The U.K. has used just 142 million of the stockpile of 650 million vaccine doses it purchased, leaving an estimated £4 billion worth of vaccines unused and, at current levels of take-up, likely going to waste. The vaccines typically have an expiration date of six to 12 months after manufacture – though it’s not clear how many of the 650 million doses have already been manufactured and put in storage and how many are on order for future manufacture and delivery.
Officials have not revealed exactly how much was paid for the Pfizer vaccines, which comprise nearly a third of the total ordered, but the U.S. Government is reputed to have paid around $20 (£16) a dose.
The Moderna vaccine is said to have cost a bit less, perhaps about $15 (£12) per dose, and the Astra Zeneca considerably less, perhaps as low as $4 (£3) per dose as it was sold at cost. There are no data on the other five types ordered, all of which are as yet completely unused.
If an average price of $10 (£8) per dose is assumed, the total bill for all the unused vaccine doses will amount to around $5 billion or £4 billion. Will the public be forgiving of this massive waste of public funds on account of it occurring with good intentions during a state of emergency? That remains to be seen.
It is however far from the only example of pandemic profligacy. The losses due to fraud and delinquent business loans are colossal, with City AM reporting that the Treasury’s £4.3bn fraud write-off is likely to be eclipsed by £20bn of Covid loan defaults. The Government has also written off £8.7bn it spent on protective equipment bought during the pandemic, with £673m of equipment unusable, £750m not used before its expiry date, £2.6bn of equipment judged to be unsuitable for use in the NHS, and £4.7bn being due to the Government paying more for it during the acute global shortage than it is now worth. The Government also spent £569m buying 20,900 ventilators, of which only 2,150 (10%) were used, the rest being left idle in a Ministry of Defence warehouse.
This gross misuse of taxpayers’ money must be examined in the independent inquiry and by Government so the lessons can be learned and in future a robust management system applied in real time so that even stocks purchased in haste and with urgency are kept in reasonable proportion to anticipated demand.
The over-reaction and panic in spring 2020 resulted in decisions that have now turned out to be a huge waste of public money. If there was perceived to be a shortage of anything that might conceivably be needed to fulfil the needs of the public emergency, the public purse was always open.
Actually, the purse appeared to be treated more like Mary Poppins’ bottomless magic carpet bag, with no sign of any prudent oversight applied to funding decisions as long as they served the purpose of proving to the public that the Government was ‘doing something’ about Covid. The results of that fiscal incontinence are now clear for all to see.
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“…diversity, equity, and inclusion…” = monoculture, exclusion, compliance, discrimination.
And if anyone says it’s a minor issue or you are making it up, show this this chart and the argument is won on the spot.
From a Charlie Kirk tweet:
In the year after the George Floyd riots, S&P100 companies added more than 300,000 jobs. White Americans, more than half the adult population, got just 6% of them. Thousands of young white graduates entering the workforce found their path blocked, not because of ability or qualifications, but because of skin color.
It’s time for white people to reject the “white supremacy” lie. White people are not the perpetrators of “systemic racism.” They are the victims of it.
https://x.com/charliekirk11/status/1742622835250729024?s=20
I’m starting to think that if Tik Tok could just be banned people’s mental health would improve no end, because it just gives validation to these and similar lunatics. Or would off-the-charts nutjobbery like this still exist but they’d just find another platform from which to project their mental illness to the world? Not sure…
https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV/status/1743293215912984753
Someone really urgently needs to tell these … ahem … somewhat human-looking entities that “white people” don’t exist as ethnic group outside of the USA. Maybe, they’ll finally take note of that (seems extremly unlikely, though). No one will ever ask a black guy living in England and speaking with an obviously English accent if he’s perhaps “Polish”. And the poor opressed black guy was even allowed to vote on the future of the “Polishes” not that long ago. They weren’t.
The three most heavily abused words in the entire Newspeak language.
Discrimination, Exclusion, Inequity.
“I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organisation…”
I have always believed it was talent and skill – ‘diversity’ whatever meaning is attached doesn’t guarantee or produce that.
“The E for ‘equity’ in DEI is about equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity.”
Equity is NOT equality… they are two separate words with distinct meaning. Equality = all treated to the same standards. Equity = all treated fairly. Hence equality and equity before the Law.
In other words make it gay and put an effing chicken in it.
This guy is such a weasel.
He only “woke up” to DEI when he realised he would have to fight it to get the heads of the Ivy League schools kicked out for allowing criticism of Israeli war crimes in Gaza.
The guy lied and BSed his way to millions in his trades and is no free speech saint.
Have no idea of his motives, if any, behind his current move, but neither do you.
I knew Bill somewhat 15yrs ago – dealt with him in business at a time when he had done well, but no more than that. He was ferociously bright, hardworking and honest, with great integrity and an enormous sense of fun. Nothing in his recent actions suggest anything has changed.
Your sound and fury belittle you.
I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organisation, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing and more … but nobody must offer anything but unconditional support to whatever policies the government of Israel wants to implement. If not, he’s ANTISYMMETRIC!!
Thank you for this highly enlightening standpoint, Mr Billionaire. It is – to me at least – entirely unclear why a successful organization other than a nation-wide swinger club should be concerened with the so-called sex lives of its members. Likewise, there’s no reason to assume that a successful organization must necessarily include black people or people whose ancestors came from different nations. That’s nicely exemplified by the fact that that the military record of the US army isn’t exactly stellar when overwhelming numerical superiority didn’t come into play.
I hope he stops funding (DEI) hate…
I don’t suggest he should stop funding education – but he might be more selective about which organisations, and with attached conditions on what it can be spent on. (Ha! More selective than Harvard).
