buctootim

We're talking about GP practices. To use one full canister you'd need seven bodies administering full time to use 975 doses in a week. That means in practice all the GPs will need to be co-opted too, with all that means for other medical care.

As I said thick and dull . Dry ice gasifies at temperatures warmer than -78c, hence why it will need to be kept at -80c or below. NHS England are telling GPs they will have to take delivery 975 doses at a time. It takes about 12 minutes to vaccinate somebody including health questions and inputting patient data. So for a GP’s surgery using one dedicated nurse that’s approx 35 slots a day or 175 in the five day usable period . Only around 85% of people turn up so that’s down to about 150. So every GPs surgery would need seven nurses working full time to make near full use of one canister. Most surgeries operate with one or two nurses The Pfizer vaccine is a logistical nightmare and unless all the other conventional candidates fail massively you can be sure this one will hardly be used in a few months time

Exactly. And with the half first dose it is 90% effective. The issue with the Pfizer vaccine will be storage which needs to be kept at -80c, thawed slowly and then used quickly despite coming in batches of 480. Any hiccup will compromise its efficacy. Even with conventional vaccines which only need a fridge there is a 25% loss rate

Fuck you're thick and dull. No a good combo

What a bizarre post. Yes if it were a choice between being infected with a serious virus or taking a new vaccine that of course I'd take the vaccine. Doh. Brilliant point But that isnt the choice. Its waiting four months until my age group gets offered a vaccine and then opting to make an informed decision.

If it was going to be the only vaccine ever available I'd probably take it. although not in the first few months. But if there was an alternative of an attenuated virus vaccine like Oxford's available a few weeks after that would be a much much better option.

So far there have been 60,000 UK deaths, so say 1:1,000 population. The death rate for those under 70 over the past year is around 1:10,000. So for a month say 1:120,000? If I spent a month in IS territory drinking, smoking, getting laid and not praying would I have a greater chance than 1:120,000 of getting killed?

Been pushed out the ale house because you cant keep your scotch eggs down?

Me too. This is a new technology, the first mRNA vaccine and we are rushing to approve. The Oxford vaccine by contrast is a proven safe technique. Its like the difference between being the first to drive the new model Ford Mondeo or the first to travel in the unproven hyperloop which has had its testing cut short.

He knows but as usual prefers to dissemble. The French have been real world testing their new customs software at ports for a year. Ours wont be ready until 10 days before January 1st. The Road Haulage Association are saying no-one knows what they need to do, advice is confusing and contradictory and only 2,000 of the 50,000 truck permits needed have been issued.

Has no-one seen this? His finest work yet!

I saw somebody online claiming he has a private doctors appointment to get it next Thursday. No idea if true or not.

British Airways first class isnt what it used to be

I have it too and use it all the time. Perversely I still hate the fact its so good. We're going to end with 20 mega corporations running everything and half the world on minimum wage or zero hours contracts

So instead you believe one random who watched a Trump speech and regurgitates it? If you dont believe the msm maybe following the results of all the court cases might help?

Depends on how you define UK fishers. British crewed? British registered ? British owned? British home port ? And that 80% does it include shellfish? Does it include farmed salmon ?

Thats the thing though. The permits currently issued by the Gov agency the Marine Management Organisation are not time limited. Brexit notwithstanding there are no grounds to terminate them if they continue to have some kind tie to Britain (normally some token measure like having the boat UK registered and visiting a UK port once a year. If the government tries to unilaterally end the permits they will potentially be in breach of contract. There will either be a flurry of court cases or the gov will end up paying out millions in compensation

Predictable. I'm sure you think that shows something but my experience in contracting, purchasing and service commissioning was that the incompetence was in the highly paid employees of private companies. Many of them were earning two or three times what we were working for supposedly successful global players Two of the 'highlights' of were Bouygues who were totally incapable of estimating how much it would cost to run a waste disposal contract for five years despite highly detailed specs. Their bid of £124m was less than a third of the next nearest tender and less than a quarter of the cost of running the service to spec. The team I worked in spent a couple of months drawing up a legally watertight contract they wouldnt be able to get out of when they realised after a few months they were losing money hand over fist. That saved the council about £375m. The second was in a hospital where McDonnell Douglas persuaded an idiot health minister to let them design a new patient administration system - which was going to be oh SO much better than the current public sector idiot designed system in place. Four years and a wasted £170m later they realised they couldnt even match the performance of what we already had.

I used to work for a city council. My department of about 35 people had a Christmas party in the function room of a pub. Sit down dinner individually paid for in advance and a cash bar. The only thing the council paid for was the £75 room hire. Still made the front page of the local paper though

Is the one where you have to click on buses, traffic lights or cars and no matter what you click it still doesnt let you in until at least five attempts?

