We have learnt over the past year that no easing of lockdown rules comes without at least a few catches. The relaxing of travel quarantine rules for those who are fully vaccinated is no exception. Families that travel to “Amber List” countries may not have to self-isolate upon their return to the U.K. from July 19th, but they will have to force their children – aged between five and 18 – to undergo PCR testing, much to the anger of many parents. The Telegraph has the story.
Parents and academics claimed it was unnecessary and potentially harmful to test such young children, while tourism chiefs warned the extra costs for holidays could price many families out of foreign travel.
The Transport Secretary announced that all children aged five to 18 will have to undergo PCR tests when they return from Amber Countries with their parents or individually. Only those aged four or under will not have to be tested.
The tests are required as part of the Government’s new travel regime for double-jabbed adults and all children to be able to travel to Amber countries from July 19th without having to quarantine on their return to the U.K.
Children aged over 11 and all vaccinated adults will have to take pre-departure tests and a PCR test on or before day two after their arrival back in the U.K.
Those aged five to 11 have to take just the PCR test on arrival. For a family of four, it could add £400 to the cost of a holiday.
Most other countries in Europe exempt children aged under 12 but Mr Shapps said the PCR tests were necessary to enable the Government to track and prevent variants being imported through genome sequencing the samples.
Molly Kingsley, Co-Founder of UsforThem, a parents’ campaign group, said Britain had never tested healthy adults “let alone five year-olds for asymptomatic illnesses”.
“It is very unclear why we would be doing this now at a time when we know the vaccines have broken the link between infections and hospitalisations,” she said.
“Many parents would feel uneasy about normalising testing for children as young as this. It sends a very negative message to our children that they are disease vectors.
“Any holiday with a family is expensive enough as it is. I would not put a five or eight year-old through this to go away.”
Professor Allyson Pollock, Director of the Newcastle University Centre for Excellence in Regulatory Science, said that with the link between infection, hospitalisation and deaths “hugely weakened”, testing children was illogical.
“We really should be asking: what is the prevalence of infection and how good is the natural immunity in the country they are returning to? What evidence is there that these tests will reduce transmission?” she said.
“I don’t understand the logic of it or what has informed it. Where are the evaluations and science to support this. They are making it up as they go along. This is the mess you get into when you introduce vaccine passports and Covid tests.
“You either make a decision that you don’t want people to travel to countries with high prevalence or coming back into them, or you simply say we have got pretty good immunity established in the country.”
The aviation industry welcomed the opening of Amber countries to vaccinated Britons as a “step in the right direction,” but urged the Government to ditch PCR tests for the fully jabbed.
Worth reading in full.
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I’ve written to my Woke Socialist Tory MP dozens of times. She knows very well I will never vote for her, and she doubtless thinks I’m Literally Hitler. I used to get an automated response – the ones that say “thanks for your email, we’ll have a look and may get back to you. Now I get nothing. I then used an old email address of mine, and got the automated response. It’s pretty clear my main email address is on the auto-delete blacklist. She’s in what was a safe Tory seat, only in danger from the Lib Dems, so she’s going to lean left if she feels in danger, knowing that dutiful Tory voters, still asleep, will keep voting for her, thinking they might get conservatism.
Mine has stopped responding to my emails too. Another MP who has subscribed to the party first, constituents & country last agenda.
It will cause pain for a while but I think our only hope is the destruction of the Conservative Party. I believe that there is still substantial support for conservatism among the UK population, but it is not being given a voice because people keep voting Tory in the hope that the Conservatives will be conservative, or knowing they won’t but hoping they will be less bad than Labour.
The problem is that we only have an illusion of democracy. No leader of any party is permitted to enter a leadership contest if they don’t subscribe to the agenda or if they do get there, you can be certain that something will be ‘uncovered’ that is so embarrassing that they have to step down , thus ensuring the leader of ‘choice’ is successful.
Politics is just theatre to keep the plebiscite convinced that democracy is alive & well.
Brexit seems to me to have proved that there are exceptions to that.
The vote, agreed. The implementation of the vote? No.
Parliament tried to wriggle out of it, but Johnson saw an opportunity to seize power through it. Right now I don’t know where we are with it though as I have been distracted by the covid thing.
We’re in limbo – Northern Ireland being within EU jurisdiction still is just extracting the urine. There was no intention of allowing the UK PLC to leave the EU PLC.
Ah yes, NI. Seems insoluble really. We dug that hole with the Good Friday Agreement.
I’ll give you the update.
Having left the EU, we now have none of the perks of being in the EU – like automatic permission to travel and settle in any EU country, duty and tariff free trade with the EU and other bits and bobs.
