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Rob Ford Profile picture
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29 Jan, 4 tweets, 1 min read
Universe brain incompetence right here
So today in EU vaccine response:
President of the most vaccine sceptical large member state cast doubt on vaccine approved by EU authorities.

Then EU accidentally publishes confidential contract with the vaccine maker potentially voiding the contract
“Now that Donald Trump is no longer President who will provide the world with its daily dose of flailing, surreal, bizarre and unpredictable political incompetence?”

European Commission: “hold my beer”

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More from @robfordmancs

Rob Ford Profile picture
31 Jan
I've been very positive about the UK's vaccine rollout, which has been outstanding.
But the successes this month only serve to throw into sharper relief the failures of last month, when a spineless got delated (again) taking the steps needed to avert catastrophe
The rolling 7 day average of cases in the UK has been halving about every two weeks since the peaked a few days after we, finally and belatedly, locked down in full on 5th January.

How many cases could have been averted if we had instead have locked down on 15th December?
Cases then, per @ganeshran , were running at average of 20k per day. Assuming same 2 week halving, we would have had:
10k per day around 29th Dec
5k per day around 12th Jan
2.5k per day around 26th Jan
Read 10 tweets
Rob Ford Profile picture
18 Jan
Excellent analysis as per usual from Stephen. One idea he raises here which I think is really worth pondering is that welfare cuts for 2020s Cons could become like immigration for 2000s/2010s Labour: an issue they can neither dismiss, tackle or find a way to avoid"
And for symmetrical reasons. For Labour, immigration controls were a policy the voters they were targeting strongly favoured, but that their MPs, activists and media supporters loathed.
Big welfare increases are like that for Cons now - the voters they've targeted and successfully won over in the "red wall" etc favour a stronger safety net. But many MPs, traditional activists, and Con media hate the idea.
Read 6 tweets
Rob Ford Profile picture
16 Jan
Netscape Navigator and AOL chat rooms. And MiniDisc.
Also the NeoGeo - a console of the same era as the Megadrive and SNES but twice as powerful but ten times as expensive. The games looked as good as the arcade games of the time but cost the equivalent of like £200 each in today’s money
I used to go to the local video game store just to gawk at the NeoGeo demo cabinet
Read 5 tweets
Rob Ford Profile picture
16 Jan
Quite a few people seem to misunderstand my point here. Let me clarify:

If you're an elected politician, let alone a former leader of a party, you should not endorse and amplify sentiments which frame your defeat by other elected politician in the language of coup & conspiracy
I don't particularly care about what Margolyes herself has to say, she's a private citizen she's free to take nonsensical position. It is Leanne Wood's endorsement I find troubling. Language *matters*. Respect for democratic outcomes *matters*. 2/?
"Miriam Margoyles is right" to say "There has been a right wing coup in this country."
That involves either bankrupting the meaning of the term coup (leaving you unable to use it correctly in future) or genuinely believing successive Con election victories amount to a "coup"
Read 11 tweets
Rob Ford Profile picture
5 Jan
I think Today producers, editors and presenters have some serious questions to answer about why they have today invited a discredited scientist with a repeated track record of making falsely dismissive claims on COVID threat to offer her views to the nation this morning
We know things are as bad as they have ever been. We know that ensuring compliance with yet another lockdown will be incredibly hard. How is it "public service journalism" to put on national radio crackpots selling people pie in the sky about how the threat is exaggerated?
There are literally thousands of scientists who could talk to citizens about the current pandemic situation. It is not "balance" to pick one with a demonstrated recent track record of getting things completely wrong. It is irresponsible.
Read 19 tweets
Rob Ford Profile picture
3 Jan
The cost-benefit on "shutting things with a vaccine literally being rolled out" is not the same as the cost-benefit on "shutting things with no idea when a vaccine will come, if ever." Can we please stop pretending the policy debate now is the same as then?
In the early stages of COVID, there was a reasonable arg to make that cases averted at very high cost were just cases delayed. The benefits of delay were therefore uncertain, reflecting our uncertainty about how treatments would evolve. That is no longer true.
For every infection in a high risk group which we avert in the next month or so, there is a high probability that said infection is then averted *forever* because the high risk indiv gets vaccinated. Therefore, restrictions have both a clear & obvious benefit and end point.
Read 6 tweets

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