Apparently not

Its an odd situation with medics. Basically we overwork them so retention is difficult, so we pay them more, so then they can afford to work part time instead of full time. Would be better to increase the numbers employed, reduce the pressure, improve quality of life and reduce pay imo. Britain pays doctors 35% more than France and double what they earn in Spain. despite comparable levels of education and skills.

Why do you not engage with the issues? Why always default to everybody before was crap but now we're going to be winners again - until you get peed off with them, decide they were also crap and move on to the next hero. The underlying issues don't change. Whoever is in charge has to deal with the same facts. Given the failings over decades are largely UK government not the EU why will this Government be any different? Do you even know why industrialised fishing has driven out more sustainable small boat fishing? How are you going to resolve the essential problem that the fish we like to eat are found in far north waters and the fish other nations like to eat is caught in UK waters. Fresh fish attracts a higher price than frozen. For catches in 'local' North sea and channel approaches landing in EU ports will always make more sense than going in the opposite direction to UK ports, freezing it, then driving it by truck for hundreds of miles back across the channel.

Wild caught fish is less than 0.1% of GDP. It is fish processing and fish farming which are both outside the cope of any agreement which brings it up

Politically important to Brexiteers that's all. Trouble for you is the problems were caused primarily by UK government policy. Leaving the EU wont fix them. NB complaining about graphs and texts just shows you up along with your desire to be unemcumbered by knowledge. an occasional magazine about land rights Selling the Silver: the enclosure of the UK's fisheries download as pdf Fishing quotas result in concentration rather than conservation, writes Emma Cardwell. The UK’s fisheries quota system, introduced in 1999 and comprising the creation of a private market for the right to catch fish, has been called “the biggest property grab since the Norman invasion”.1 The UK government use the quota system to control how many fish can be taken from the sea. It does this by dividing up the right to catch fish between a limited number of companies, and then allowing this right to be bought and sold. This privatisation of the produce of the sea has many parallels with the parliamentary enclosure of land in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the press, the quota system is often unquestioningly presented as a conservation measure: a means by which governments can limit the catches of fishermen and protect fish stocks. Policy documents and academic literature tell a different story. Here, the argument for fisheries quotas closely echoes the economic improvement justifications of enclosure, and is based on those classical Ricardian principles formulated in England during the era of the Enclosure Acts: it is a way to increase the efficiency of the industry, and a means to capture untapped resource rent. The quota system, which was implemented gradually between 1980 and 2000, has led to widespread dispossession. This is in part because of what is widely considered a calculative error on the part of the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA – previously MAFF) that led to the small boat fleet (made up of vessels under ten metres long, and the vast majority of British fishermen) being allocated less than five per cent of the right to fish.2 It is also because of the ‘grandfathering’ nature of rights allocation to larger boats, which implicitly favoured high-catching vessels. Larger vessel owners were given property rights over fish based on their historic catches. The proportion they took of the total recorded catch then remained stable as the overall amount fluctuated, meaning the same amount of quota would allow the right to (as an example) 3% of 100 tonnes of cod in 2003, and 3% of 25 tonnes of cod in 2005. Applying Hardin’s tragedy of the commons analogy, this system is akin to tackling overgrazing by allocating property rights based on the number of cattle someone owns: it rewards overexploitation, and penalises restraint. SUPER TRAWLERS AND MILLIONAIRES This allocation method led to many low-catching fishermen being forced out of the industry as quota levels fell and they found themselves unable to survive during lean periods. Larger companies could then use their holdings as leverage for loans to buy up this quota, and ownership of the right to fish was consolidated. A stark example of this is the fishery for herring and mackerel. At one time made up of thousands of boats around the coast, over 99 per cent of this valuable fishery – which accounts for almost half of total landings by UK registered vessels — is now caught by only 33 trawlers.3 The value of these boats, and more importantly their share of UK fishing rights, runs to hundreds of millions of pounds. This increase in costs – the manifestation of the ‘resource rent’ promised by economic theorists – is turning fishing into a millionaires’ club4 and means that the traditionally widespread small business structure of the fishing industry, in which a boat owner/skipper employs a crew on a share (or ‘lay’) system, is gradually shifting to a model of large company ownership with significant involvement from financial institutions. Of the 33 mackerel and herring boats mentioned above, 14 are owned by just five large companies, a share that increases with every boat sale. Two of these companies (and their associated rights to fish) are owned by non-UK multinationals.5 COMMUNITIES AND MULTINATIONALS It is hard to know the extent of quota consolidation and foreign ownership in the fleet as a whole, as the government keeps no public register of fishing rights, although one has been promised since 2011. (See Stop Press below.) It is known that foreign ownership of fishing rights is widespread – at a conservative estimate, around 20 per cent of English and Welsh fishing rights are owned by