Coronavirus - the political argument

boltonbonce wrote:

Norpig wrote:Okocha banned? 

I've read his post a couple of times, but I can't really see anything worthy of even a one day ban, let alone three.
I hope Sluffy will reconsider, because, on past form Okocha is one of our fairest and even handed posters.
Perhaps we're going stir crazy. I know I am.

You may need to change your slippers.

I have enough of a job walking forward, let's not complicate matters. Anything relating to dance is a no go area for me. I have issues.
Just like it would be wrong for Uri Geller to host a fork supper, my straying into moonwalking would be equally bothersome. And possibly for the same reason, in that, I bend in all the wrong places.

Scrutiny/holding to account or fake news?

Interesting development here.

Rule of thumb I was taught as a child is not to believe everything you read in the newspapers but over the years you sort of refine that into thinking some papers are far more believable than others, one of which being the Financial Times.

Well the FT ran a story yesterday by Peter Foster in respect of the governments actions on getting more ventilators and Mr Foster went on to tweet more about it throughout the day.

Today Her Majesty's Government has taken the unusual steps to publicly 'trash' the story by issuing a detailed rebuttal from the Cabinet Office.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/response-to-ft-article-and-twitter-thread-by-peter-foster

So, fake news story or the state telling lies - you decide.



I'm not saying from this that all reporting is false nor government always gets things right just that the press aren't always spot on with what they say and no doubt their 'sources' for the story may not be as informed as they wished them to be.

It will be interesting to see how the FT and https://twitter.com/pmdfoster respond to this.

It will be interesting to see if they try to rebut any of the serious allegations in today's Sunday Times. Briefly it says the government ignored warnings from scientists for five weeks, neglected training for a pandemic and let stocks of PPE run down and go out of date. And what was Boris doing? He did not attend any of the five virus meetings held by Cobra although he did manage to take a 12 holiday at a mansion in Kent during this time.

Boris is not only the most dishonest prime minister we have ever had he is also the laziest.

xmiles wrote:It will be interesting to see if they try to rebut any of the serious allegations in today's Sunday Times. Briefly it says the government ignored warnings from scientists for five weeks, neglected training for a pandemic and let stocks of PPE run down and go out of date. And what was Boris doing? He did not attend any of the five virus meetings held by Cobra although he did manage to take a 12 holiday at a mansion in Kent during this time.

Boris is not only the most dishonest prime minister we have ever had he is also the laziest.

I don't think they will rebut anything that is a hard fact and can be evidenced in the way of the statement they've issued above but no doubt they will put their side of things in interviews or the televised public briefings as they have been doing.

Also everything needs to be looked in context at the time as well.

For example look at the explanation from Gove (to BBC's Andrew Marr) about sending almost 280,000 bits of PPE to China, which the Sunday Times also reported on - with the clear implication it left us short and was a stupid thing for Boris/the government to have done -

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1270981/michael-gove-bbc-news-andrew-marr-uk-coronavirus-latest-ppe-china-covid-19-cases

It's a fact that the government held a pandemic exercise in 2016 called 'Cygnus' which the results of remain classified but is widely believed to have shown an unpreparedness if a real pandemic actually did strike.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise_Cygnus

Of course it is easy and glib now to say the government should have done something to rectify this but we are talking about adding to a stockpile of £800m worth of equipment at the time on the off chance of a worse case scenario - which really hadn't happen since Spanish Flu almost 100 years earlier, whilst at the same time face rising demands for education, welfare, pensions and everything else a government faces.

How many of us have put away personal/family savings to keep us going for more than three months say on the off chance something bad happens?

Not that many according to this article also from 2016 -

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35801951

Are those criticising the government about being underprepared actually practicing what they preach themselves?

As for Johnson missing the Five COBRA meetings - yes it does sound bad BUT is it really if you put it into context to how he normally operates.

Laura Kuenssberg the BBC Political Editor did this profile of him less than a year ago -

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-48778509

...seems a bit of a non story if that's the way the man always operates and only becomes the story when people have the mindset that the PM of the day should be present at every such meeting.

Clearly the government set a policy that they had to do a U-turn.  Similarly they were underprepared and insufficient PPE to meet the tsunami of demand the virus brought.

Was that because they/Boris couldn't give a toss, it was a political strategy to win votes for the 2024 General Election, or they followed the medical advise modelling based on the only data at the time that China provided.

France's President Macron clearly doesn't believe them -

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-52319462

Fwiw my view is that its most probably the latter that was the major influencer of where it went wrong for the government rather than Boris being lazy or Cummings planning for a General Election four years away.

Just to pick up the Boris point, charisma is not what is required in a crisis. What is needed is effective decision making and that is not, as Kuenssberg makes abundantly clear, Boris's strength. He is far too lazy and self seeking.

