I don’t know, and I don’t want to spend the time required to gain a proper understanding. Balancing the benefits and risks can be tricky (although this seemed very odd to me, maybe it was just legal ass covering) but my point here is that the judgement was made by countries individually not by the EU as a bloc.

A very quick Google indicates that in the EU, Sweden (where the Astra-bit comes from), Latvia, France, Austria, Spain, Italy, Luxembourg, Cyprus, Portugal, Slovenia, Germany, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Denmark and Ireland suspended use. Which means a dozen EU countries didn’t.

European non-EU members Iceland and Norway also suspended use. The Swiss still haven’t even approved it yet AFAIK.

Outside of Europe, Thailand, Indonesia and the DR Congo suspended use.

Brexit has been our national political-cultural obsession, the rest of the EU and world do not care nearly as much and are perfectly capable of making poop decisions irrespective. It is bleakly reassuring to know that we don’t have a monopoly on COVID related idiocy, and that we’re doing better in this regard.

You do fall back on nirvana fallacies a lot. Like for healthcare, the ‘we can never spend enough, so we shouldn’t spend more’ argument.

Relying on stereotypes of conservatives, would you take the same attitude with the military or roads? Like, ‘we can never be completely safe from attack, so why even bother with an army, navy and Air Force.’?

Fair enough, I assume you’re not saying do away with schools and hospitals - so that is an exaggeration, I admit.

Or you could put the link up you are referring to

Not at all what I saying is our current education system doesn't deliver the outcomes it should when compared to other countries e.g Finland/South Korea. So rather than throw even more money into a failing system as Ghost would do why don't we fix the system by taking the best of other education idea adapt them to suit our culture first and them increase the spending - these are not difficult concepts for most of us to think through.

Just throwing good money after bad is not is a great solution - more teachers teaching the same way - is that as good as it gets?

You could also put your 20m flue jabs link up also?

Considering that all over 55's are offered the flu jab, plus those with particular medical needs, the 1.9 million figure is very ,very low.
I cant find a figure but, the uptake is supposed to be 2/3 of those eligible, somewhat more than the number you have given.
Also, there were 750,000 given to NHS employees. OK some of these will fit into the over 55 category but, I think your figure is wrong.

It is a bit of a leap from not best to failing. Education is a bit of a political football unfortunately and reforms rarely last long enough in the UK to even allow their level of success to be assessed, before another Education Secretary comes along with a new vision.

It is entirely possible to try to optimise and invest at the same time, and those things might well be complementary. I can understand a degree of nervousness about handing over billions of £s to Gavin Williamson to spend effectively, admittedly.

The Tories will do nothing to manage the education system better because to make the changes you need ala Scandanavia you have to fundamentally see education as about encouraging learning for the sake of learning and to develop independent thinking.

Every announcement by the Tories about education is about controlling what is taught and emphasis on exams and testing not a love of learning. Hence their love affair with targets and ofsted.


Simple starter on education would be No Formal Learning until children are 7 years old. The first 3 years is all about socialising children, developing co-operation and communication and developing a love of learning.

A good post and my view too - education is about delivering rounded students at all levels with the necessary skill set to advance at what ever level into adult life.

I agree with the last paragraph provided you have a clear vision of what you are trying to achieve and a clear strategy of how you are going to get there

I was wrong - the number was c10m but it still makes the latest vaccine roll out on a different scale to the annual flu jab roll out - timescales being one thing, volumes being another, the nature of the vaccine especially the Pfizer.

Vaccines usually take at least a decade to become available, so this vaccination programme is indeed a few levels above anything we've had rollout before.

most of the vaccines for covid are old tech.

the mrna ones are new, but they are not brand new, they have been a decade in construction and half a century in design.

sure the timescale has been shortened to get it to market but no trials were rushed they were just done in parallel.

You lied.
And you are still lying

I didn't lie I made a mistake - what is you excuse?

I was closer to the real number than you!!

Was that with your first, second or third attempt to guess the figure or, all of them ?

I used Google which gave me one figure 1.9m and then when questioned I looked further and eventually found the actual government stats which split the data down by country and age group

I am happy to admit when I have got it factually wrong - unlike some on here

Thinking is that this situation has changed forever the way we develop, test and roll out vaccines. You are correct, the Oxford vaccine was a carbon copy of their MERS vaccine, using a simian virus as a conjugate to carry the spike protein. That had been in clinical trial for a while. They had it ready in weeks - early January last year I think. It hasn't changed since then - just been tested. The mRNA vaccines are actually quite novel in that there had never been one on the market before, but you are correct, the basic tech has been in development for a long time. In vaccine world though that's like the first man on the moon. The Novavax vaccine is also an unusual format, they've been trying for 18 years to get a product to market and this is their first. They were laying people off 18 months ago and running out of money, we know those guys quite well as they are neighbours of ours in the US and they now spend a lot of money with us on serology testing. Turns out it could be the best vaccine of the lot so far. The issue with public health is that the markets are ultra conservative. You see this in medicine and in food safety testing. There is no benefit from being "first" to adopt something novel.

We are actually seeing data for the effectiveness study "live" so to speak. Effectiveness is the study of how well the vaccine actually reduces the disease in the population and includes data on limiting transmission etc -this can only really be seen once you give it to a large population. That's why early reports that "nobody knows if the vaccine will even stop the disease spreading" were accurate but misleading. The vaccines were expected to stop disease spread but the data was not available - you can't get that from a clinical trial into efficacy - just not enough people get the vaccine.
We have been lucky in one way, covid is not a difficult virus to deal with, this was recognized almost immediately. The vaccines we have are all stunningly good. Anything over 50% efficacy is considered "good", so to have 75-90% for all the vaccines is remarkable. If Covid had been like HIV then we would be in real trouble.

What the Germans have been doing makes no sense. They already have a real problem with vaccine uptake and seem to be doing all they can to make it worse. As my German buddy told me today, "We are becoming more un-German by the day". I'm currently trying to get documentation to give people in my team across Europe priority vaccination as they regularly work in customer Covid labs with covid positive samples.

I am happy to admit when I have got it factually wrong - unlike some on here'"

Not lies, not fibs, he just "mis-spoke" (again and again and again)

:29bo3zxh

Not lies, not fibs, he just "mis-spoke" (again and again and again)



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maybe some will have researched all the information available long before any outbreak in the uk and although they have had every vaccine in their life up to this point will never take an experimental pathogen primer the media are banned from discussing the negative side effects of ?

There are many reports of issues and the pros and cons all over the media, not sure what you want?

There vaccines are used around the world and information is given out all over, even if some countries might be able to push down reporting not everywhere could and it is incredible to think otherwise.

Not to mention the circa 50,000,000 jabs that have now been given.
There are some side effects, no doubt but, on balance, there are better outcomes for those who have received the vaccine(s).