This, from Professor Christina Pagel, is too good not to share:
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There’s nothing to disagree with there but of course it will take money, and as we all know there is no “magic money tree”!
Outstanding. That requires to be consolidated into a single statement and diffused everywhere. The contrast between Pagel’s statement of the position (which could be echoed by so many reliable sources – Linda Bauld, Devis Shridar, Stephen Reicher), and the absurd and dangerous irresponsibility of the Conservatives sacrificing everything and everyone to cling to a false prospectus simply to keep a fake Government, phony PM and the gutter Conservatives in power at all costs and any price, is simply shocking.
Interestingly, here is what Stephen Reicher tweeted today: “We used to talk about ‘building back better’. Now we only talk about ‘back to normal’. Does that mean accepting a society in which:
Our NHS is underfunded and unprepared for new outbreaks. Dirty, stuffy air harms millions and makes us all more vulnerable to airborne disease.” Strikingly Bauld, Sridhar and Reicher are all independent advisors to the Scottish government on public health policy.
Note that Johnson in a typically malignant, poisonous attempt to reduce this whole line of approach to a matter of risible comic contempt; at PMQs this week referred to this issue as merely the vainly foolish effort of the Scottish Government cutting School classroom doors to increase the airflow. In short, ignore the problem and turn a serious issue into a trivial joke.
Sounds very reasonable and full of common sense.
No chance of the idiots that run this country doing anything close to it, then (sadly).
Craig
Well pretty much everyone accepts things have changed..the majority of the population are double or triple vaxed and will continue to take boosters. They have shown they are prepared to accept restrictions on their freedoms and am sure they will in the future if necessary.
But public opinion does seem it wants to live with it as opposed to a zero covid strategy. You may agree or disagree but the vast majority of the population want to move on and live their lives as best they can and as close to 2020 as is possible whilst accepting the aforementioned restrictions.
Your claim is not true
Evidence is most people want restrictions still because they appreciate the benefit of them
A minority want to abuse the health of others
“Public opinion” has nothing to do with the “public” and everything to do with those who are able to determine what the public are told their opinion is. And that boils down to those few who control the media whether that is paper, tv or internet.
Steve: YouGov poll shows only 17% of people agree with government plans to scrap self-isolation requirement at the end of February: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/health/survey-results/daily/2022/02/09/7c596/1. So not true that the majority of people think it’s all over and just want to let the virus rip through the population unchecked. “Living with Covid” can mean many things – including adapting to the sensible mitigations and adaptations that Christina Pagel describes here. None of which involve a lockdown.
If people were offered the opportunity to either “live their lives as best they can and as close to 2020 as is possible” or to live a life more aligned to Prof Pagel’s point 8, which do you think they (we) might choose?
What a shame that everyone in this Government thinks everything has to be paid for as an individual and denies the worth of collective action in so many areas.
Professor Pagel is so right on so many things.
Well well.
My friends said there was no point posting those YouGov polls as you were too much of an intellectual fraud and coward to publish them.
I gave you the benefit of the doubt. Seems my friends were right.
You should choose your friends more carefully
You are now banned for trolling
Mr McHarvey,
You have friends?
Your question is reasonable
It assumes a capacity to care that the question posed here implied was absent
I’ve known this – how do the Americans say it? ‘Like for ever’.
Why? Because I’ve seen it at work – how Covid has totally changed our capacity to deliver and our internationalised supply chains. At work we are still using 19th century management techniques for 21st century problems. Everything is going t be slower. Many just don’t realise it yet.
I read on one of your Twitter thread links today Richard someone noting that Covid’s favourite host was us. How right they are. And here’s why:
We’ve been encouraged/manipulated to believe that there are no limits at all to what we want and that we are also entitled to think like this.
We have a low tolerance of change and an over reliance on the marketized system we live in. The sun rises and and sets everyday and we expect that it always will. Except one day, it will not. Everything dies, including our sun.
We are prone to wishful thinking. We are short termist in outlook. We lack imagination. Because we are addicted to money.
We like to travel a lot. We are used to folding time with planes whose pollution makes an enemy of our future and which enables viruses to spread.
We like to get together and socialise between multiple groups.
Freedom is going to come at a price in the future and the price will be time (things will be slower I’m afraid) and disruption (the need to adapt around a warming planet and also to deal with pandemics as and when they arise which could be with increasing frequency).
And I’m afraid the other things that Covid-like pandemics will thrive on is our newly found inability to co-operate and our need to compete at the international level. We need more co-operation not blame.
And then there is greed – good old greed as big pharma wants to profit from vaccines, sell us pills for our anxiety instead of dealing with the problems we face.
If we are not careful, society won’t stop next time because of testing and self-isolation: it will because people will be dying in numbers that will out strip what we have just been through.
No one would disagree with any of the Twitter points so well put, but I suppose looking at the heading you have to ask, pandemic apart, would anyone want to go back to pre 2020? With a right wing, inept, government and the post 2008 hacking at social services. I don’t see any way other of not going back or not combating the spectre of fascism without a radical political change. Which means not only the rebuilding of Trades Unions (as Larry Elliot in The Guardian) but a political party with a new direction. While I accept that getting back to the root can sometimes be divergent to analysing the causes there is still that now urgent question.
Remarkable interview of Rishi Sunak by Helia Ebrahimi, economics correspondent, C4 News. I do not have a copy yet to check his words, but he appeared to claiming that the compulsory £150 energy loan to consumers, to be repaid in five equal annual instalments, wasn’t in fact a loan. His case appeared to be that there was no interest due on it, therfore it wasn’t a loan.
When is a loan not a loan? When the Chancellor decides to use sophistry. The payment is not a gift. So what is it, if it isn’t a loan? In inheritance tax planning (IHT – say, a gift from parent to child), I understand HMRC would require the gift to be formally demonstrated by a Deed. HMRC’s Inheritance Tax Manual apparantly states: “Letters and circumstantial evidence that clearly indicate an intention to absolve the beneficiary of the loan from any liability to repay will not be sufficient to discharge the debt”. The wording suggests that the absence of interest is not the critical matter at issue, a gift under IHT requires a formal Deed; even an interest free ‘gift’ that is not a deed remains a debt. And the energy payment isn’t a gift; there is no Deed. Indeed there is no agreement. HMRC would also expect a contract between two parties who freely agree to the transaction; but Sunak’s energy loan is compulsory; not even an agreement. If it looks like a loan, acts like a loan and transacts like a loan, let us draw the fair and plain conclusion, in plain English: the energy loan is a loan. Sunak is just making this piece of puff up as he toddles along.
Oops! Wait a minute! I think I have seen the same sort of sophistical tenuous, self-serving, manipulative and improbable reasoning before: when is a party not a party?
Helia tied him in knots
It’ about time that she did – but good for her anyway.
“Normal is what got us here” – both with climate change and Covid. Covid took hold mainly because the the appalling state of people’s health globally due to the “food as profit” corporations driving addictive consumption leading to the obesity epidemic, the key co-morbidity for susceptibility to severe disease, hospitalisation and death. “Normal” was toxic pretty much across the board. Climate change and Covid are siren wake-up calls. The government slumbers on in its self-serving belief in British exceptionalism but many, many people are waking up to the emergency.