I attended the London Labour Conference over the weekend, which was held online. I was lucky to be able to speak on CV19, public health and NPIs. This blog article reports on the notes of the speech, and the words of the motion.
Today should have been either Freedom Day or a more mundane, lifting of all lockdown restrictions. It isn’t. It’s been postponed by four weeks. I remain uncomfortable about the Govt’s (and Labour’s) approach and its sole reliance on vaccines. I came across a tweet today from Deepti Gurdasani , who has taken up the issue of pandemic response and, in my mind, talks about the fact that the Govt. are still pursuing a herd immunity strategy and the the failure and loss of trust in track and trace is a critical weakness in the UK response. She also pointed me at the serious escalating evidence of the crippling damage of “long covid”. and at the John Snow Memo.
#JohnSnowMemo
— Deepti Gurdasani (@dgurdasani1) October 14, 2020
Scientists, health professionals, public health researchers- please join the call for action.
Sign the John Snow Memorandum here:https://t.co/wXNbsv0wcq
Please disseminate widely. https://t.co/foukzPulSB
It seems to be about 1 year old, and says, among other things,
In the absence of adequate provisions to manage the pandemic and its societal impacts, these countries have faced continuing restrictions. This has understandably led to widespread demoralisation and diminishing trust. …
Any pandemic management strategy relying upon immunity from natural infections for COVID-19 is flawed. … Furthermore, there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection and the endemic transmission that would be the consequence of waning immunity would present a risk to vulnerable populations for the indefinite future. …
Effective measures that suppress and control transmission need to be implemented widely, and they must be supported by financial and social programmes that encourage community responses and address the inequities that have been amplified by the pandemic.
The John Snow Memo
We, i.e. the UK, need an effective and trusted track and trace, which we don’t have, thanks to Hancock and Harding. Without it, we are just using sticking plaster to mend a broken leg! …
Will we go abroad for holiday’s this year? Boris, in Hartlepool, says maybe, Shapps says, dig out your passport. We’ll find out on May17th, but it looks as if the Govt will operate a traffic light scheme, requiring returning holiday makers to have a PRC test on return for Green list countries, and 10 day isolation for Amber, and a10 days in an approved hotel stay for Red list countries. Who bears the cost of testing is unclear, who bears the cost of hotel stay is not, it will be bourne by the traveller. I have taken the controls from the another BBC article. So it might be Devon, or Skegness?
Even if we don’t go abroad, are we putting our health in the once struggling NHS track & trace system? …
Someone writes to me, “I’m not sure the UK can pat themselves on the back for intentionally looking after themselves, much like the US. Germany also funded research into the Pfizer vaccine but didn’t secure a 1st order before the EU, taking a more Internationalist approach. They’ve also secured their own orders since, probably because of Germans getting fed up with the slow EU roll out. Without the EU a lot of smaller member states would have struggled to get in the queue that’s the difference. Unfortunately now that UK have received plenty but not exported any to EU it’s getting tense and the rhetoric unhelpful. Macron has been an idiot but Merkel and the EMA have not. Good distraction for UK government from world leading death toll and billions wasted on PPE and test and trace. It’s also a good case for saying that the UK should be part of the leadership of the EU then this drama may not have happened.”
To which I added, that the grandstanding and threats by Macron & Von der Leyden has been exceptionally unhelpful; it’s possible that this Commission is the 2nd worse there’s been and for the record, the German’s like us, only seem to put 2nd rate politicians onto the Commission. We don’t need to defend the Commission but should always remember that for vaccines to work, we need people other than those that paid for it to have it. We should also forcefully make the point that vaccines are not enough, it is necessary to have a well functioning, track, trace and isolate programme which the UK does not, with adequate compensation for loss of income from public health compliance.
By saying it’s a vaccine bounce and there’s nothing we can do, we collude with a policy that has led to the highest death total in Europe and a policy which is trying to get people back to the work place irrespective of safety, again! I hope that there is no reason to slowdown or reverse the unlockdown, but it is not planned as a complete reversal even today. …
A friend moved this motion, in his case, at their CLP on what we need to support people and even families during the current pandemic. (NPI is Non pharmaceutical intervention.) This can be used at CLP, Labour branch and Union branch meetings. The words of the motion are overleaf/below ...
In his first speech of the year, Sir Kier Starmer, the Leader of the Labour Party makes a speech on the Tory Govt's flawed response to the coronavirus pandemic. Is this a redefinition of 'responsible opposition'? I am not so sure. This post includes a link to the speech on youtube. I say, "It's ok as far as it goes" but in thre end disappointing.
Last night the Prime Minister announced a new lockdown in England. Top line being that people should stay at home and only leave their homes for work if the work cannot be done at home and is essential. The rest of this blog is a draft of a post to one of my union blogs and talks about the NEU, and how to report employer bad behaviour. There's more below and overleaf.
I mirror a Sky News report. WHO state that track & trace is more important than lockdowns, "UK leaders need to sort out problems with test and trace, says WHO envoy", while we consider that all the Govt. is doing is mandating social lockdowns. The full article including the Nabarro quotes are worth reading and published on the "Read More" page. ...
In my blogs on the Track & Trace failure [blog | linkedin], I make the throwaway comment that Govt. IT often fails repeatedly because no-one is accountable, nor punished and thus they fail to learn but in this case it’s not true; Dido Harding the CEO of the Track & Trace was CEO of Talk Talk when it was fined £ ½m for another data protection breach caused by another failure to in this case close down an application running on an out of date & unpatched version of MySQL, making it vulnerable to a SQL injection attack, one of the OWASP top 10 vulnerabilities. How unlucky can you get? …
The press have been full of the story of Dominic Cummings’ trip to Durham (from London) while he was isolating due to CV19 infection. “Led by Donkeys” have their own inimitable take on this; they took it to Cummings’ London home. However, he has been supported by various members of the Cabinet, including the Attorney General, probably in an act of prejuidice, in the legal sense, and capped off last night, by Boris Johnson who took the daily press conference, for the first time in a while and, not for the first time told the nation to fuck off. It seems that what Cummings did is responsible and legal. Johnson also restated that the Govt. planned to re-open the schools, starting with the youngest, against the will of most parents and most school workers. Johnson’s press conference was followed by an extraordinary hostile tweet from the Civil Service twitter account, allowing us to draw the conclusion that Johnson is “arrogant & offensive”; I mean it’s not exactly news.
What the Tory Government fail to recognise is the elitism and arrogance of this behaviour. A number of twitter users have expressed their anger and sadness that they were able to see, visit and comfort their dying relatives, even when living much closer than Cummings’ 500 mile round trip. It took me a while to realise how important it is to spend some time with the dying to properly say goodbye. As a child, I had been protected from family deaths and had thus learned not to see them as important events; I even almost missed saying good bye to my mother, through choices of my own, and can now see how important the visits to my dying father in the ICU were. My solidarity goes out to all those who have lost relatives and others precious to them during this crisis, I know that my grief would have been harder to overcome, if I had not been able to see my Dad although I only know this looking back helped by the insights and grief expressed by those writing today. The grief will hurt for a longer time then if they’d been able to visit them. I am sorry for your loss. …