7 ms·

Here's another way of framing it: Having messed this up so very badly doing idiotically risky things from the start the latest big risk taken by the UK governm

by harry8 6y ago

Here's another way of framing it: Having messed this up so very badly doing idiotically risky things from the start the latest big risk taken by the UK government didn't actually backfire as badly as the previous ones. Others have pointed at the current per-capita deaths. This completely ignores the long-term effects to survivors accross the population. It can be a challenge to see how the UK government could have dealt with this worse. It's a highly educated population that has put the brakes on the most destructive policies from the very start. I really hope the wider population comes to an appreciation of "asymmetric risk" from this the way "metal fatigue" entered popular usage with the aeroplane disasters of I think the DC-10.

nicoburns 6y ago
To be fair to the UK government, their vaccine strategy has been spot on: lot's of investment and early. They've messed up basically every else, and still are. But I think they do deserve some credit for that.
- harry8 6y ago
  >to be fair ...taking a flyer on an utterly unproven vaccination strategy was a huge, huge risk and had it not come off there would be no vaccination strategy. Relying on being lucky doesn't seem like a "spot on" strategy to me. "We gambled everything on red it and came up so we deserve credit for the strategy." edit: This is in relation to the additional time between first and second jabs that was untested in the strategy - for which this result suggests we no longer need to be concerned that the vaccination might be reduced in protection as we were before this data came in.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    When they do badly you say it's because of their incompetence. When they do well you still say it's because of their incompetence. At every turn they’ve had credible expert advice telling them to do contradictory things. They’ve had to use judgement. If only they had the sense to use hindsight, like you.
    - harry8 6y ago
      The UK's has been a gambler's strategy, for mine, seat-of-the-pants I'm-feeling-lucky stuff. This "win" does not compensate the losses nor justify the strategy. The win here is "the decision outcome has not been smashed by a possible downside." There were rather a lot of people suggesting that doing an unproven vaccine strategy of getting the maximum number of people their first vaccine and a longer period between first and second that had not yet been trialed, at all as a thing that was risky. People said it in advance. Who were the credible experts who recommended it? What support did they give that it wasn't a pretty big risk? If there was some and I missed it I'll put my hand up and say I was wrong. As I recall there was some serious doubt about whether anyone would get benfit from vaccination at all. Again if it was /known/ that it was likely to work that's not a bad decision - but I haven't seen that analysis. Have you? Please do link it if you have. I'm also not clear about what the upside for running that risk was. Are there better results for people contracting covid after only one jab? Do we have data? Or was that a flyer that it might turn out to be? Any links you have with an analysis of that is welcome. The "herd immunity" strategy was also described as risky by most experts that I saw. I think the word I used when looking at it, in advance of the numbers coming in was "insane," while being well aware there was at least a nonzero chance it could work better than the conservative approach. To say it has not come off is an understatement. If it did come off somehow due to dumb luck it would have been equally terrible decision making. It's too big a risk to take, the downside is immense. It is reasonable to criticise a risk-loving gambling strategy for a nation's health whether it comes off or not. I criticisised it before and after and I criticisise it when it comes off and when it doesn't. By contrast a considered and careful strategy is to be commended even if it turned out to be incorrect based on subsequently available facts. This is literally gambling on uncertain outcomes with people's lives and health. You want to do that as sensibly as you can. You want the analysis. You want it public. You're paying the downside. Getting lucky to get results out of bad decisions does NOT make a decision a good one. But hey, take the thing as a whole. Has it been good, covid management in the UK or not? It's worthwhile analysing what when wrong and why and how that compared with other, differing strategies. Taiwan's looked pretty good initially and continues to. South Korea and Japan looked to have pretty good strategies and continue to. New Zealand and Australia had very different strategies to the UK. It's entirely reasonable to criticise a gambling addict's decision making when they bet the rent check and the bet wins. I hope that makes the point clearer for you, please disagree if you like but it should be clear that hindsight has nothing whatever to do with the criticisim.
