Westministenders: Unilateral Ignoring of WHO rules

[RedToothBrush]

Where we are:

On 1st January the EU started to apply checks on all goods from the UK coming into the Union.

However the UK decided to take a slower route to this, and planned that on the 1st April the UK we would be carrying out Sanitary & Phytosanitary paperwork for animal and plant EU imports like meat and eggs.

Then on 1 July we'd implement a full customs check on all goods arriving into the UK from EU member states.

Obviously we've struggled with exports as we weren't ready for this and its fucked business. But ultimately the import side of things has yet to hit the shit fan still.

It sounds like there is likely to be issues with imports of food in particular, so there is talk of delaying our plan of checks until later in the day. There is concern that the reopening of pubs and restuarants which will up demands of imports occuring at the same time as checks are put in place is likely to be 'problematic'.

Remember we get 2/3 of fruit, veg and cheese from the EU. And half our wine. And to date these largely have only been affected by haulage issues NOT UK customs issues...

You might want to keep that in mind.

Thankyou mathanxiety.
I certainly intend to

Farming Today:
Chilled food exports at risk, tree planting, adapting to sustainable farming
New paperwork for chilled food being sold to the EU will need extra veterinary checks, which could delay its export and make it unviable.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000tlwz

But I expect we will soon be told that chilled foods are unhealthy and we should all be buying fresh from Waitrose or the local farm shop just down the road.

How would the AZ deaths be "hidden" ?
The UK system for weekly reporting of death has been going for many years and works well.

I agree with frankie and pretty
cui bono if take up of AZ drops

Well technically, a death as a consequence of a vaccine would be completely different from logging a Covid death. You'd need an autopsy for a start and it would be difficult to say conclusively that a vaccine had caused a blood clot.

The German and Norwegian research, which is at this point preliminary and has not yet been peer-reviewed, afiak involved living people. Both indicated an immune over-reaction causing antibodies to attack blood platelets in response to which the body to over-produces more platelets inducing clotting.

One team compared blood from AZ receivers who had developed clots to those who had not - and the difference were specific antibodies that are seen in Thrombocytopenia - specifically Heparin Induced Thrombocytopenia. (Heparin being an anticoagulant drug).

It's all very early days.

The TL;DR is that the person in the street is thick as pigshit when it comes to numbers. It takes alot of experience and working with numbers to be able to get your head around UK population size proportions.

For example, whatever the death rate was in 2019, even a tiny weeny little change of 0.1% (that's a tenth of a percent ) could manifest as a change of 10,000 (that's ten fucking thousand) deaths on the previous year.

(And yes, these are figures I am pulling out of my arse - notice how easy they are to type).

And that is before you get in the medico-semantic bunfight over dying of Covid and dying with Covid.

Doctors aren't much better, by the way. Very few can explain why giving up smoking (cutting your risk of premature death by x%), fatty foods (y%), more exercise (z%) doesn't lead to eternal life.

It was a pisspoor grasp of statistics that saw poor Sally Clark banged up.

It was also a pisspoor grasp of statistics that sent the crew of the Challenger to their deaths.

And that's before you add to the mix that weird group of people who say Facts ? Don't waste my time with facts. I know what the facts are - like a Trump election agent.

It was also a pisspoor grasp of statistics that sent the crew of the Challenger to their deaths.

I thought that this was muddling up metric and imperial measurements?

One thing that has amused me which won't please Rees-Mogg is that we have been told to distance ourselves by two metres, not 3 feet and 3 inches. You can imagine him choking on his cornflakes about that.

Just had to look up Sally Clark.
That was very sad.

6 feet and just shy of 6 inches, surely?

The EMA assessment on the risk associated with AZ vaccine was actually quite nuanced

www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/covid-19-vaccine-astrazeneca-benefits-still-outweigh-risks-despite-possible-link-rare-blood-clots

The key passage is here:

The Committee’s experts looked in extreme detail at records of DIC and CVST reported from Member States, 9 of which resulted in death. Most of these occurred in people under 55 and the majority were women. Because these events are rare, and COVID-19 itself often causes blood clotting disorders in patients, it is difficult to estimate a background rate for these events in people who have not had the vaccine. However, based on pre-COVID figures it was calculated that less than 1 reported case of DIC might have been expected by 16 March among people under 50 within 14 days of receiving the vaccine, whereas 5 cases had been reported. Similarly, on average 1.35 cases of CVST might have been expected among this age group whereas by the same cut-off date there had been 12. A similar imbalance was not visible in the older population given the vaccine.

The Committee was of the opinion that the vaccine’s proven efficacy in preventing hospitalisation and death from COVID-19 outweighs the extremely small likelihood of developing DIC or CVST.

I thought that this was muddling up metric and imperial measurements?

No - great story though it may be.

Challenger was doomed before take off, as it should never have launched in the temperature that day. However NASA - and the manufacturers of the all important O-Ring - managed to completely balls up their "understanding" of the risk statistics. It was one of the key points Richard Feynman reported on afterwards.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report

Feynman was disturbed by two aspects of this practice. First, NASA management assigned a probability of failure to each individual bolt, sometimes claiming a probability of 1 in 108, i.e. one in one hundred million. Feynman pointed out that it is impossible to calculate such a remote possibility with any scientific rigor. Secondly, Feynman was bothered not just by this sloppy science but by the fact that NASA claimed that the risk of catastrophic failure was "necessarily" 1 in 105. As the figure itself was beyond belief, Feynman questioned exactly what "necessarily" meant in this context, whether it meant that the figure followed logically from other calculations or that it reflected NASA management's desire to make the numbers fit.[6]

...

It was also a pisspoor grasp of statistics that sent the crew of the Challenger to their deaths.

