Analysis

Epidemiologist: ‘very narrow window’ to save UK – and world – from Tory ‘negligence’ still seen in failure to close schools

Spread of virus and government stubbornness on schools set to put us all in peril – and push up level of immunisation needed to 90% or more

An epidemiologist has accused the Tories of missing ‘a very narrow window’ to react to the threat of spiralling infection rates and contain the COVID-19 coronavirus – and in doing so, of putting not just the UK but the rest of the world in greatly increased danger.

Deepti Gurdasani published her reasoning in a detailed Twitter thread:

Gurdasani points out that the current rate of spread means that even a national lockdown will struggle to contain the pandemic’s growth – and that the government will need to achieve almost universal immunity among the population to achieve any effective ‘herd immunity’ to push the infection rate below the level where it is still able to grow:

Gurdasani is very clear that the failure to close schools – despite months of warnings from experts – has ‘directly’ put the UK in such a precarious position that even a national lockdown is unlikely to cause a downturn in infections unless schools are closed now:

And she warns that the Tories’ delays mean that even if the government closed all schools and locked down right now, the failure to hit vaccination targets means that the UK is almost out of options to get on top of the latest surge:

Gurdasani points out that the ‘zero COVID’ success achieved by nations such as New Zealand was entirely possible for the UK and that the Tories’ continually slack response has fuelled the rise of the new mutations that are now said to pose such a threat – and that the Tories have known this was the consequence for ten months:

So central is the role of schools and the Tories’ failure to react appropriately in the ongoing disaster, that Gurdasani stresses again that they are the key – before concluding by warning that just having a vaccine may not solve the problem even in the long term, making the Tories’ approach ‘deeply negligent’:

Tragically for this country, Boris Johnson and his cronies show little sign of heeding the warnings any more than they have for the past year, at a cost of tens of thousands of lives – and their fiddling around the edges by delaying the opening of some schools is unlikely to be cause for hope that they might finally get it.

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22 comments

  1. It’s been a tussle between Johnson and Starmer as to who is “hardest” in getting schools back, ever since Starmer became Labour leader.

    Now we reap what these two have sown.

  2. Anyone out there got the numbers for the current state of play with NHS
    Looks like Herd immunity is back in play, who’da thunk it, fuck me pink with a tickling stick
    Why should 99.9% of the population take the vaccine when Covid19 doesn’t affect them and the vulnerable will be immunised first
    Now can we get back to the industrial scale corruption going on in plain sight

      1. Tim
        Exactly,
        My partner ‘Nurse Practitioner ‘ and I noticed at yesterday’s Covid19 press conference JVT Jonathan Van Hire tried to make the argument that people who have been vaccinated can still be infectious, which turns any known medicine on its head, we are being played, for why
        The virus is real, the vaccines will do their job, its the financial pandemic that needs wiping out
        Joseph
        You are also spot on about care homes, but you can blame privatisation for their inability to protect residents
        And the small matter of shifting infected patients from hospitals back to their care homes
        The science has been poles apart, but somethings are constant and viruses to date have been entirely predictable, the weakness is in the system and the corruption is all to human

      1. timfrom
        Throw in Thatchers greatest suggests you will have a good level of immunity from the first jab, so we all should get it and yesterday Van Hire agreed
        Which begs the question why the drug companies sold efficacy after two jabs in short order and do they now agree on this strategy, is this a British thing or a science thing or a con

    1. Getting too visual………& why should the healthy ever be vaccinated? I think Boris Johnson may agree with you, but as a Socialist I would judge the merits of any society by how it cares for its elderly; its disabled & its poor.

    2. “Why should 99.9% of the population take the vaccine when Covid19 doesn’t affect them and the vulnerable will be immunised first”

      Do people develop immunity to the coronavirus disease after being infected?
      There is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from COVID-19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection. The development of immunity to a pathogen through natural infection is a multi-step process.

      1. If you were anywhere near correct then life 9n this planet would have been wiped out eons ago

  3. Herd immunity is acceptable as part of a vaccination programme and necessary – some people cannot receive vaccines because of allergies to the ingredients, or have such impaired immune systems the vaccine is ineffective. These people rely on everyone else getting vaccinated. For example, children now receive the flu jab, not to protect them but to protect their grandparents.

  4. Doug…I don’t really know what is truly going on in the UK and most of the western world,but I can only assume that if you are correct in assuming that its only us bedwetters as you have previously described the elderly,have anything to fear in the virus then you should be very worried or even terrified.You are suggesting that its far more horrifying than just corruption which is endemic I agree.But from my reading of the situation and your reflections you are suggesting a orgaanised and deadly serious game across the western world from British,US and European co coordination to wipe out the over sixties and vunerable population which makes Adolf Hitler and the Nazis,Pol pot and various other crazed individuals look almost like minor players in a genocidal game of murder..Do you really believe that?If that is true then my car and all my House in France will remain empty and abandoned has it has done for over a year now and it will remain so if I believe it is no longer safe to enter Europe or Britain if you and many others believe we have a plot to murder millions of people.I truly hope you’re wrong comrade,but I am no longer sure of just whats happening to the UK.