  - phatfish 6y ago
    To produce the vaccine so fast that had to be done. The issues European production partners (one in Belgium I think) are suffering with the AstraZeneca vaccine are similar to those already solved at the UK production sites months ago because of the risk taken to start production early. Each production facility can have unique issues that effect yield that simply need time to resolve. Maybe AstraZeneca over promised, but it feels like risks to production yield were not properly assessed by those in charge of ensuring vaccine supply in the EU.
    - harry8 6y ago
      I think we're talking about different things here. The unproven strategy that I meant was the one where a longer period ellapses between first and second jabs than had ever been tested. This new data is the test and shows that we probably don't now need to be concerned about that as we did when the strategy was first decided on and implemented. The conservative approach would have been to ensure everyone got 2 jabs with the elapsed time between them the amount of time that had been tested until this data came in to show that a longer period would actually still work. I don't know what the advantage of more people with a single jab is. Does anyone? Are you less likely to die? Or we hope so but don't have the data yet - the other leg of this bet so to speak.
    - renaudg 6y ago
      The EU has a contract with AZ that makes ensuring vaccine supply to the EU the company's problem, even explicitly requiring the use of UK plants for this purpose if need be. The problem is that AZ had also promised the UK it would have priority over the goods produced on its soil : https://www.irishtimes.com/business/health-pharma/dragging-astrazeneca-to-inevitable-compromise-in-covid-19-vaccine-row-1.4471383 https://www.irishtimes.com/business/health-pharma/dragging-a...
      - blibble 6y ago
        they might have a contract with AZ, but it's very likely to be the wrong AZ... instead of AstraZeneca plc (.uk parent company) their contract is with AstraZeneca AB (.se subsidiary) the UK vaccine operation will be under the control of AB plc I would bet the commission insisted on having it with an EU entity without having thought the ramifications
throwaway2245 6y ago
Also uncontrolled spread allowing the opportunity for significant mutations to evolve. It's hard to understand how you can mess up worse than that.
chrisseaton 6y ago
> It can be a challenge to see how the UK government could have dealt with this worse. For example they could have delayed ordering vaccines, like the Europeans have.
- makomk 6y ago
  The vaccine screw-up wasn't even the only... interesting part of the European pandemic response. For example, there was a very public push by the EU itself as an institution for member states to reopen travel in order to save the critically important summer vacation season that was just quietly forgotten about by the media after it turned out to be a terrible idea. Complete with a certain amount of pressure on the UK government to try and get them to go along with it too. The vaccine problems were just too visible and undeniable to ignore.
  - tinus_hn 6y ago
    That sounds pretty logical but it isn’t. Without travel it would have been a slower motion train wreck. Still a train wreck, but now with even more economic destruction.
  - heavenlyblue 6y ago
    > Complete with a certain amount of pressure on the UK government to try and get them to go along with it too. And it took all the way to December to implement testing at the borders for the UK government while they were obviously allowing their citizens to take advantage of those travel policies.
- phatfish 6y ago
  Yup, messing up both would have been catastrophic. Just a shame it took so many deaths for the UK government to wake up. If saving lives is the end goal then countries that took it seriously from the start and had a competent strategy for social distancing and containment are still better off. Barely a month ago Boris was promising a normal Christmas.
  - 6y ago
renaudg 6y ago
> "It's a highly educated population that has put the brakes on the most destructive policies from the very start." Anecdote : I live near a busy high street in London and went out for my daily lockdown exercise at around 6pm today. About 10% of the "highly educated population", as you say, was wearing a mask. Even more worrying, if you looked through the windows of estate agencies and other such ""essential"" shops, it was exactly 0% indoors. To people outside the UK reading this : supermarkets here have only made face coverings mandatory a couple of weeks ago ("unless you tell us you're exempt", of course) because the government finally asked them nicely to. All these months, their CEOs have been emailing us bullshit newsletters about how "your safety is important to us in these unprecedented times", and to that effect they were politely asking customers to "keep your distance" and "wash your hands" and "follow local guidance about face coverings" (i.e. "none"). Meanwhile their employees were free to spend