Member Info for neilrich3

What's with the word 'babe' written upon the side of the Q32?

Antonio gets my vote for a promotion to Chief Commercial Officer.

Also, worth noting the number of former employee that like such posts, obviously they still feel a connection.

Okay, I take that back, can view his profile within Private Mode and can see that he liked a post from a Novacyt colleague earlier Today, however I still think an odd decision to block people and the vacancy as advertised is a very similar position to his own.

I'm not so sure Larry, too much of a coincidence, why would he block people?

It was a couple of weeks ago, Antonio posted the vacancy the same week that Matthew’s profile vanished. Did Matthew leave suddenly and not work his notice period, I’m not sure, can only guess.

The RUO European Sales Manager is not a new position, this is to replace Matthew Mayhew, who recently departed the company.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/vito-cinquepalmi-4726695a_novacyt-and-ahdiagnostics-partnering-up-activity-7038769274038951937-AS6z?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Consultants were paid a total of £1 million a day to work on the NHS Test and Trace system for more than a year of the pandemic, despite ministers being “very worried” about the spending.
WhatsApp messages between Matt Han****, then the health secretary, and his team of special advisers, show that he was shocked at learning the extent of Whitehall spending on external consultants to prop up the government’s ailing contact tracing system in January 2021.
He asked for the “exit strategy” and Emma Dean, his special adviser, said she had been “nagging” the department about it since November 2020.
Mr Han**** appears to have been made aware of the problem after David Williams, a senior civil servant, appeared before a parliamentary select committee on Jan 19, 2021.
The WhatsApp messages also raise fresh questions about the cost of the Test and Trace programme, which was accused by MPs of spending “unimaginable” sums and treating taxpayers “like an ATM machine” without making a “measurable difference” to case numbers in the UK.

The Telegraph states over 100,000 messages and 2.3 million words, testing is listed as one of the subjects, shall be interesting to read what transpires.

More than a 100,000 WhatsApp messages….tip of the iceberg so far, more to come!

The Lockdown Files show the nature of government during the Covid pandemic and how, despite public claims to always “follow the science”, key decisions were made on the fly for political reasons.
PM discovered second lockdown was based on ‘very wrong’ data

Mr Johnson was worried that he had “blinked too soon” in plunging Britain into a second national lockdown on the basis of data that scientists had warned him was “very wrong”.

He made the observation on Nov 1, 2020 – a day after he had announced a lockdown to come into force on Nov 4. Despite his fears, the lockdown went ahead and lasted for a month.

In one exchange, on Nov 1, 2020, Mr Johnson explained that he had been on a video conference call with scientists Dr Raghib Ali and Dr Carl Heneghan.

He told the WhatsApp group that Dr Heneghan said “the death modelling you have been shown is already very wrong”, as it was out of date having been drawn up three weeks previously.

Matt Handjob
I need to call in a favour tmrw
23:17
I currently have 22,000 spare slots tomorrow at my drive thrus. Hence I’ve extended eligibility today. Demand just isnt there. This is obvs good news about spread of virus. But hard for my target
23:18
So I really could do with a testing splash
23:18
Can we make this happen?

I WANT TO HIT MY TARGET!

Boris Johnson Prime Minister
Folks I am about to asked about masks in schools
Before we perform another u turn can I have a view on whether they are necessary
Matt Han****
Can you talk to CMO and see what we can do
14:21
Emma Dean
Emma Dean Department of Health Policy Special Adviser
Yes. What is your ask? Get rid or neutralise?
14:21
Matt Han****
Matt Han****
neutralise. Stop the defamation

The volume of people affected in turn makes it harder to treat them, she says, reducing capacity for the close monitoring of plasma leakage and fluid restoration required, which “leads to patients developing more complications and unfortunately higher mortality rates”.

Children have been worst affected by the current spread in Bolivia, and globally too, due to having weaker immune systems; a second dengue infection is five times more likely to kill a child than an adult.

Vaccines are seen by most as the only way of turning the tide on dengue, which the World Health Organization last year said could spark the next pandemic.

Yet “many high-income countries believe that dengue is not their problem,” according to Malavige, who points out that South Korea has been reporting 250 to 350 cases annually since 2016. Europe isn’t immune either, with cases cropping up across Italy and France last summer.“Funds need to be invested in developing treatment, biomarkers for prediction of those who will develop severe disease, and studies on understanding dengue disease pathogenesis better.”

Part of the difficulty is that dengue has four strains; developing a vaccine which can “protect simultaneously and equally against” all these different variants is challenging, says Regina Rabinovich, director of the Malaria Elimination Initiative at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, describing dengue as a “terrifying disease”.

