Charles Jillings, CEO of Utilico, energized by strong economic momentum across Latin America. Watch the video here.
The Tory backers are landowners, property developers, hedge fund owners and financial institutions…
Anyhoo..
“.. A senior official from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said the body was having to adjust to a "new reality" after the disruption to revenue streams following the UK's exit from the European Union.
Sources in the health care sector told PoliticsHome that a senior official at the regulator told industry figures at a recent meeting that regulatory changes as a result of Brexit could cost MHRA between £20-30 million.”
“ The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), which employs around 1200 people in England, could cut its workforce by as much as 20% as part of a transformation programme that will radically reshape how the agency operates, leaked documents seen by The BMJ show. The agency is targeting savings after losing a substantial amount of funding from the European regulatory system after the UK’s exit from the European Union.”
If Covid caused a small percentage of middle aged mens p3nises to turn black and drop off I’m convinced that we would be hearing a lot less about ‘having to just live with Covid’.
‘levelling up’ is a slogan without policy. The current government has no industrial or manufacturing policy beyond that of an ideological belief that the market ‘knows’ best. It’s of no surprise to me that the UK diagnostic industry got a slogan (we’re working day and night) rather than action. Contrast with the almost immediate response of a stamp duty ‘holiday’ that benefited banks, house builders and land owners.
I’m sure it’s been done to death on here but it’s all dependent on Rt. With a back of the envelope calculation I make it to be 85% to 95% of the population of the UK to be vaccinated and/or immune before herd immunity to be approached. I say approached as we will be constantly moving towards herd immunity, past the point of herd immunity and back again such is the nature of the vaccine/Covid/human behaviour. The fact that we’ve been seeing 30k-50k new daily cases was entirely predictable based on our level of vaccination and removal of protective measures. The fact that it never got to 100k daily cases was probably due to the unpredictable nature of human behaviour, namely that a sizeable proportion of the population continue with protective measures.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/23/emails-emerge-of-vip-route-for-uk-covid-test-contracts
“ internal emails between DHSC civil servants, discussing the Rapid Testing Consortium (RTC), a group of companies led by York-based Abingdon Health, which was awarded huge government contracts without a competitive tender, did describe the process as “the VIP route”. The then health minister, Lord Bethell, was described by officials as a “sponsor” of the consortium.”
“ The DHSC disclosed the June 2020 emails during a legal challenge brought by the Good Law Project (GLP), which argues there was “apparent bias” in the award of the contracts to Abingdon Health, and that the government “failed to undertake any transparent or lawful process”. The DHSC is defending the case, arguing that the emergency of the pandemic justified it making direct contract awards.
In the email exchanges, one civil servant, discussing how to process the RTC companies, said a person in authority, whose name is redacted, “would like them to go through the VIP route”. The official asked: “Who should they name as their sponsor?”
A colleague replied: “Are the sponsors usually ministers? I would imagine RTC can name Lord Bethell?”
An EU diplomat said that it was obvious Barnier was trying to draw attention to a presidential campaign with seemingly little energy or momentum, and perhaps even less chance of success.
“The guy is irrelevant in France,” the diplomat said. “He is a joke. He needs to somehow position himself and he thought this would help him. It’s not going to bring him anything.”
A series of revelations in a new book, Spike, by a scientific adviser, Jeremy Farrar, describes gross malfunction at the heart of government. He portrays a prime minister in meetings on Covid “waving his arms around as he put in offers to buy millions of tests of uncertain provenance”. There have been contracts, which we know to be with cronies, that were made without sufficient “quality control”. Test and trace is a shambles, as is almost every area of pandemic management.
This should have been announced months ago. The failure of this government to push on with a national vaccine drive for the under 40yrs from March is a cowardly disgrace, born out of sloth, ignorance and ideological bs. The only way to get herd immunity is through vaccination rates of 75% plus. Testing should be there to protect yourself and others whilst this takes place,
Lockdown t-21 days.
Bow.
The government policy is a return to mass infection creating herd immunity. This is of course simply *******s.
We’re here because of a catastrophic failure of government to protect our boundaries from delta, to reduce its ingress into the country. Coupled with a failure to push on with a National vaccination drive in the under 40’s and an absence of financial support to isolate I’m uncertain how Avacta could have changed anything. The economy cannot cope with hundreds of thousands of infected workers. Lockdown in three weeks from today.
One of the first topics I studied in the medical statistics module at medical school was how to evaluate a test. It’s not a difficult topic to understand, and little has changed in the 30 odd years since then. What’s clear is that no one from the medical profession, be that Public Health, Epidemiology or Infectious Diseases was consulted or listened to when the need to evaluate new tests for COVID-19 was deemed necessary. The decision to involve PD gives all the appearance of having been taken by government without any understanding of how medical tests are evaluated. I don’t blame the staff at PD, they are just doing what they were asked to do by government. Tests should have been evaluated against the current gold standard in real people in real settings, a ‘test’ equivalent to the RECOVERY ‘treatment’ trials.