BBC's "justification" for inviting those who've refused the vaccine onto Question Time. (They're now having to screen applications for rabid anti-vaxxers.)
Ridiculous non-logic, because belief in a Flat Earth can't put the lives of others at severe risk. theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2…
Can you imagine the mindset of someone who's essentially saying: "f*** reality - if people want to believe stuff that's KNOWN OBJECTIVELY to be untrue, we should give them a platform anyway"?
Having them anywhere near the flagship national broadcaster is beyond ridiculous.
It's the old "from the point of view of representation, Mrs Miggins the pie shop owner knows as much about international trade as customs specialists" Brexit argument all over again.
Except this time it's deadly.
And here's what happens when you put out a Welcome mat for fringe groups:-
"BBC to vet Question Time audience after call for unvaccinated to appear
Disinformation specialists brought in after Fiona Bruce’s appeal was publicised by anti-vaxx social media" theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2…
Before they start asking the wrong people the wrong stuff, the BBC should forcefully challenge the government's endless lies about the success of the UK vaccine programme.
(Johnson still defines "fully vaccinated" as 2 doses from the POV of letting people enter the UK untested.)
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Have you noticed that the main UK government sources of information still de-emphasise the primary source of transmission (droplets and aerosols in the air) and over-emphasize the danger of catching it from surfaces?
It's particularly telling when you compare with international information (WHO, Mayo Clinic, EU etc.) which all place a much greater emphasis on the primary transmission route of droplets and aerosols suspended in the air, sometimes for hours, after they're breathed out.
This seems honest. It's in the middle of a long document from the Cabinet Office: "Coronavirus: how to stay safe and help prevent the spread"
But all the stuff about airborne transmission, speaking, singing etc. magically disappears in other core docs. gov.uk/guidance/covid…
Express story this morning (co-authored by no less than 3 of their journalists) about an 822% spike in certain non-EU trade.
It is pure, unadulterated propaganda. Keep reading this thread to find out more...
This is what people visiting the Express website will see syndicated across all sorts of other pages. It's all the information they get. The Express only ever syndicates the headlines of stories.
But in fact that 822% relates to ONE vegetable, courgettes, imported from Morocco.
You wouldn't have guessed it from the headline, would you?
Things get worse.
The 822% figure relates to a single month, January 2021.
Gosh, that seems rather a long time ago, doesn't it? Yes, that's because this "news" was first released in May 2021. african.business/2021/05/agribu…
Double dose of propaganda in this Brexit story in the Express.
1) A huge surge in imports is a sign something may be going wrong with the domestic market.
2) Actually, the story is only about one vegetable, not all trade! The 882% increase is in shipments from Morocco.
And when you look at the story closer and realise it's about courgettes (which we also grow in the UK) and strawberries (which we famously also grow in the UK) then the alarm bells really start ringing, especially when we know domestic strawberry growers suffered staff shortages.
(Should just add that Facts4EU went to the same school of naming as the European Research Group, Covid Recovery Group etc. ie their sole mission in life is to manufacture stats that can be spun as anti-EU as humanly possible.)
Liz Truss certainly seems to have a yen to spend large amounts of our money on wining and dining herself and those around her...
(I lived in Tokyo for quite some time. It's expensive, but it's not £2,000 expensive. Not unless you try really, really, really hard.)
Excerpt in previous tweet came from this Guardian article. (Couldn't fit the link into Twitter's character limit.) theguardian.com/politics/2022/…
Just a bit more about eating out in Japan, if you've read this far.
It can be eyewateringly expensive. But it can also be good value (more so than the UK) especially at lunchtime, when many restaurants have cheap set menus including a starter, main, dessert and drink for £10-15.
When is it too early to draw lessons from a pandemic that's been raging for 2 years?
Could we learn about England's current situation by studying the peak last winter?
Last winter: cases in blue, hospitalisations in purple.
This winter: cases in red, hospitalisations in orange.
Last winter, cases peaked around 8 January (would have been reported in the daily figures between 9-12 January). Hospitalisations peaked a week later.
This suggests we have a lot of cases and an awful lot of hospitalisations to come as the effects of Xmas/NY mingling play out.
Of course, Omicron isn't Delta. History won't play out exactly the same. And there will be fewer deaths per hospitalisation thanks to the vaccine and better treatments.
But we have a strong indication that the worst:
A) Is already baked in
and
B) Has yet to manifest in the data