I’m sure Harvard won’t miss him as a donor but when a few other rich folk begin to question what they’re funding, maybe they’ll have to take notice.
Man, they do like to close ranks don’t they? I mean, do we have many examples of black people calling out other black people who have behaved inappropriately? But if you’re not black and call them out you’re a ‘you know what’, and what the hell is an ”anti-racist” anyway? Is this a new nonsensical term such as ”Islamophobe” or ”far-right”, to be misapplied and over-used at will? More on the fraudulent windbag antisemite ( who can’t possibly be a racist because she’s black ) here;
”Christopher Brunet and Christopher Rufo did much to uncover and publicize examples of Claudine Gay’s serial plagiarism, and had criticized her when, as Dean of the FAS, she had defended Professor Ryan Enos from charges of using fabricated datasets. Some have suggested that her investigation of sexual misconduct charges brought against Lawrence Fryer, a black professor of economics, and the punishment he endured — two years of unpaid leave — were motivated in part by personal animus, for Fryer’s work directly contradicted her own. Brunet wrote in October 2022:
”I can’t stress enough how much of a tragedy a Claudine Gay presidency would be — this mustn’t be allowed to come to pass. She will ruin Harvard. She’s an intellectual lightweight (her entire body of critical race theory “research” is flawed and/or fake), a far-far-far-left DEI activist, and corrupt as hell.”
She became president of Harvard, in what many believe was a clear example of race-conscious hiring by the Harvard Corporation, and during the six months of her tenure she has brought the university to a state of disarray that will continue even after she packs up at Massachusetts Hall and returns to her job as a Professor of Government and of African and African-American studies, as the faculty, and students, will continue to be split on Gay’s resignation. Meanwhile, those who believe Gay did nothing wrong, but was a victim of “white racism,” have predictably declared themselves outraged at the injustice.
Here, for example, is that inimitable race-baiter and flim-flam man Al Sharpton, who expressed outrage at Claudine Gay’s resignation in a statement on Tuesday, January 2: “President Gay’s resignation is about more than a person or a single incident. This is an attack on every Black woman in this country who’s put a crack in the glass ceiling,” he said.”
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/01/jamaal-bowman-claudine-gay-is-a-brilliant-historic-black-woman-who-was-bullied-by-fascists
DEI = Discrimination, Exclusion and Inequality.
totally agree.
I have absolutely no idea what this man is talking about.
Racism is instinctive. All primates, indeed most mammals, are intrinsically instinctively racist.
The only route towards true DEI is DIE, all of us, by our own hand.
What a load of complete nonsense on stilts.
The United States and this country, most of Europe, are in grave danger of disappearing up their own fundaments, where the sun don’t shine…..
Some people love a cosmopolitan environment and some don’t. This goes largely unacknowledged and it is generally about two thirds to four fifths that prefer to be among their own kind. You have students who go to study in Germany or Russia because upon exposure to the language and literature they feel that they have found a spiritual home. I have lived all over the place and in England cosmopolitanism isn’t common at all even among those who claim to be that way. Orwell talked about how Dickens isn’t really intelligible outside of England. There is an immense concentration of idiom and Dickens Londoners were dodgy at best but it did reflect a set of allusions that didn’t travel well. In polls of the country’s favourite books you get very few novels in translation. I am not knocking it I am pointing out what should be obvious – that what they call diversity is especially repugnant in a country like England.
Well I definitely find this example of diversity particularly repugnant. But whatever, I’m sure I’m just a racist cherry-picker…
https://twitter.com/RadioGenoa/status/1743704963023355915
He didn’t give a fig about the lack of free speech at universities as long as it extended to criticizing Israel.
When that taboo was broken, he started to get active.
His DEI sermon is just a fig leaf story made up on the fly to deflect from his hypocrisy and from what he really cares about.
You’re welcome.
They are clearly fighting a losing battle. Don’t interrupt your enemy when they are busy destroying themselves. It is utterly brazen and blatant and soon there will be few who can’t see it. The parasites in charge will stick to their guns but they are riding a vanishing horse. Our time is the time of stark relief. Where it can’t help its nakedness. On every level, every political persuasion will soon see. I that there will be a nuclear conflict at some point and perhaps this has already started but I think it will fall short of a full nuclear exchange and there will be a rebuilding. The mystery schools said Russia and Brazil are the next centres of spiritual power and that there will be a vicious fight between the Anglo-Americans and the Russians. But if you are used to a sedentary lifestyle then the best thing to do is gradually wean yourself off it.
Let them bleed out. They are like sharks in the final stages of the feeding frenzy (accoiding to Orson Welles in The Lady Of Shanghai). First they find the blood and then they start attacking the fish and the meat. They become so frenzied that they start attacking each other. In the final stage they are so ravenous that they start biting at their own stomachs tearing themselves apart and canniblizing themselves.
Antisemitism is the world’s oldest hatred, but in recent decades it SEEMED to have waned and been largely confined to a few pockets of extremists here and there, at least in Western countries. But apparently it was simmering just below the surface all along. The events of October 7th seem to have brought it out of the shadows into the open, but what I think really led to its recent resurgence (especially the fashionable hipster variant of antisemitism) was the pervasive anti-white reverse racism that became in vogue in recent years. You can draw a straight line between “Kill Whitey!” being OK to casually say, and “Kill the Jews!” also being OK to casually say, since Jews can often “pass” for white (both a blessing and a curse).
“DEI” should really be spelled “DIE”.
DEI=Entryism
https://newdiscourses.com/2023/12/communist-entryism/