And the political agenda is still the same as the rest of the EU’s because it’s the same agenda that every western country has – climate change, vaccines (except we got them even quicker… yippee), lockdowns, masks, war with Russia, pandemic treaty coming your way, online censorship, transsexualism, more expensive energy, the whole nine yards – and not much hope of ever being free of any of it.
In fact, what Brexit actually seems to have meant is that now that we aren’t in the EU we can be front runners for the whole agenda, thanks to our leaner, more streamlined lawmaking capabilities. So Net Zero sooner, covid jabs sooner, the first of Moderna’s mRNA facilities. So we get it all sooner.
Aren’t we lucky…
I voted Leave and still believe that was the right choice, though in practice it only matters if we have a sovereign national government acting in the best interests of UK citizens – and we all know how that is going
Absolutely correct BB or as I like to put it:
Our salvation will not arrive via the ballot box.
Mine is Ian Liddell-Grainger, (name and shame, on him) he never responds to anything that doesn’t follow the political agenda. I know I’ve tried on numerous occasions over the last few years. The man is pointless unless you are a full blown somnambulist, but also sits in what for many years has been a safe seat.
“…pseudo-scientific quack treatments…”
I am always worried when we encompass ideologically loaded terms like “pseudo-science” to defuse opposition, as philosophers of science know that “pseudo-science” cannot be defined in relation to “real science” without simply an appeal to “consensus,” which we know from recent experience to be anti-scientific and very often mere fabrication. It’s like the common, “I would never go down the conspiracy-theory nonsense, but something isn’t quite right” – how do you know there isn’t a conspiracy apart from the conspirators denying it?
Here is some pseudo-science which underpins the ban on conversion therapy: “Homosexuality is genetic, and therefore inborn and unchangeable.” “Trans people are born in the wrong body, and therefore cannot change.” “Biological sex is not binary.”
By contrast, if somebody wants to change a lifestyle they regret, counselling that maybe provides satisfactory understandings of what went wrong, whilst not likely to be amenable to scientific demonstration, may well help an individual to a happier and healthier life.
Addendum:
If you look up the prestigious Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “Science and Pseudoscience,” you’ll see among the list of pseudo-sciences that is, it says, more or less universally agreed by the “community of knowledge disciplines” not only holocaust denialism and dowsing, but climate denialism. Tough luck Richard Lindzen and all the accredited scientists at WUWT.
In the section on “conspiracy theories,” anti-vaccine proponents fall into the pseudoscience category because of their absurd belief that “large pharmaceutical companies and governments are covering up information about vaccines to meet their own sinister objectives.” The fact that those companies have been fined huge amounts in the past for just that is, apparently, irrelevant. The conspiracy theorists, we read, have to explain “the overwhelming consensus among medical experts that vaccines are efficient.” We’ve learned since 2020 that keeping your medical registration is a powerful former of such consensus.
Now substitute for those the vast consensus of experts, professional bodies, governments, religious leaders and educationalists who agree that denying children can be born in the wrong body is hate speech, and that trying to persuade children otherwise has no place in civilised society. It becomes obvious that “pseudoscience” is a very dangerous concept to embrace, however useful it seems for debunking von Daniken or astrology.
The very first ‘live’ group I ever went to see were The Kinks. 1964. Burnley Mechanics’ Institute. Seems like Ray Davies was onto something in 1970 when Lola was released.
“Girls will be boys and boys will be girls
it’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world, ‘cept for Lola
La la la la Lola
–
Well I’m not the world’s most masculine man
But I know what I am and I’m glad I’m a man
so is Lola
La la la la Lola
Some saddo has down voted song lyrics. “It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world.”.
Don’t worry about it. Trolls are just what we have to put up with. They are sad little people really. I have one following me around all day waiting for my posts so they can downtick. As Mogs puts it – a splash of red adds a bit of colour
This has been marketed more-or-less aggressively since the 1970s. Or maybe more correct, it was marketed aggressively back then and is again being marketed aggressively now, except that the people doing this now control everything and not just so-called popular culture.
The assumption is that MPs are interested in or supportive of free speech. Nothing could be further from the truth.
How about repealing all Crimes invented since 1997. We need to police to deal with real crimes not Thought Crimes.
Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near Everyman Cinema & play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
I hereby self-identify as sex: male, gender: none. I’m me. I’m not playing some canned role. People have no gender identities unless they chose so.
Yes I just find it baffling how hung up people get on this stuff. God knows life is difficult enough without imagining problems that don’t exist.