Coronavirus (COVID-19)

Had AZ for the first 2

Let's go back a step...

Which of those are "gross distortions of the truth"?

Show your working without reference to some random YooChoober, please. Peer-reviewed scientific information from reputable sources only.

With nearly 70% of the population fully vaccinated (not including boosters) including all the most vulnerable and elderly it is almost inevitable that vaccinated people are dying 'with' covid. If you look at deaths on 'our world in data' the UK looks fairly stable on deaths over the last few months, which is good news to me. The unvaccinated are a smaller percentage of the population and usually younger, less vulnerable and less likely to get seriously ill from any cause.

Sorry to say it, but I frequently despair: I struggle to believe that posts like this are anything other than deliberate obfuscation. I mean, even reading the article you have linked to can not lead you to that conclusion ("we know that...."). Let alone the rest of the discussion in thread that you have been a party to. Bizarre. To wit:

- Vaccine effects are not binary on/off. Its a continual spectrum
- Vaccination may stop or significantly increase the chances of not getting infected (essentially your immune system fighting off initial attack so effectively that.....), but it may not
- Disease is an outcome of infection, not the same as 
- Even if it doesn't provide a high level of protection against infection, it can have primed your immune system so that it is able to put up a significantly better fight so  as to avoid you getting significant disease

What we currently do know (amongst other things) is:

- The current vaccines are less effective
- Az on its own is probably very poor at completely preventing infection (lab tests, neutralising antibodies response)
- that compared with the mRNA vaccines, the trial data from Az gave the biggest gap between preventing symptomatic infection vs preventing disease severe enough to prevent hospitalisation. It was less good at preventing infection (first trial data) but not only comparable but possibly better at preventing severe disease (as I recall). 

Just about every Tom Cobbly and all - by which I mean those with some credibility in the matter, including the WHO - say that not withstanding reduced effectiveness, they expect [but don't yet know] that existing vaccines to still provide a reasonable level of protection against serious disease.

The article you point to includes the following paras, just as one example:

While the effectiveness of the jabs against severe disease is still unknown, the team says it is expected to be higher [than protection against infection], drawing parallels to the drop in vaccine effectiveness for Delta when compared with earlier variants.



“We did see this reduction in protection against milder disease with Delta way back in June. And what we didn’t see was any reduction in protection against hospitalisation,” said Ramsay.

Well on that friendly note, I'll bow out of this discussion for a few weeks. No doubt in January when we hopefully will know omicron was a damp squib, you'll be saying it was the booster wot won it.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year !

When reporting the government's announcements and pronouncements, then there is one relevant consensus.

You seem to be confusing, as MichaelC seems to, reportage with debate.
That's an internal matter for SAGE. They come to an agreement, that gets fed to the government.
Yes, there is.

Each country makes political decisions based on its own advice.

Mostly, the UK seems to be on the lower-impact end of the spectrum, trying to minimise socio-economic disruption even at the expense of greater cases. Because THAT is the trade-off... Results can't be compared easily across different countries, because of different societal factors at play.
The one thing that is reasonably consistent, however, is that this really is serious. Both the pandemic generally, and this variant in particular.
And that's part of the political process.

Those individual backbenchers MPs - who have just as much say as any other MPs, when it comes to votes put before the HoC - are consciously and deliberately leaning towards the minimum disruption end of the trade-off. Such is their prerogative.

I'd like to hope they are at least basing that decision on the sound scientific evidence that is available to them, not favouring a random retired nurse's home-made videos over that.

But, given the overlap with the ERG...