Well personally I'm convinced by a paper on vaccines written by a gynaecologist and a linguist and published in an open access journal where anyone, however bonkers, can publish anything they like. I've got a Covid vaccination coming up, and it's about my fifth, so I'm wondering if the microstructures will be starting to fit together like vaccine Lego?
You're dead, well according to some after those jabs you should be, along with another couple of billion. The views expressed in my posts are not necessarily mine.
Iron? You need to clean it first - which wash do you put it in? I mean it’s clearly a delicate, but the combination of pristine white cotton with all that red offers a real risk of colour bleed. They just haven’t thought it through
Another twist in the (fury) tale or a defused con(spiracy) ... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy8095xjg4po
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/09/26/chris-whitty-covid-inquiry-live/ The Government potentially overstated the danger of Covid to the public at the start of the pandemic, Prof Sir Chris Whitty has admitted. The Chief Medical Officer told the Covid Inquiry he still worries about whether the Government got “the level of concern” right as it introduced lockdowns and shielding measures. Sir Chris said it was a difficult balance and if anything it was possible that authorities “overdid it” when communicating how dangerous the virus was at the beginning of the pandemic. “I was worried at the beginning. I still worry, actually in retrospect, about whether we got the level of concern right,” he said. “Were we either over pitching it so that people were incredibly afraid of something where in fact, their actuarial risk was low, or we were not pitching it enough and therefore people didn’t realise the risk they were walking into. “I think that balance is really hard, and arguably, some people would say we, if anything we overdid it, rather than under the beginning.” Latest updates Alex Barton. Samuel Montgomery. Michael SearlesHealth Correspondent 26 September 2024 • 4:50pm 4:48pm That’s all for today
I'd of had absolutely zero chance of getting my hip replacement done at 38 if I'd of had to have gone via the NHS, which is wrong as if it's needed then your age shouldn't matter ( but apparently it would have ) I've fortunately got Bupa it's it's all been covered and done without having probably 25/30yrs worth of waiting first
Yer it's pretty much guaranteed, plus I will need my other one doing in the next few years they reckon, so I'll have at least 2 on each over my lifetime
Isabel Oakeshott Whitty’s lockdown admission shows the public sector rewards failure, however cataclysmic The Chief Medical Officer has conceded ‘we overdid it’. So why haven’t many of the architects of this disaster been held accountable? please log in to view this image Isabel Oakeshott 27 September 2024 5:00pm please log in to view this image “The Prof is pivotal,” Matt Hancockobserved, as he mused over how to frighten the nation into following Covid rules. Writing about Chief Medical Officer Sir Chris Whitty in his Pandemic Diaries, the former Health Secretary noted that the public “seemed to like” his calm, reassuring manner. The Government needed to make the most of that respect, he concluded – and asked Whitty to use “his most authoritative voice” to make a bossy social media clip about new social distancing rules. The date was March 25, 2020: two days after Boris Johnson gave his historic address to the nation, instructing everyone to stay at home. Prince Charles had Covid and (though he didn’t yet know it) so did Hancock. Terrified by Doomsday predictions of bodies piling high, and apocalyptic scenes from hospitals in Italy, the British did what they were told. No government in history had ever attempted anything remotely like it – and trust was critical. Advertisement As Hancock told the House of Commons at the time, the draconian measures the government was taking to “stop the spread” would change the lives of everyone. The scale of public sacrifice required meant there was no room for doubt about what was at stake. Who better to convey the severity of the situation than a mild mannered distinguished medic like Whitty? Very early in the crisis, Hancock clocked that the man he affectionately called the “the Prof” was a very powerful asset. For all his legendary arrogance, the then health secretary was sufficiently self-aware to recognise that doctors always get a better hearing than politicians. In the league table of most and least trusted professions, medics consistently rank in the top five (alongside nurses, pilots, and librarians and engineers); while politicians always (quite rightly) languish at the bottom. With his gentle demeanour and unimpeachable professional credentials, the Chief Medical Officer was the perfect person to deliver difficult messages. Hancock had lucked out – and exploited it. Advertisement please log in to view this image 8 top tips to get the most when you travel Privately, the modest Whitty was far from comfortable with his new very public facing role. Recalling how he ordered the CMO to make social media clips “repeating key mantras” like