Not statistics - it was the physical failure of rubber o-ring seals that weren't designed to withstand the much lower temperatures that had occurred overnight prior to launch.

@LostToucan

It was also a pisspoor grasp of statistics that sent the crew of the Challenger to their deaths.

Not statistics - it was the physical failure of rubber o-ring seals that weren't designed to withstand the much lower temperatures that had occurred overnight prior to launch.

Did you read the Rogers report ?

The shuttle would never have launched had NASA understood risk properly.

However,. I am grateful that you have perfectly illustrated the problem with understanding statistics in the current debate. I really couldn't have asked for a better placed comment.

I thought that this was muddling up metric and imperial measurements?

That was the Mars Climate Orbiter - JPL, who were the navigation team, used the metric system in its acceleration calculations, while Lockheed Martin, who designed and built it, spacecraft, provided the data in imperial figures. Oops.

Did you read the Rogers report ?

The shuttle would never have launched had NASA understood risk properly.

However,. I am grateful that you have perfectly illustrated the problem with understanding statistics in the current debate. I really couldn't have asked for a better placed comment.

A long time ago - it was one of the scenarios we used for practicing root cause analysis for major incidents.

The cause of the accident was the o-ring failure.

The contributing cause was those who made that decision to launch were unaware of the history of problems concerning the o-rings and were unaware of the contractor's recommendation advising against the launch at low temperatures.

As usual, it was down to a lack of communication and appreciation of known risks - the joint design had been flawed from the start, never properly rectified, and then just classified as an acceptable risk.

No stats really required as it was known that the o-rings could/would fail at low temperature. It was the lack of communication from those that knew that the o-rings could/would fail to those in charge of the launch, plus the political and operational pressures on those in charge of the launch to go ahead.

Meanwhile "Jean" really not doing much to sell "The English" to me.

And I am English. Only not her sort of English.

westcountrybylines.co.uk/hey-jean-meet-genealogy/

A woman called Jean caused a stir when she phoned in to LBC and told David Lammy, the UK’s Shadow Lord Chancellor and Shadow Secretary of State for Justice, that he wasn’t English. He was born here, grew up here and all his sensibilities are English, but that doesn’t count, according to Jean. He can only claim to be Afro-Caribbean, just as if she had been born in the Caribbean, she could only claim to be English. She had traced her maiden name back to the Middle Ages, it was Saxon and so she was definitely English. The unspoken reasoning behind this was, “because I’m white and you’re black.” She may as well have come right out and said it, because saying other races were “polluting” Anglo-Saxon lineage was just as bad. If you’ve ever wanted to see an example of grace under fire, David Lammy was it.

(contd)

6 feet and just shy of 6 inches, surely?

yes, got muddled, mentally converting1 metre.

An easier way to measure would be 'about an arms length, each'

DGR
A friend of mine is one of the white Barbadians Lammy mentions.
The white Barbadian community goes back many, many generations and is most definitely West Indian.
Accent is very odd !

Heaven knows what nationality "Jean" would consider me : obviously not South African, even though I was born there , but on one side my ancestors are German, Swedish, Irish, French (Huguenot), Dutch (Afrikaans) and English, while on the other side, Australian English (going back supposedly to Henry VIII ) although I believe my aunt has now discovered an Edinburgh connection while doing some genealogy research.

That last one is pertinent, as even though I consider myself to be Scottish (having arrived here when I was 3), I didn't think I actually had any Scottish blood not that that matters

Heaven knows what nationality "Jean" would consider me

Mysteriously, I give not a fuck about what a thick racist considers. About anything really.

I'm going to hazard a guess that she was a Brexiteer. As a lot of people with successive vowels in their name were.

www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/03/21/470870426/challenger-engineer-who-warned-of-shuttle-disaster-dies

www.npr.org/2021/03/07/974534021/remembering-allan-mcdonald-he-refused-to-approve-challenger-launch-exposed-cover

The Challenger disaster - groupthink and 'go' mentality to blame. The truth was known but overruled, and an attempt was made in the aftermath to hide the truth too.

Weird tone deaf race report make depressing reading.

If the Tories want race riots, they've certainly sowed the right seeds.

I listened to Jean on LBC with jaw dropping increasingly to the floor. David Lammy was so gracious and restrained in the face of astounding ignorance and naked racism. But really, is it right that peole like Jean are given airtime to chunter on in this hateful fashion? I cant decide, the rational know those views are hateful and the racists see their views normalised. A bit like the racists of the 70s seeing Alf Garnett as one of their own, it's a conundrum.

I'm going to hazard a guess that she was a Brexiteer. As a lot of people with successive vowels in their name were.

Meet Jean and Sheila:

www.thenewfederalist.eu/20-years-as-an-mep-jean-lambert-on-the-uk-s-bizarre-plight-and-the-growth?lang=fr

www.northern-scot.co.uk/news/election-2021-scottish-liberal-democrats-reveal-sheila-ritc-233154/

15/09/2019 -
Is Von der Leyen’s new commission team really ‘as diverse as Europe’?

“This is the team as diverse as Europe is, as strong as Europe is, those are dedicated men and women, and I’m looking forward to working with this team for Europe.”

[Those] were the words of incoming European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen last week as she announced her new executive group.

But while the 27-strong team of commissioners is an even split between men and women, they are seemingly all white.

www.euronews.com/2019/09/15/is-von-der-leyen-s-new-commission-team-really-as-diverse-as-europe

@TatianaBis - I am not surprised about the report, and I am sure some people will pay themselves on the back.... but if it gets covered in the international press, I don't think it will do the government and this country any favours. I think it will just reinforce an already poor opinion.

@DGRossetti

Your grasp of mathematics appears to be rather weak.

There were 530k deaths in 2019
0.1% of that figure is 530, NOT 10k