Charisma helps to win elections as Boris, Trump, Bolsanaro and the likes of other popularists (including Hitler) have demonstrated but that does not make them either good or effective leaders.

xmiles wrote:Just to pick up the Boris point, charisma is not what is required in a crisis. What is needed is effective decision making and that is not, as Kuenssberg makes abundantly clear, Boris's strength. He is far too lazy and self seeking.

Charisma helps to win elections as Boris, Trump, Bolsanaro and the likes of other popularists (including Hitler) have demonstrated but that does not make them either good or effective leaders.

My point above was nothing to do with the 'charisma' element of Kuenssberg's article it was more to do with this view of Johnson -

"...he passes the charisma test so easily, but because being a leader should be about decisions not details.
One of his backers familiar with how Mr Johnson operates makes the comparison to the captain of an enormous battleship.
They don't want or need to know which pump has broken in the engine room, which crewman has gone sick, what the exact temperature of the boilers are, but is only required to know if there is a problem that affects the performance of the vessel and if it can be fixed.
And you'll regularly hear around the place that the former foreign secretary would run his Number 10 operation as the chairman of the board, not the chief executive - the decider and figurehead, not the manager.
There's also a view in his camp that because much of the public isn't that interested in the micro detail of policy, not of course always the case, then it doesn't really matter if he isn't either".

Whether that is the true view of him I don't know but he certainly didn't rise to the PM role on just charisma alone.

Even if we had a detailed focused and non lazy PM and the medical advise at the time (based on the Chinese data which was clearly being believed then about numbers - and thus the (significantly understated) rate of spread fed into the governments forecasting model) would they reject the 'herd immunity' advice their medical advisors were giving at the time and over-rule it instead?

I doubt it.

Johnson is clearly not the PM we may wish at this time but we are stuck with him in the same way that Labour was stuck with Corbyn at the General Election when clearly he was deemed unelectable by many previously hardcore Labour held seats and again how we are stuck with Brexit because Cameron decided to hold a referendum to deal with his Tory Eurosceptic's and it ended up with the country leaving the EU instead.

We just have to make of it the best we can from here on in.

The Times story seemingly confirms what most of us already knew, too slow to react, no strategy, time wasted and ultimately a failure of leadership and policy.

As Andrew Adonis said today though, it’s imperative not to be distracted by what’s happened and focus on looking forward. Right now we’re essentially leaderless and Whitehall is paralysed.

xmiles wrote:Just to pick up the Boris point, charisma is not what is required in a crisis. What is needed is effective decision making and that is not, as Kuenssberg makes abundantly clear, Boris's strength. He is far too lazy and self seeking.

Charisma helps to win elections as Boris, Trump, Bolsanaro and the likes of other popularists (including Hitler) have demonstrated but that does not make them either good or effective leader

Charisma denotes charm, I'm surprised you find Hitler charming.

T.R.O.Y. wrote:The Times story seemingly confirms what most of us already knew, too slow to react, no strategy, time wasted and ultimately a failure of leadership and policy.

As Andrew Adonis said today though, it’s imperative not to be distracted by what’s happened and focus on looking forward. Right now we’re essentially leaderless and Whitehall is paralysed.

"Knew" - I don't know that - where's your proof because I've not seeing anything confirming any of that?

Fine if you wanted to replace "knew" with 'think' because that would be your opinion which of course is yours to hold.

Mine is more that the strategy has always been based on Medical Advise given to the government and was fatally flawed by being modelled on the "light" figures provided by China at the time, leading to the no need for immediate action/ herd immunity strategy.

Once the Italian data was fed into the model it quickly became clear something was clearly amiss and brought about an immediate change in policy and the lockdown.

So yes time was wasted and the original policy flawed but was that the governments fault or the medical advise based on deliberately understated Chinese data (see Macron's view which is completely independent of the government or Trump but comes to the same belief).

I look forward to reading what the official inquiry's findings are after all this is over (particularly if other country's question China's initial honesty too) rather than jump to conclusions based on what is written in the press - eg my original post today in respect of the FT article for instance.

‘Seemingly’ was the key word you’ve missed there.

T.R.O.Y. wrote:‘Seemingly’ was the key word you’ve missed there.

I don't wish to be pedantic but this is what you wrote

T.R.O.Y. wrote:
"...seemingly confirms what most of us already KNEW..."

...which says something is looking to CONFIRM something you already KNEW.

You ALREADY KNOW the fact, this is just something on top to confirm it.

Even if it doesn't confirm the fact it doesn't matter as such because you ALREADY KNOW it to be a FACT, the extra information if it was correct would only ADD to that, not DISPROVE it wasn't the FACT you ALREADY KNEW about.

So no, I didn't overlook the word 'seemingly' in the sentence you wrote as it was incidental in respect to the FACT you ALREAY KNEW.

Anyway in response to xmiles post earlier...

xmiles wrote:It will be interesting to see if they try to rebut any of the serious allegations in today's Sunday Times. Briefly it says the government ignored warnings from scientists for five weeks, neglected training for a pandemic and let stocks of PPE run down and go out of date. And what was Boris doing? He did not attend any of the five virus meetings held by Cobra although he did manage to take a 12 holiday at a mansion in Kent during this time.

