Concerned about the spread of the Omicron variant and a lack of understanding surrounding how dangerous the new strain is, Gillian Keegan, the Care Minister (the Minister of State responsible for mental health), has declared that New Year’s Eve festivities might have to be cancelled. In addition, Keegan mentioned that the Government was being lenient with the public in allowing Christmas to go ahead with the current restrictions in place, but that this leniency may end following Christmas Day. The Guardian has the story.
Plans for New Year’s Eve parties in England may have to be scrapped, a minister has admitted, as she said there remained uncertainty over the severity of illness caused by the Omicron variant of Covid.
Gillian Keegan, the Care Minister, refused to rule out lockdown measures being introduced in England shortly after Christmas and said 129 people had been hospitalised and 14 had died with Omicron in the U.K.
“There is uncertainty. So, if you can’t change your [New Year’s Eve] plans quickly, then maybe think about it. There is uncertainty. We can’t predict what the data is going to tell us before we’ve got the data,” she said.
She told LBC Radio that the Government’s approach in England had been to try to allow people to go ahead with Christmas plans, but that the same could not necessarily be said of the following holiday.
Boris Johnson has said no new measures will be put in place in England before Christmas Day, but the devolved administrations in Scotland and Wales are introducing some new restrictions before and after the holiday.
Keegan told Sky News: “We do not have all the information that you would like to have at your fingertips, in particular… the severity of the disease. So it is a difficult balance but we think we’ve got the balance right. You know, saying to the country we wanted to lock down etc, when you’ve got those kind of figures wouldn’t look proportionate.”
She said the decision that was taken on further restrictions was “difficult”. Asked whether there was any chance a ‘circuit breaker’ lockdown might be avoided if the country continued on its current path, Keegan said: “We are waiting for data on the severity, we’ll still have to wait to see where we land on that, but we can’t really say, you know.
“What we’ve said is: up to Christmas, we’re fine, looking at the data, looking at the numbers we have at the moment. But, of course, we have to look at where this virus goes, where this variant goes, so we have to look at that data. I can’t tell you in advance of getting that data, but you should be cheerful because we’re doing a lot more than we could last year. We’re able to see our families.”
Keegan acknowledged that Johnson was refusing to act based on the same data that had led first ministers elsewhere in the U.K. to take preventive measures, but she claimed this was not a result of indecision or political calculation.
She was asked on Times Radio if the issue was not Johnson’s “own political judgment and that he doesn’t want to do anything with the data that all the leaders are seeing”.
Keegan said: “If we see large jumps in the data, large jumps in hospitalisation… then of course we’ll react. But we don’t actually have that yet. So what [Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon and Wales’s Mark Drakeford are] doing is… they’re looking at the risk and they’re coming up with a different answer.”
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Lockdown zealot Mark Drakeford, Wales’s swivel-eyed First Minister, has banned New Year’s Eve celebrations and ordered pubs and restaurants to re-impose the rule of six from Boxing Day. MailOnline has more.
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So when the Fascist pigs want to terrify their own people, each scariant is deadlier than the last, including the Kentiscariant. But when Macron wants to score a point against Britain (how very novel for a French leader!), our Fascists suddenly find that the Kentiscariant is a tame lapdog.
Well well.
I am not giving Macron a ‘pass’ here, he should have resisted the enormous pressure from his ‘experts’ that sometimes make SAGE look like poodles. But in his speech he was careful not to phrase reference to the Kent ‘variant’ as if it was a ‘britsh/brexit’ issue, which is how most of the UK MSM and this article are painting it. This doesn’t help anyone.
I agree that the almost linear rise in ‘cases’ is more a function of increase tests than anything else, but its also reflected in numbers of hospitalisations and ICU admissions, again in a linear increase.
This is highly unusual behaviour for a virus. There is no explanation I have seen for this.
I suspect some of the numbers are very suspect, and are part of an attempt to convince at least part of the 50% of the French population that are saying no to vaccination.
If people will need a booster jab in September that’s billions more in profit for big pharma and another reason to reintroduce restrictions if there is a seasonal rise in cases before everyone has their booster. I wonder who is lobbying who to push the largely nonexistant dangers of all these variants.
Since viruses continously mutate, and presumably have done for hundreds of millions of years it seems obvious that the immune system would evolve to be able to fight variants of a virus as well as the strain that is currently circulating. Any organism that was immune against new variants and not just the old one would have a competative advantage and be more likely to pass on the genes for developing this immunity. This is another reason why it would’ve been better to allow the virus to spread among people at low risk of serious illness. Natural herd immunity is likely to be better than vaccine induced immunity. Sadly this is one more basic principle of biology/virology that the “experts” seem to have ignored, for reasons only they can know.
Not yet.
A few months ago someone leaked the contract. They can choose to make a profit from July, if I recall correctly
It depends on who gets to call the end of the emergency at which point
1. AstraZeneca can start charging market rates.
2. Authorisation for use under ’emegency’ provisions must surely be called into question ?
… which gives the rationale for continually upping the ante in terms of new Scary Fairies, and continuing the suppression of possible cheap prophylactics like Ivermectin.
They are experimenting on millions of subjects for free, whilst getting lots of coverage, that’s a nice win-win
Your link to the PHE study is hilariously, embarrassingly wrong.
It is actually the link to a BMJ study (March 10) concluding that the Kent variant is indeed much more deadly.
Please provide the correct link.
Yes – even in the report written by the “Swiss Doctor” there is only a link to an article in the Daily Telegraph. The study seems not to have been published (or peer reviewed) yet, and its existence is only known due to a press conference at 10 Downing Street.
There could be an easy explanation for increased hospitalization rate not accompanied by higher mortality rate. The propensity to admit could have been increased compared to the first wave ie less sick cases admitted. The health care sytem did not collapse in the first wave might increase “overhospitalization” ie doctors admit more,knowing it would have less effect on the system. Really the excess mortality and the the true C-19 mortality is the only way to estimate if a variant really is more dangerous.
The Swizz doctor is a bit leaning to van den Bosche scenario saying if neutral antbodies are affected as above could be problematic although they allude to something called T-cells immunity. But another study published a few days ago,again showed that T cells have a broad immunity incl. against variant.
One would bet that natural acquired immunity ,is the most effective T cells response as known by everybody pre 2020 and that an artificial immunity like vaccine can never come up to that level. The article above is down here
https://academic.oup.com/ofid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ofid/ofab143/6189113#.YGTXD75sdDQ.twitter
CD8+ T cell responses in COVID-19 convalescent individuals target conserved epitopes from multiple prominent SARS-CoV-2 circulating variants
This study examined whether CD8+ T-cell responses from COVID-19 convalescent individuals (n=30) potentially maintain recognition of the major SARS-CoV-2 variants suggesting that virtually all anti-SARS-CoV-2 CD8+ T-cell responses should recognize these newly described variants.