their whole shift unmasked and potentially filling the air with virus, getting their colleagues and customers sick : that was totally cool. And no mention of any effort regarding store ventilation or aerosol risk either. There is no enforcement of lockdown whatsoever, except for the most egregious cases of partying. It all seems to be based on a gentlemen's agreement, except there seems to be very few gentlemen left indeed. It is all so hypocritical. This situation is in stark contrast with what I hear from friends & family on the continent. Last time I was in Paris for instance, mask adherence was probably 80% in the street and 99% inside shops. And the French are not exactly known to be fond of rules. So yeah, B.1.1.7 probably didn't help, the government has probably f**d up on everything except the vaccination programme, but the behaviour of the population alone is in my view, more than enough to explain the terrible UK death/cases figures.
- outside1234 6y ago
  WHAT!?!?! Seriously?
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  I don't know why London was so bad for compliance. I've seen videos from before Christmas that looked like normal, bustling restaurants, etc. In my area (near Oxford) I haven't seen a maskless person in a supermarket since masks became compulsory.
thu2111 6y ago
I feel I just looked into a mirror world that's exactly like the one I live in, except everything is reversed. The UK started out very briefly with a Sweden-like strategy. We now know the Sweden strategy was correct: their results are in line with the EU average[1] despite a drastically smaller decline in GDP, a much smaller backlog of non-COVID health care problems and of course, a critically higher freedom and quality of life. The UK was 'bounced' into this reversal by its most highly educated people: literally university professors. Later it turned out that those professors had forced the reversal using a computational model that was filled with mission-critical bugs[2][3]. It was so buggy that it produced totally different predictions every time it was run depending on what CPU architecture executed it and how many threads it used. There were typos in the constants of the hand-rolled PRNG, memory corruption errors in hand-rolled sorting functions and of course the whole thing was impossible to understand, being a single 15,000+ line C file in which basically every variable had a single letter name. The guys behind it were not merely incompetent but knew they were incompetent: the lead author (the notorious Ferguson) told a national newspaper, "For me the code is not a mess, but it's all in my head, completely undocumented. Nobody would be able to use it" [4] as if these statements weren't a contradiction. They brought in developers from GitHub to try and patch the code into an acceptable state before it was released, and then did a git squash to try and hide all the bug fixes. People who pointed these problems out were told that it didn't matter because none of the models actually mattered - all that mattered was that "Epidemiology is not a branch of computer science and the conclusions around lockdown rely not on any mathematical model but on the scientific consensus" [5]. That is obviously 100% pure pseudo-science. Some UK ministers and MPs have repeatedly expressed frustration that whenever they try and introduce some perspective, quietly ignore obviously dodgy numbers or reduce the damage of the proposed policies, the "scientists" immediately run to the press and whip up a mob that forces them to obey. Yet these people - the most highly educated of them all - have shown consistently very low standards about everything they are expected to know about. Vaccines are the first chance we get to see what can happen when the British government is able to tackle something without dodgy epidemiologists constantly fucking everything up. Actual scientists, working in the world of real experiments and trials instead of student-quality C programs pretending to be theories, were paired with the private sector and a government that worked hard to clear obstacles from their path. The results have been extraordinary. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&country=SWE~EuropeanUnion&region=World&deathsMetric=true&interval=total&perCapita=true&smoothing=0&pickerMetric=total_cases&pickerSort=desc https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS... [2] https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/ https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/ [3] https://lockdownsceptics.org/second-analysis-of-fergusons-model/ https://lockdownsceptics.org/second-analysis-of-fergusons-mo... [4] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/neil-ferguson-interview-no-10s-infection-guru-recruits-game-developers-to-build-coronavirus-pandemic-model-zl5rdtjq5 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/neil-ferguson-interview-n... [5] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/05/16/coding-led-lockdown-totally-unreliable-buggy-mess-say-experts/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/05/16/coding-led...

