[davidjay]

[mr angry manchester]

That wankstain Duncan Smith turned up briefly on the evening news with some shit about "our young people will be trading and dominating the world after Brexit"

WTF? Dominating the world???

We haven't done that since the 19th century.

Tit

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Thick, delusional, sneering, psychopathic shit, to you.

[Watchman]

That wankstain Duncan Smith turned up briefly on the evening news with some shit about "our young people will be trading and dominating the world after Brexit"

WTF? Dominating the world???

We haven't done that since the 19th century.

Tit

Singing “Tomorrow Belongs To Me”

[Malcolm Armsteen]

George Smith's idea of European integration is singing the Horst Wessel song in bad German.

[mattomac]

Irony is they could have got a Tony Benn cut out and said the same and it would have been far more accurate.

[Bones McCoy]

Today I present the Government, Tony Blair and the SAGE members who lent their credibility to this madness.
The madness being delivery of Covid vaccine in single doses.

Let's take this in stages.

The first Vaccine (Pfizer) is part way through administration, with only first doses delivered to date.
Its handling requirements mean that GPs have their bookings packed with second appointments.
GPs now believe they must cancel those thousands of appointments and replace them with new "one shot" patients.

The claim that the first shot affords 70% effect bears no relation to testing.
Pfizer's vacine was tested on the assumption of two shots with a 3 - 4 week gap.
This provided a 90% figure - that is all the data we have.

I suspect 70% was arrived at using a swiss-cheese statistical method. (More on this later)
A method utterly unsuited to use for 2 doses of the same medicine.

Without going all Thalidomide on you, I'd note the effects of other medicines taken in partial doses against manufacturer's recommendations.
The most familiar one being development of "super" bugs that bypass the medicine's effects - when a full dose would have wiped them out.
Others include reduced effect (assumed in this case), or reduced duration of protection.

The Govt need to clear this up fast.
Any policy other than continuing the Pfizer batch according to manufacturer's instructions represents the worst form of magical thinking.
It's effect is to use that cohort of the eldest and most vulnerable, and use them as guinea pigs for an untried therapy.

I've no doubt this plays fantastically well with the government's eugenicist outriders.
The rest of us have a right to be very angry.

Personal interest: Both my parents received dose 1 of Pfizer, and are due for dose 2 on Jan 7th.



Swiss cheese statistics - a very quick run through...

Swiss cheese got a mention a few weeks back in the context of taking multiple precautions; masks, and distancing, and hand washing.
For sake of a simple example, if each one provided 50% protection, then using two would provide 75% (Half of the half gets through) and using all three provides 87.5% (Half of half of half).
Actual figures are quite different, I kept it simple for this example.

You can also calculate backwards, but the swiss cheese model only applies if the different methods are independent.
What I suspect some spreadsheet jockey has done is this.
2 doses = 90% effect - what's the effect of 1 dose.

Simples: If 1 dose is 70% effective, only 30% gets through, so 30% of 30% gets through with 2 doses - 90% effect (With a bit of Excel rounding applied).

Simples, but bollocks; because we're looking at two of the same things, where the numbers don't work like that.
Hanging a serial killer twice, for example.


Angry, I'm totally livid (apols. Gerald the Gorilla. Not the Nine O'Clock news).

[youngian]

Its the same article as Larry Elliot’s been writing for forty years but as well reopening British Leyland he’s got ideas for agriculture. Apparently Brussels set sector wage levels.

The left must stop mourning Brexit – and start seeing its huge potential

Brexit means that those farmers who want their fruit harvested will now have to do things that the left ought to want: pay higher wages or invest in new machinery.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... conomic-uk

[Boiler]

For some crops the machinery is unlikely to ever exist. Countryfile and Farming Today taught me that; and people won't want to pay Wimbledon prices in a supermarket for their strawberries.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Before the Latvians came, agriculture was a famously high paying industry. So much so that it was one of the few parts of the economy deemed to require a minimum wage, set by a wages council. (Until John Major got rid of it).

[Boiler]

I had a gangmaster in my family. Round here there's still one farm with land set aside for gypsies to park their vans up on when working on his farm.

Equally, I remember my mother doing seasonal work on the land. I don't recall it making us richer than Croesus either.

[Bones McCoy]

It seems I posted my Coronavirus fuckwit rant in the Brexit fuckwit board.

My apologies.

The fact that the Venn diagram of the respective fuckwits appears almost circular confused my hungover 2021 mind.

[Boiler]

Almost, but not quite concentric circles. Some of my family are against the vaccine but are Remoaners (can we see that word chucked on the fire this year?).

[Boiler]

A retort to a Brexiter spotted elsewhere:

Screenshot_2021-01-01 New Year(1).png (3.06 KiB) Viewed 1142 times

[youngian]

Before the Latvians came, agriculture was a famously high paying industry. So much so that it was one of the few parts of the economy deemed to require a minimum wage, set by a wages council. (Until John Major got rid of it).

MPs who voted for the AWB’s abolition include Dorries, Gove and Johnson who have been terribly concerned about falling wages in the agricultural sector. As long as foreigners can be blamed.