the hated “two metre rule”, Hancock writes in his diaries that the Prof found recording these sorts of things “terribly embarrassing”. Nonetheless, Whitty did it, which means he cannot escape accountability for the terrible mistakes that were made. As the old Whitehall saying goes, advisers advise and ministers decide. But in these unique circumstances, it is no exaggeration to say that the Chief Medical Officer drove the pandemic response. Had he not personally recommended and promoted the lockdown policies we now know were so flawed, they would simply never have happened. Accordingly, he must take full responsibility for the dreadful consequences. Far, far too late in the Public Inquiry that took years to get underway, and still has no end date, Whitty this week acknowledged what so many of us could quite clearly see at the time: that the government went way over the top in its initial pandemic response. Of course, he didn’t put it quite like that. What he actually said, giving evidence this week, is that “in retrospect,” he still worries about whether the government “got the level of concern right.” Advertisement “Some people would say... if anything we over did it,” he conceded. In a further remarkable concession, he went on to declare that in hindsight, ordering 2.3million people to cut themselves off from the world entirely for 12 weeks may have done more damage than it prevented. He now says he is “unsure” he would go down that route again, because it caused “significant harms.” Say what? This is extraordinary! If Whitty is no longer sure that the elderly and most vulnerable (around whom the entire response to the pandemic revolved) needed to self-isolate, what on earth is left of the case for anyone else locking down? In his characteristically understated way, Whitty appears to have shattered the case for lockdowns. If even he wouldn’t repeat the policy, who would? Sadly, it has taken so long to extract this confession that the significance is in danger of being lost. For just as the criminally wasteful public inquiry is finally starting to get interesting, most ordinary people have lost the will to live, and are no longer affording it any attention. Who can blame them? We have had months and months of irrelevant minutiae from civil servants and other dreary figures nobody has ever heard of. That a government which spends so much time wailing about the state of the public finances nonetheless sees fit to spend £137,000 every single working day simply responding to this charade beggars belief. Shamefully, that official figure – £9.285 million in the first quarter of this year on civil servants and lawyers alone - is literally only the half of it. Every day, the Covid Inquiry itself spends almost the same amount again. The whole ruinously expensive exercise may not be of Labour’s making, but as they wail about great black holes in the public finances, they most certainly have the power to stop it. As many of us have argued ad nauseum, all it need do is answer the single most important question: were national lockdowns ever necessary or justified, and should they ever be repeated? As weary as we may all be of the Baroness Hallett boreathon, the answer to this question could hardly be more consequential. Therefore what Whitty has to say deserves very close attention, especially since he considers another pandemic is “inevitable”. Bit by bit, the edifice he and Hancock constructed to imprison us is now falling down. From the absurdity of the medically meritless pieces of cloth we were forced to wear over our faces, to the unforgivable sacrifice of a generation of children who were needlessly deprived of going to school, so much of what we were told has now been exposed as a monstrous lie. While youngsters are resilient, and most bounced back, a small but significant number are still suffering and will never achieve their full potential. As Whitty now admits, there’s a whole additional group of lockdown victims: those who were condemned to an early death or long term suffering because ministers put “protecting the NHS” ahead of caring for those who use it. The CMO now concedes that in their desperation to prevent the health service from becoming overwhelmed, those in charge of the pandemic response failed to convey that it was still open for business. The trouble is, it wasn’t. The gatekeepers to the system – GPs – literally shut up shop, posting hostile messages on surgery doors. No wonder people failed to get lumps and bumps checked out. What really rankles is that the architects of this historic disaster are all still sitting pretty. So far from the downfall they deserve, they have prospered. Knighted for his public service, Whitty is still in an almighty position of power, as Chief Medical Officer. Meanwhile his pandemic sidekick, former Chief Scientific Officer Patrick Vallance, is literally lording it, having recently been given a peerage to join Keir Starmer’s front bench. As for Hancock? Mercifully, since stepping down as an MP, he has temporarily disappeared. Rumour has it that he has landed a plum job in the Middle East. If so, those still suffering as a result of his blunders won’t be shedding any tears