Boris is not only the most dishonest prime minister we have ever had he is also the laziest.

...a response to the Sunday Times from the government website -

https://healthmedia.blog.gov.uk/2020/04/19/response-to-sunday-times-insight-article/

I particularly would wish to highlight this part of the response -

"The editor of the Lancet, on exactly the same day – 23 January - called for “caution” and accused the media of ‘escalating anxiety by talking of a ‘killer virus’ and ‘growing fears’. He wrote: ‘In truth, from what we currently know, 2019-nCoV has moderate transmissibility and relatively low pathogenicity. There is no reason to foster panic with exaggerated language.’ ."


transmissibility
/tranzˌmɪsəˈbɪləti/

nounMedicine
noun: transmissibility
the quality of a disease or trait being able to be passed on from one person or organism to another.


pathogenicity
/ˌpaθədʒəˈnɪsɪti/

nounMedicine
noun: pathogenicity
the property of causing disease.


Which I humbly suggests backs up my reasoning of what happened at the time in that virtually only China had ALL the information of the virus at that time (Japan's first case was reported on the 16th Jan, South Korea the 20th and Singapore the same date of the Lancet article, the 23rd) and which clearly the rest of the world used to base their strategies on.


Tbh, I hadn't heard of the government even had a blog site and was suspicious about it's authenticity but confirm it to be genuine by doing a separate search to prove its authenticity -

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/govuk-blogging-platform-privacy-notice/govuk-blogging-platform-privacy-notice

Two essays because of my choice of one word.

T.R.O.Y. wrote:Two essays because of my choice of one word.

Two informed and researched replies to something you stated you 'knew' which I would suggest was just your opinion based on your particular political stance rather than any known facts.

I don't know if you even bothered to read my last post above but it does seem to contain the 'smoking gun' of what most likely happened and why in respect of the information about the virus (which could only have come from China) and which the rest of the world initially based how best they would deal with the virus within their own country.  

The information at that time clearly was that passing the virus on was only 'moderate' and the potential death from it was relatively 'low'.

Seems reasonable for the government to therefore pursue a herd immunity strategy rather than draconianly locking down the whole country as a 'containment' strategy on that basis.

When the true results of the virus based on what went on to happen in Italy, 'exponential' transmissibility, and 'quarter of million' pathogenicity the medical advisors immediately changed their advise to lockdown.

Perhaps if the true details of what actually did occur in China were given many people throughout the world would not needed to have died and sadly many, many more still will.

Still believe it's all the governments fault?

I’ve never said it’s all the governments fault - I’ve said multiple times it’s not.

I think their response has been poor, and we were ill prepared. Stories leaking now seem to be supporting that view - not to mention the amount of deaths we’ve had.

I haven’t been reading your posts on it.

Cajunboy wrote:

xmiles wrote:Just to pick up the Boris point, charisma is not what is required in a crisis. What is needed is effective decision making and that is not, as Kuenssberg makes abundantly clear, Boris's strength. He is far too lazy and self seeking.

Charisma helps to win elections as Boris, Trump, Bolsanaro and the likes of other popularists (including Hitler) have demonstrated but that does not make them either good or effective leader

Charisma denotes charm, I'm surprised you find Hitler charming.

I don't find Hitler (or Boris, Trump and Bolsanaro) in the least bit charming. My point is that lots of people apparently do and then vote for them despite their obvious faults.

T.R.O.Y. wrote:I’ve never said it’s all the governments fault - I’ve said multiple times it’s not.

I think their response has been poor, and we were ill prepared. Stories leaking now seem to be supporting that view - not to mention the amount of deaths we’ve had.

I haven’t been reading your posts on it.

Clearly.

Just trolling for a response then - arguing for arguments sake and all that once again?

Believe whatever you want - most people do - but I suggest what I've been saying all along is near the mark as to what has happened than most seem to want to believe.

A long and hard road to travel for us all yet and many will die before we finally get through it.  

Sadly it seems many might have been spared if China had been honest right from the start and lockdown their international flights when they locked down Hunan.  Instead they ended up exporting the virus to a world who 'was told' by them that the spread of it was of it was 'nothing much' and the death rate from it only minimal.

Politics (world) being played yet again.

How many people have died and continued to die over the years and now because of politics and religion.

Will we never learn?

I can’t be trolling you if I’m not challenging anything you say.

Forget Covid. Kenneth Copeland has our back.

T.R.O.Y. wrote:I can’t be trolling you if I’m not challenging anything you say.

You're fooling nobody.

You're not challenging anything I say (never read it in fact you claim) yet still post exactly the opposite things to what I've said.

Yeah right, must be pure coincidence then and not you deliberately trying  to seek a reaction!

Totally believable from you.