1) The data shows that the vaccine reduces serious illness and risk of mortality from around 10 days of having just first dose. 2) The risk of acute illness, hospitalisation and mortality is highest in the tenth of population who are over 80 or clinically most vulnerable...
3) Tier 4 lockdown is designed primarily to protect the NHS from being overwhelmed by those whose Covid19 symptoms require hospital treatment. 4) Tier 4 lockdown is coming to a region near you very soon, if you are not there already. 5) Tier 4 is economically devastating...
6) The costs of a military style operation to vaccinate us would be huge, but they would be a fraction of the economic costs of Tier 4 lockdown. 7) The top priority, by a country mile, of any rational government would therefore be to create the infrastructure for millions of...
vaccinations per week (I am assuming that the Oxford/AZN vaccine, which is easiest to distribute and of which the government has bought enough for 50m people, is approved in coming days). 8) The threat from the more infectious new Covid-19 strain only strengthens...
the case for accelerating the vaccination programme to the maximum safe speed. 9) I haven't bothered to make the case that speedier vaccination will save many thousands of lives, possibly tens of thousands, because it's too obvious to mention. 10) I am simply saying there is...
no economic or financial argument against spending whatever it takes to get the vaccine into us as quickly as possible.

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More from @Peston

19 Dec
So here are the CovidUK headlines. Nervtag thinks new British strain is 70% more infectious than existing strain and may increase the R or transmission rate by more than 0.4. So London and SE go into new Tier 4 (very similar to last lockdown) tonight and...
Everyone in ALL tiers should stay local. And no foreign travel if you are in Tier 4...
Lawful Christmas will be reduced to a single day everywhere in England. This is a disaster for non-essential shops, hairdressers, gyms and so on in the capital and surrounding area. In London and SE no intra household mixing even on Xmas day...
Read 4 tweets
14 Dec
The current government timetable is to announce any tier changes on Wednesday for implementation 00.01 Saturday. But there is evidence that when people fear their tier level will rise, which is a well-grounded expectation in infection-growing London, they bring...
forward socialising, they discount the shift to increased restrictions. There is evidence these behavioural changes increase infections by 10 to 15 per cent. It is a basic flaw in a system of tiers being reviewed every couple of weeks. By the way,...
there is also evidence that when an area comes out of restrictions, it is like unpopping a cork of a fizzy drink: there is such a sense of relief and release, that again people accelerate their virus-spreading socialising. All of which is an argument for having fewer tiers,...
Read 5 tweets
9 Dec
Here is the fundamental stumbling block to a free trade deal. And truthfully I am not sure how it can be sorted. The EU wants the unilateral right to toughen up its labour laws, or environmental standards or other so-called level-playing-field rules. Any such new rules...
would not automatically apply to the UK. But the EU wants an arbitration mechanism to determine whether the change in rules would confer a competitive advantage to the UK. And if the balance of competitive advantage tilted to the UK, the EU would want to allow...
the possibility of tariffs being imposed on relevant UK exports. And the UK would have the symmetrical right if it so chose to toughen labour laws etc. This is not an issue of sovereignty but of complexity and uncertainty for business. And it is difficult to see...
Read 6 tweets
9 Dec
.@michaelgove is conspicuously desperate for the UK to agree a free trade deal with the EU, in the way that @BorisJohnson is not (and the gap between the two has been there for months, according to his ministerial colleagues). But in saying that "like Canada" the UK is happy...
to sign up to "non regression" he was being startlingly disingenuous, because the kind of "non regression" agreed by Canada is a world apart from the level-playing-field non regression on offer from the EU (and from the point of view of EU...
leaders, that difference is reasonable because Canada's economy is not integrated with the EU's in the way that the UK's is). There is a growing view in Brussels that the prime minister's conception of the sovereignty he wants for the UK is not compatible with a zero tariff,...
Read 6 tweets
8 Dec
There is one more thing about @ONS’s Covid19 survey which is driving me up the wall. As I pointed out, it has revised down its daily data for coronavirus incidence per 10k from an original estimate of 9.52 on 17 Oct to 4.89 for that date, and 4.90 on 18 Oct, 4.91 19 Oct...
4.90 20 Oct, 4.89 21 Oct, 4.86 22 Oct and 4.83 23 Oct. That means the revised daily average in the week to 23 Oct is 4.88 per 10k. Which is therefore the latest @ons revised daily number of infections per 10k people. Except it isn’t. Because the @ons continues to insist that...
it stands by its data in “table 2a” - which shows that the average daily incidence rate for the week to 23 October was (believe it or not) 9.52 per 10k. So is the newly revised daily data correct or the unrevised old weekly data? Both cannot be correct. And yet the ONS...
Read 4 tweets
8 Dec
There is a ton of contradictory stuff flying around about what @MichelBarnier says is the EU's bottom line for fair competition in any free trade agreement with the UK. As I understand it, what follows is the EU's position. For the "level playing field commitments" there...
should be "non regression" - ie on standards for working practices, environmental etc, the UK must stick to current EU rules, subject to tests and the risk of legal challenge if there is a perceived breach of the obligations. And the non-regression rules apply to the EU as...
well as to the UK. They are mutual symmetrical obligations in that sense. The requirements not to give unfair subsidies to businesses, the state aid rules, are different, and more complicated, because subsidies to businesses given out of EU funds (as opposed to national funds)...
Read 13 tweets

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