  5. We are about to enter a New year in the West,….I hope and pray that the fear that my elderly brothers and sisters in Britain today have of the Political system in Britain is just fear and not fact We have suffered the death of two elderly brothers in care homes this year and I wonder how many of the elderly especially cope with the fear that nobody actually knows just what’s going on?….and those around them are not actually worried about the vulnerable amongst the population.The Labour party has deserted the working-class and who out there is going to do something,anything to stop the fear and loathing of this neo liberal alliance.?.Surely this year someone will stop this happening.We are not Robots but human beings and we are not programmed to obay and quietly lay down and die….A New year and a new dawn of hope….!

  6. I’d been wondering in my usual mechanistic way what could possibly cause the “greater transmissibility” of the D614G variant compared to the original WT strain. Bigger viral load per droplet? Smaller droplet carries better on the wind? Survives longer out of the host?

    Found this – despite understanding almost none of the actual words I believe I can now state with absolute confidence that…

    “D614G reproduces better than VT in the epithelials of the nose and upper airway, Dummy.”

    Luckily Twitter lets you delete your previous theories.

    https://science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6523/1464

  7. Well there we have it folks heard immunity never was “off the cards” .Johnson has achieved his Brexit , now knows he’s bullet proof and can go on and do anything ! Thus the twat knows he’s got the vaccine to protect the rich and important in society and for the rest of us then …… basically the plebs can eff off and die .The Tory great experiment , just remember Brits you’ll voted for this cluster fucking idiot and his track record was well known prior to the election , suck it up UK …..Corbyn would never have allowed this to happen EVER !

  8. Yes rob….Corbyn and a lot of the membership would not stand by and watch what the neo liberal alliance are planning…He should have stayed and I am sure that if he had ignored the plotters and showed faith in the loyal membership that joined because of him we would not be in this awful mess the Torys and the knights ascendancy have landed the country in. Hindsight is a wonderful thing but futile in the reality of a neo liberal alliance that are obsessive in their destruction of all the Labour party fought for in the years after the war.Jeremy Corbyn would never have been allowed to walk into Downing street and whats happened now reinforces my veiw.So my home in France and my car will be allowed to rot away abandoned just like the elderly and vulnerable people in Britain today….So much for them few short years after the war when the working-class class were actually treated like human beings…and the fight against the establishment system has begun again I hope… All the best for a crucial year for all us…!

    1. It’s hard to feel sorry for someone because their second house abroad is temporarily being left abandoned. Nobody should own a second home while the majority of under 40s can no longer afford to buy a home to live (and probably never will in their lifetime).

  9. So much for hindspite?
    The question on everybody’s lips (especially MSM…..sic) is ‘Public School ‘Private Education worth the money or has Britain got itself into such a mess deliberately or perhaps it’s all a gigantic ‘cock-up’ & the Tories really didn’t mean to kill off so many people & wreck the economy? Surely no-one could be that callous or that stupid?

    1. The economy was wrecked in 1979, capatalism died in 2007 but they refuse to release the body
      To big to fail, who bailed them out and saved the world, twas Obama and Brown, thats how fucked the system is, Covid19 is a window for them to press reset and blame the pandemic
      Back to the Gold Standard methinks

      1. How interesting- this is the second time now that I’ve seen this sort of link made within a week!

        I am on a list which recommended watching Mike Maloney’s series The Hidden Secrets of Money (to be found on YouTube). The person making the recommendation whetted our appetites with this (a conversation between a banking programmer and his friend). I’m not qualified to know if this is true or not but I’m going to make some time to watch the series

        Is love of money the root of evil?

        Instead, the focus should be that ‘’sound’’ money was destroyed in the last century. It was a source of stability and equal opportunity. This was because you could save your hard earned wealth in gold coins (Swiss currency was gold coins for a long time even up to the 1970s (e.g. watch the film Log of the Black Pearl on Youtube at http://bit.ly/film- log-of-black-pearl where they are hunting for a shipwreck carrying gold swiss francs). Sound or ‘hard’ money would preserve the value of your wealth. But in the ‘’fiat1’’ currency system we have now, the banksters can devalue your wealth at the press of a button.
        Like in 2008/2009 I saw the UK Government print so much money in 6 months, the pound dropped 40% in value. I only noticed because I was working abroad and checking its foreign exchange rates.
        You work 20-30 years and save up so you can quit the rat-race and do something useful but they go and cut your savings in half in under a year. So you’re chained to the hamster wheel. Without fiat money allowing ‘banksters’ to bleed us dry without even touching our bank accounts (by debasing the currency), technological progress would have made most of us effectively millionaires who only need to work a day per week. Imagine the human creativity that could be unleashed if we were not financially enslaved by this usury system, based on currency that the bankster and cartel can loan and print into existence at will.
        When the deflation-inflation tug of war finally breaks it will mean they have printed so much so fast that they flood the economy with increasingly worthless £££. It’s a massive bubble.

