission and the member states agreed not to compromise on the safety and efficacy requirements,” she said.

This was false, irresponsible, and disgraceful. Europe will not suffer as many Covid deaths from the B.1.1.1.7 variant as the UK because some of its elderly are at least vaccinated, but it will pay a high economic price for wasting three months on the rollout before full reopening. 

The pandemic will not be contained in time to avert an extra quarter of double-dip slump. There will be deeper labour hysteresis and economic scarring. Thousands more businesses will be pushed over the edge into insolvency once loan moratoria expire. 

Southern Europe risks losing a second tourist season, or much of it. Public debt ratios will be further beyond the point of no return later this year. The EU’s €750bn Recovery Fund  - in reality €390bn of grants spread across 27 states over five years - is trivial by US standards and is rapidly being overtaken by events.

There will have to be a much larger package to avert another lost decade, but the North is going to resist. Fiscal settings are already turning contractionary in Germany and Holland.  

The European Central Bank is holding the edifice together by chronic monetisation of Club Med debt issuance. This is an unstable equilibrium. It will not be tolerated indefinitely by the German people or the Verfassungsgericht once German inflation revives.

In short, there will have to be an internal eurozone restructuring of Italian, Portuguese and Spanish sovereign debt.  Covid policy failures have made this almost ineluctable. Europe has condemned itself to another traumatic financial and political moment.

they'll soon realise their mistakes. I honestly think we are on the verge of witnessing the greatest medical miracle of all time unfolding this year with these vaccines.

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