No dengue vaccine has yet to be globally approved: Qdenga received the regulatory nod in the UK last month, while Dengvaxia has been green-lit in the US. Another prevention option being trialled is Wolbachia, a bacteria used to infect mosquitoes, which makes it more difficult for the virus to replicate.

Without consensus on what works, though, the worsening situation in Bolivia is an indictment of what’s to come elsewhere, Malavige believes. “Dengue is everyone’s problem now.”

What is driving Bolivia’s worst dengue crisis in 25 years?
Field hospitals open in Santa Cruz to help ease the burden engulfing its medical centres
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/what-driving-bolivias-worst-dengue-crisis-25-years/
On a pharmacy storefront in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, eastern Bolivia, a sign bears an image of a man clutching his forehead and cartoon mosquitoes whizzing nearby.

“If the fever and pain doesn’t stop, try paracetamol,” it reads – a reminder that, in the thick of the country's worst dengue fever outbreak for 25 years, a vaccine or even relief remains wanting.

Bolivia’s Ministry of Health has reported more than 11,000 cases of the disease, while 33 people have died, mostly children. Multiple regions, including Santa Cruz and La Paz, are now under a red epidemiological alert.

Late last week, a field hospital opened in Plan 3000, a neighbourhood in central Santa Cruz, with 30 beds set up in a sports field to help share the burden now engulfing its medical centres.

Ninety doctors have been dispatched there to both provide on-site care and carry out house calls nearby; hundreds more have been placed on emergency duty in the city’s hospitals.
Dengue haemorrhagic fever, the severe form of the illness that can lead to organ failure, internal bleeding and death, has quadrupled in the past 30 years, infecting 400 million annually.

Spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which also transmits yellow fever, Zika and Chikungunya, dengue virus kills 20,000 globally each year.
While predominantly associated with southeast Asia, its spread in Latin America (Peru has this year seen a 72 per cent rise in cases) is in part due to population density, as the mosquito is highly adapted to urban environments and breeds inside homes.

Hospitals ‘absolutely overwhelmed’

Global warming, which creates more temperate conditions in which they can thrive, is also a major factor in this worldwide rise; so too is the post-pandemic travel boom, which has seen a spike in mosquito-borne diseases crossing borders.

The primary prevention method is eliminating the mosquito but, with fumigation efforts taking place across Bolivia failing to slow soaring case numbers, the lack of effective tools available to authorities is becoming painfully apparent.

Bolivia’s hospitals are “absolutely overwhelmed,” says Neelika Malavige, head of the Dengue Global Program at the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative.

The fatality rate has jumped significantly this time around, she adds: 0.3 per cent, compared to 0.04 per cent in 2020, with data suggesting that it is being driven by DENV-2 – the same dengue strain that caused the largest-ever outbreaks in Asia between 2016 to 2019.

“This would have happened earlier if not for Covid-19 resulting in reduced international travel in years 2020 and 2021,” Malavige explains. “Unfortunately, more virulent dengue virus strains are emerging, which leads to massive outb

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Some health experts believe the collateral damage from hospitals cancelling and delaying treatment to focus on Covid is behind a huge spike in excess deaths, raising the possibility that lockdowns caused more harm to public health than the virus itself.

The revelations will anger families who lost loved ones in care homes and will fuel criticism that adult social care was neglected during the pandemic.

More than 45,000 care home residents died with Covid in England and Wales during the first two years of the pandemic, with many people feeling the sector was abandoned.

There was also an increase in deaths from causes other than Covid. Overall mortality rates in English care homes jumped by 79 per cent in the first 16 weeks of the pandemic, and by April the risk of death for a care home resident was 17 times higher than for someone else of the same age living at home.

Ms Whately later warned Mr Han**** that the elderly were at risk of “just giving up” because they had been isolated for so long.

Care homes were the setting for one of the biggest catastrophes of the pandemic after thousands of people were moved into them without being tested. The messages reveal Mr Han**** was repeatedly warned that care homes were becoming a problem.

The disclosures raise questions about the position Mr Han**** has adopted publicly. He has previously said that he put a “protective ring around care homes” from the start and that he followed scientific advice.Mr Han**** said in his book, Pandemic Diaries, that the “tragic but honest truth” at the start of April was that “we don’t have enough testing capacity”.

The WhatsApp messages leaked to The Telegraph include one-to-one conversations between ministers at the heart of government.

They were handed to The Telegraph by Isabel Oakeshott, the political journalist who was given copies of Mr Han****’s messages while working on his Pandemic Diaries memoir. She writes for The Telegraph explaining her reasons for making the information public, saying, with reference to the Covid inquiry: “We absolutely cannot wait any longer for answers”.