by harry8 6y ago

nicoburns 6y ago

To be fair to the UK government, their vaccine strategy has been spot on: lot's of investment and early. They've messed up basically every else, and still are. But I think they do deserve some credit for that.

harry8 6y ago
>to be fair ...taking a flyer on an utterly unproven vaccination strategy was a huge, huge risk and had it not come off there would be no vaccination strategy. Relying on being lucky doesn't seem like a "spot on" strategy to me. "We gambled everything on red it and came up so we deserve credit for the strategy." edit: This is in relation to the additional time between first and second jabs that was untested in the strategy - for which this result suggests we no longer need to be concerned that the vaccination might be reduced in protection as we were before this data came in.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  When they do badly you say it's because of their incompetence. When they do well you still say it's because of their incompetence. At every turn they’ve had credible expert advice telling them to do contradictory things. They’ve had to use judgement. If only they had the sense to use hindsight, like you.
  - harry8 6y ago
    The UK's has been a gambler's strategy, for mine, seat-of-the-pants I'm-feeling-lucky stuff. This "win" does not compensate the losses nor justify the strategy. The win here is "the decision outcome has not been smashed by a possible downside." There were rather a lot of people suggesting that doing an unproven vaccine strategy of getting the maximum number of people their first vaccine and a longer period between first and second that had not yet been trialed, at all as a thing that was risky. People said it in advance. Who were the credible experts who recommended it? What support did they give that it wasn't a pretty big risk? If there was some and I missed it I'll put my hand up and say I was wrong. As I recall there was some serious doubt about whether anyone would get benfit from vaccination at all. Again if it was /known/ that it was likely to work that's not a bad decision - but I haven't seen that analysis. Have you? Please do link it if you have. I'm also not clear about what the upside for running that risk was. Are there better results for people contracting covid after only one jab? Do we have data? Or was that a flyer that it might turn out to be? Any links you have with an analysis of that is welcome. The "herd immunity" strategy was also described as risky by most experts that I saw. I think the word I used when looking at it, in advance of the numbers coming in was "insane," while being well aware there was at least a nonzero chance it could work better than the conservative approach. To say it has not come off is an understatement. If it did come off somehow due to dumb luck it would have been equally terrible decision making. It's too big a risk to take, the downside is immense. It is reasonable to criticise a risk-loving gambling strategy for a nation's health whether it comes off or not. I criticisised it before and after and I criticisise it when it comes off and when it doesn't. By contrast a considered and careful strategy is to be commended even if it turned out to be incorrect based on subsequently available facts. This is literally gambling on uncertain outcomes with people's lives and health. You want to do that as sensibly as you can. You want the analysis. You want it public. You're paying the downside. Getting lucky to get results out of bad decisions does NOT make a decision a good one. But hey, take the thing as a whole. Has it been good, covid management in the UK or not? It's worthwhile analysing what when wrong and why and how that compared with other, differing strategies. Taiwan's looked pretty good initially and continues to. South Korea and Japan looked to have pretty good strategies and continue to. New Zealand and Australia had very different strategies to the UK. It's entirely reasonable to criticise a gambling addict's decision making when they bet the rent check and the bet wins. I hope that makes the point clearer for you, please disagree if you like but it should be clear that hindsight has nothing whatever to do with the criticisim.
- phatfish 6y ago
  To produce the vaccine so fast that had to be done. The issues European production partners (one in Belgium I think) are suffering with the AstraZeneca vaccine are similar to those already solved at the UK production sites months ago because of the risk taken to start production early. Each production facility can have unique issues that effect yield that simply need time to resolve. Maybe AstraZeneca over promised, but it feels like risks to production yield were not properly assessed by those in charge of ensuring vaccine supply in the EU.
  - harry8 6y ago
    I think we're talking about different things here. The unproven strategy that I meant was the one where a longer period ellapses between first and second jabs than had ever been tested. This new data is the test and shows that we probably don't now need to be concerned about that as we did when the strategy was first decided on and implemented. The conservative approach would have been to ensure everyone got 2 jabs with the elapsed time between them the amount of time that had been tested until this data came in to show that a longer period would actually still work. I don't know what the advantage of more people with a single jab is. Does anyone? Are you less likely to die? Or we hope so but don't have the data yet - the other leg of this bet so to speak.
  - renaudg 6y ago
    The EU has a contract with AZ that makes ensuring vaccine supply to the EU the company's problem, even explicitly requiring the use of UK plants for this purpose if need be. The problem is that AZ had also promised the UK it would have priority over the goods produced on its soil : https://www.irishtimes.com/business/health-pharma/dragging-astrazeneca-to-inevitable-compromise-in-covid-19-vaccine-row-1.4471383 https://www.irishtimes.com/business/health-pharma/dragging-a...
    - blibble 6y ago
      they might have a contract with AZ, but it's very likely to be the wrong AZ... instead of AstraZeneca plc (.uk parent company) their contract is with AstraZeneca AB (.se subsidiary) the UK vaccine operation will be under the control of AB plc I would bet the commission insisted on having it with an EU entity without having thought the ramifications

throwaway2245 6y ago

Also uncontrolled spread allowing the opportunity for significant mutations to evolve. It's hard to understand how you can mess up worse than that.

chrisseaton 6y ago

> It can be a challenge to see how the UK government could have dealt with this worse. For example they could have delayed ordering vaccines, like the Europeans have.

makomk 6y ago
The vaccine screw-up wasn't even the only... interesting part of the European pandemic response. For example, there was a very public push by the EU itself as an institution for member states to reopen travel in order to save the critically important summer vacation season that was just quietly forgotten about by the media after it turned out to be a terrible idea. Complete with a certain amount of pressure on the UK government to try and get them to go along with it too. The vaccine problems were just too visible and undeniable to ignore.
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  That sounds pretty logical but it isn’t. Without travel it would have been a slower motion train wreck. Still a train wreck, but now with even more economic destruction.
- heavenlyblue 6y ago
  > Complete with a certain amount of pressure on the UK government to try and get them to go along with it too. And it took all the way to December to implement testing at the borders for the UK government while they were obviously allowing their citizens to take advantage of those travel policies.
phatfish 6y ago
Yup, messing up both would have been catastrophic. Just a shame it took so many deaths for the UK government to wake up. If saving lives is the end goal then countries that took it seriously from the start and had a competent strategy for social distancing and containment are still better off. Barely a month ago Boris was promising a normal Christmas.
- 6y ago