a handful of Spanish, Dutch and Icelandic companies, although this number could be higher.6 Within the UK, much quota ownership is now consolidated in a small number of industrial ports (such as Peterhead, Lerwick and Brixham) from which large, high-powered vessels travel many miles to fish. This shift towards the concentrated, private ownership of fishing rights, which has taken place only over the last two decades, has decimated fishing communities around the country. As one small-scale fisherman based in Scarborough put it to me: “We can’t catch a mackerel now because all the mackerel that swim past our front door are owned by 12 Scotchmen. It’s killed the community. There’s no community left”. This destruction of communities is particularly marked in remote areas. The Hebrides was once home to a vibrant fishing industry, but has now lost the vast majority of the right to fish and is entirely dependent on shellfish. Alarmed by these developments and afraid of losing their traditional livelihood and a lynchpin of local culture, in the late 1990s the Shetland Islands Council invested £17 million to form a community-based whitefish quota scheme and retain fishing rights in the islands. In 2003, the European Commission declared this action illegal under European competition law.7 SEALORDS AND TENANTS The promised ‘rent’ of quota has manifested itself in the practice of investors leasing the right to fish to working fishers, creating a situation akin to landlords and tenants. This is particularly the case for those in the small-scale, under ten metre fleet. These boats fish against a small government allocated pool and, due to the vagaries of the law, are not allowed to supplement this allocation by purchasing extra fishing rights, but can only take these on loan from larger vessels or quota investors. Again, the lack of public data on ownership means that the exact extent of this practice is unclear, but it is recognised as endemic throughout the industry. As a fisherman I interviewed on what was once the fish docks at Whitby, and is now a coach and car park, remarked: “It’s all investors now. I’m fifth generation. My eldest son, who takes the boat out, is sixth generation, and we’re having to go to these people cap in hand. It makes a mockery of the entire system.” Currently, the law is muddy as to whether the right to fish has been truly privatised, or if quota holdings simply represent a temporary allocation of a public resource. An extensive political battle between small-scale fishers and quota owners (centred around the diminutive government allocations of fishing rights to smaller boats) culminated in the High Court of Justice of England in summer 2013, but the verdict remained inconclusive as to whether the legal standing of the right to fish was as a private possession or a common good.8 Regardless of intention, attempts to bring quotas, which have been the subject of multi-million pound investments and used as collateral for bank loans, back into public ownership would prove highly problematic. BEST-CASE SCENARIO? A bleak illustration of these potential problems can be found in Iceland, often held up as the exemplar of successful quota management. Iceland is highly fisheries dependent, with fish providing 40 percent of national export earnings, and over 12 percent of GDP. The price bubble created by the privatisation of Icelandic fisheries — a model that has been enthusiastically followed around the world — can be directly implicated in the nation’s economic boom, and its consequent financial collapse in 2008.9 After the economic collapse, Icelanders became alarmed by the extent of consolidation in their huge fishing industry. By 2011, around 20 companies controlled the majority of Icelandic fishing, and therefore a significant proportion of the country’s economy. These fishing companies were linked to politicians and ownership of the national media. The extensive dispossession this represented even meant the Icelandic government being accused of human rights violations by the United Nations Court of Human Rights. The Court dropped its case against Iceland in 2012, when the government proposed that 15 percent of fishing rights should be returned to public ownership and the remainder subject to higher taxes. However, such a large proportion of fishing rights were being used as collateral for loans that even this small reclamation threatened to create a crisis for the Icelandic national bank, which since the crash had been funded by the taxpayer. A renationalisation proposal, presented in February 2013, suggested companies retain quota rights for only 20 years, but this has not yet been agreed by Parliament, and has been the source of extensive protest and public clashes between vessel owners and other Icelandic citizens. MACKEREL WARS The upshot of these developments can be seen in the ongoing ‘mackerel wars’ between the UK, Norway and other EU states on one hand, and Iceland and the Faroe Islands on the other. Echoing the cod wars of the 1970s, it is perhaps difficult to understand the political vehemence with which the UK fishing industry is battling to retain their customary share of the right to fish mackerel, which (probably due to climate change) has begun to shoal further north in Icelandic and Faroese waters – representing a potential windfall for the troubled Icelandic economy. The economic fragility of the heavily consolidated UK industry, and particularly that of vulnerable, remote, fisheries-dependent areas such as far North-East Scotland and Shetland, which now rely economically on just a handful of large boats, can go a long way to explain the high political pitch of these negotiations. If cuts in quota led to just one mackerel boat becoming unprofitable and being put up for sale, and if this boat were then to be purchased (as is likely) by a foreign (such as a newly-rich Icelandic) company, a significant proportion of the national right to fish would disappear, and whole regions could permanently lose the right to make a living from the sea. Stop Press: The Government has finally released the UK Quota Registry. This can be found at https://www.fqaregister.service.gov.uk