Reacting to The Telegraph's report on Tuesday night, the broadcaster Piers Morgan said: "Astonishing & utterly damning scoop. And we do deserve to know."

Jess Phillips, Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley and shadow minister for domestic violence and safeguarding, said: "If details about how Han**** was more bothered about hitting his target on testing by possibly wasting tests that led to less capacity in care homes is true, then imagine how those who lost loved ones in that week will feel."

"With this lot its always headlines before front lines."

The Telegraph will reveal how children’s education was sacrificed in order to avoid political confrontations; how isolation rules that brought the economy to its knees could have been lifted sooner and how the Government sought to frighten the public to ensure they complied with lockdown.

Inquiry timing criticised

The public inquiry into the Government’s handling of the pandemic began earlier this week, but has been criticised because it will not address the reasons for lockdown decisions until its second module – meaning any findings are unlikely to be released for years.

The leaked cache of data will raise serious questions over how Mr Johnson’s administration handled the crisis.

The messages will inevitably stir debate over the Government’s repeated claims it was always following the science when it took decisions about tackling the pandemic. The UK has seen a death toll of more than 216,000 to date, while the economy suffered a shock from which it is struggling to recover.

Government guidance in its “admission and care of people care homes” document was not updated to require care homes to test new admissions from the community until Aug 14, 2020. It was early July before staff in all care homes had regular access to weekly tests.

Mr Han**** later told the health and social care select committee that “the strongest route of the virus into care homes, unfortunately, is community transmission, so it was staff testing that was most important thing for keeping people safe in care homes”.

In addition, Mr Han**** did not adopt Sir Chris’s advice to “recommend” segregation for everyone. The guidance stated that care homes “may wish” to isolate residents admitted from the community “after discussion with the new resident and family” – adding that the “majority” will have come from isolation at home.

The then health secretary has since said that “the vast majority of infections were brought in from the wider community” and highlighted staff as the main source of transmission.

An independent report by the Department of Health and Social Care has also found that there was “potential exposure to Covid-19 in care home settings” from factors including “new admissions from the community”.

On April 24, 2020, a civil servant in Matt Han****'s private office sent him a WhatsApp message passing on scientific advice that his department should “prioritise testing of asymptomatic staff and residents” in care homes where there had been a coronavirus outbreak.

Mr Han**** responded: “This is ok so long as it does not get in the way of actually fulfilling the capacity in testing.”

The WhatsApp messages also reveal how some care homes refused to test staff for the virus at the height of the pandemic in case they discovered they were positive, and they show comments by the social care minister, Helen Whately, where she warns that restrictions on visitors to care homes are “inhumane” – months before they were finally lifted.

They also contain evidence as to how Mr Han**** reached the target by including in the tally large numbers of tests that he knew might never be processed.

The WhatsApp messages expose how, as early as April 2020, Sir Chris warned there should be “testing of all going into care homes”.

The comments about care home testing by the Chief Medical Officer were discussed on April 14, 2020, the day before the Government published its “Covid 19: adult social care action plan” – a document that set out to fix some of the problems created by the Government at the very start of the pandemic.

In a WhatsApp conversation about its finer details, Mr Han**** told his advisers: “Chris Whitty has done an evidence review and now recommend testing of all going into care homes, and segregation whilst awaiting result. This is obviously a good positive step & we must put into the doc.”
One of his aides, Allan Nixon, responded that he had sent the request “to action”.

However, by the end of the day Mr Han**** appeared to have changed his mind – and he requested the removal of the commitment to begin testing admissions from the community.

At 6.23pm, Mr Nixon sent a message saying: “Just to check: officials are saying your steer is to *remove* the commitment to testing on admission to care homes *from the community*, but *keep* commitment to testing on admission to care homes *from hospital*. Is that right?”

Twenty-five minutes later, he messaged again: “Update: we can say in the doc that it’s our ambition to test everyone going into a care home from the community where care homes want (‘in the comings weeks’ is the suggested timeframe I’ve been told).”

Mr Han**** responded: “Tell me if I’m wrong but I would rather leave it out and just commit to test & isolate ALL going into care from hospital. I do not think the community commitment adds anything and it muddies the waters.”

When the Government published its official guidance to care homes in England the following day, it said it would start testing all “those being discharged [into care homes] from hospital” – but only that it would “move to” testing people being admitted to care homes from the community.

It did not make it mandatory to test residents going into care homes from the wider community – with Mr Han**** saying that “muddies the waters”. Nor did it make mandatory the testing of all care home staff, or the isolation of all new residents.