renaudg 6y ago

> "It's a highly educated population that has put the brakes on the most destructive policies from the very start." Anecdote : I live near a busy high street in London and went out for my daily lockdown exercise at around 6pm today. About 10% of the "highly educated population", as you say, was wearing a mask. Even more worrying, if you looked through the windows of estate agencies and other such ""essential"" shops, it was exactly 0% indoors. To people outside the UK reading this : supermarkets here have only made face coverings mandatory a couple of weeks ago ("unless you tell us you're exempt", of course) because the government finally asked them nicely to. All these months, their CEOs have been emailing us bullshit newsletters about how "your safety is important to us in these unprecedented times", and to that effect they were politely asking customers to "keep your distance" and "wash your hands" and "follow local guidance about face coverings" (i.e. "none"). Meanwhile their employees were free to spend their whole shift unmasked and potentially filling the air with virus, getting their colleagues and customers sick : that was totally cool. And no mention of any effort regarding store ventilation or aerosol risk either. There is no enforcement of lockdown whatsoever, except for the most egregious cases of partying. It all seems to be based on a gentlemen's agreement, except there seems to be very few gentlemen left indeed. It is all so hypocritical. This situation is in stark contrast with what I hear from friends & family on the continent. Last time I was in Paris for instance, mask adherence was probably 80% in the street and 99% inside shops. And the French are not exactly known to be fond of rules. So yeah, B.1.1.7 probably didn't help, the government has probably f**d up on everything except the vaccination programme, but the behaviour of the population alone is in my view, more than enough to explain the terrible UK death/cases figures.

outside1234 6y ago
WHAT!?!?! Seriously?
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
I don't know why London was so bad for compliance. I've seen videos from before Christmas that looked like normal, bustling restaurants, etc. In my area (near Oxford) I haven't seen a maskless person in a supermarket since masks became compulsory.

thu2111 6y ago

I feel I just looked into a mirror world that's exactly like the one I live in, except everything is reversed. The UK started out very briefly with a Sweden-like strategy. We now know the Sweden strategy was correct: their results are in line with the EU average[1] despite a drastically smaller decline in GDP, a much smaller backlog of non-COVID health care problems and of course, a critically higher freedom and quality of life. The UK was 'bounced' into this reversal by its most highly educated people: literally university professors. Later it turned out that those professors had forced the reversal using a computational model that was filled with mission-critical bugs[2][3]. It was so buggy that it produced totally different predictions every time it was run depending on what CPU architecture executed it and how many threads it used. There were typos in the constants of the hand-rolled PRNG, memory corruption errors in hand-rolled sorting functions and of course the whole thing was impossible to understand, being a single 15,000+ line C file in which basically every variable had a single letter name. The guys behind it were not merely incompetent but knew they were incompetent: the lead author (the notorious Ferguson) told a national newspaper, "For me the code is not a mess, but it's all in my head, completely undocumented. Nobody would be able to use it" [4] as if these statements weren't a contradiction. They brought in developers from GitHub to try and patch the code into an acceptable state before it was released, and then did a git squash to try and hide all the bug fixes. People who pointed these problems out were told that it didn't matter because none of the models actually mattered - all that mattered was that "Epidemiology is not a branch of computer science and the conclusions around lockdown rely not on any mathematical model but on the scientific consensus" [5]. That is obviously 100% pure pseudo-science. Some UK ministers and MPs have repeatedly expressed frustration that whenever they try and introduce some perspective, quietly ignore obviously dodgy numbers or reduce the damage of the proposed policies, the "scientists" immediately run to the press and whip up a mob that forces them to obey. Yet these people - the most highly educated of them all - have shown consistently very low standards about everything they are expected to know about. Vaccines are the first chance we get to see what can happen when the British government is able to tackle something without dodgy epidemiologists constantly fucking everything up. Actual scientists, working in the world of real experiments and trials instead of student-quality C programs pretending to be theories, were paired with the private sector and a government that worked hard to clear obstacles from their path. The results have been extraordinary. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&country=SWE~EuropeanUnion&region=World&deathsMetric=true&interval=total&perCapita=true&smoothing=0&pickerMetric=total_cases&pickerSort=desc https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS... [2] https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/ https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/ [3] https://lockdownsceptics.org/second-analysis-of-fergusons-model/ https://lockdownsceptics.org/second-analysis-of-fergusons-mo... [4] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/neil-ferguson-interview-no-10s-infection-guru-recruits-game-developers-to-build-coronavirus-pandemic-model-zl5rdtjq5 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/neil-ferguson-interview-n... [5] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/05/16/coding-led-lockdown-totally-unreliable-buggy-mess-say-experts/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/05/16/coding-led...