        How did this situation arise?

        There was no income tax in USA until the “Federal” Reserve (which is not part of government but is owned by the largest banks and which have no reserves!). It was created and started printing money out of nothing to lend to the US government at an interest rate. Income tax was invented to pay the interest on this government debt. It was initially just a few % tax and claimed to be a temporary measure – (of course there’s nothing so permanent as a temporary government measure.)

        Why did they need to borrow from the Fed?

        If you want to spend on interminable wars and feed a huge secret police organisation aka ‘’deepstate’’ without running out of money then you need a currency which the Treasury can print as fast as the machines turn: paper money; gold and silver won’t cooperate in this game. So there is this ‘’evil’’ cooperation between government treasuries that print paper money and central banks that allow the banking industry. And this model depends on politicians who promise more and more spending to bribe electorates to get elected.

        Why has Covid been useful for them?

        Covid was a gift to them because not only is it reducing the pension liabilities as ‘oldies’ ‘kick the bucket’ a decade or two early, but they have also had an excuse to shut down the economy and put everyone into financial life support… i.e. dependence on government cheques. This dependency is something which they can evolve into a surefire way to get acceptance of personal cryptocurrency accounts at the central bank. Who is going to refuse for long when everyone else is getting a thousand or two free just by opening the account? Then they will try to phase out paper and metal cash and we will be penned like sheep.
        Already a squeeze on cash is happening for political reasons – e.g. control of aid going to Palestine. Recently aid workers were stopped at a UK airport as they were carrying cash destined for aid projects in Gaza.

        1 Fiat=currency (a medium of exchange) established as money, often by government regulation, that does not have intrinsic
        money does not have use value (inherent utility, such as a cow or beaver pelt might have), and has value only because a government
        maintains its value, or because parties engaging in exchange agree on its value.

        The bubble is getting awfully big – won’t the burst hit the rich just as badly if their millions are worthless; in effect, all the wealthy with their offshore accounts will be rendered paupers, won’t they?

        The uber rich .. in particular the bank owners… don’t store their wealth in the form of bank accounts holding currency or in the form of paper money under the mattress. They know full well its intrinsic value is essentially zero. They buy up all the real stuff instead and are the owners of arable land, real estate, factories and companies that produce. All the things that we all critically depend on (food, shelter etc). The banks keep blowing up the credit bubbles, the insiders sell at the top and buy at the bottom or confiscate (foreclose) all the real assets from the rest of us in the popping of the bubbles. I think they’ve been at this for at least a century or three. . And we are not just talking about the US any more – the UAE has been accused of becoming a hub for the blood-gold trade as it seeks to acquire assets which has added to the turmoil in Africa.

        But this is so dangerous – the 2008 crash will be nothing compared to what is on the horizon …

        Ah but there lies the crux of the matter. Our would-be controllers in Davos know their history and are trying to avoid another French or Communist revolution in the coming decade as this uber bubble pops.
        Linking this to the Covid measures which have been put in place, some point to this rollout of mass control measures as also
        serving to pre-empt any forceful outcry against the catastrophe which may engulf us.
        Back in the 1930s, it is documented that Henry Ford is supposed to have remarked that if most Americans found out
        how the banking and money system really works, “there’d be a revolution before tomorrow morning”.
        I think there’s quiet panicking
        behind the scenes. I expect some draconian actions to stop the masses running away from their fiat currency (which
        is part of the hyperinflation experience, most recently experienced by Venezuela and Lebanon, but going back to the most famous example of the Weimar Republic.)

        The Hidden Secrets of Money (several episodes). Mike Maloney ON YOUTUBE – THE HIDDEN SECRETS OF MONEY

  10. We have been saying for months close schools this is stupid and yet 1000 people die a day is still not enough for the Tory scum to actually listen to the science not there BS money only matters ideology.

    The UK deserve a competent reactive government not a bunch of cronyism and arrogant scumbags as we have! FFS my pot plant has more of a clue than this lot…

  11. Is this not just the advice from The scientists at Astro Zeneca and Pfizer that the second dose is much more effective after 12 weeks instead of the first advice that it be given after 3 weeks? That’s what I read today? It’s new advice?

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