MHQ was ostensibly introduced to protect us from âvariantsâ, although, as Iâve pointed out many times, that was not the reason it was introduced. Now the UK is riddled with the only variant yet that actually may be a cause for concern but MHQ is not applied to the UK. If anyone was still under the illusion that MHQ was supposed to be protecting us it should be gone by now.
A farce and a disgrace.
Iâm not either.
It should be applied to the UK. As I said when I started posting here.
The UK now has the Delta variant because it didnât put India on its red list for political reasons.
Travel, travel, travel spreads this thing.
UK stats released yesterday show one vaccination reduces hospitalisations by 75 per cent and second dose by 95 per cent
Pfizer reduces hospitalisations by 94 per cent after one dose
Iâd say weâre on the cusp of compulsory vaccinations or some element of that where people who arenât vaccinated wonât be allowed to do or attend certain things
No one is forced to take it. Because you have asthma you are deemed by medical experts to be at risk. You donât agree with the medical experts. They rang you up and asked did you want to be vaccinated. You could have said no, you said yes. One thing you could be right about is Florida. Theyâd love your kind of logic there.
Like yourself I avoid engaging with @Cheasty as much as possible.
I donât agree with him on the lockdown but I think on balance heâs mostly debating quite well on this thread. There was one thing he said a few months back that was absolutely mad. The English were strongly considering not vaccinating their children. @Cheasty weighs in and accuses them of being crazy âjust let it ripâ advocates who donât care what damage covid does. âWhy else would you be against providing the vaccine to children?â he said.
Of course there are a lot of circumstances where it might be better not to vaccinate the children - if, for example, it was shown that the protection gained from catching the virus naturally was better than the protection gained from a vaccine and simultaneously there was a very high vaccine uptake amongst other people. Whilst accusing the British medical advisers of plotting the mass murder of Englandâs children @Cheasty was resolute in his attack on the hysterical right-wing and the conspiracy theorists.
I should say that I have no opinion on whether or not to vaccinate kids myself and I donât really care.
This has been a tedious and pedantic post that added very little to the conversation. I apologise to you all for the time it took to read it and I hope my next one will be better. @Copper_pipe
I can think of about 5 right off the bat
I donât read every study and Iâm certainly not aware of every study done, but has it not been shown that the opposite is the case?
Even in the hypothetical argument that it isnât, why on earth would you want to deliberately subject anybody to getting this virus?
The ideology of the British Government is and has always been âlet it ripâ. Reality keeps intruding though and even a government which is hell bent on dismissing truth and making Britain into a politics of spectacle hellhole has not been able to avoid the reality.
That would be rather pointless with an open border to the UK, wouldnât it?
So the choice is a pretend measure which doesnât work, or working to make travel as safe as possible by using measures that could actually work.
Weâve chosen the former.
Sure that argument is to say that unless the border to NI is sealed - which Iâve stated several times I would have been in favour of but accept wonât be done - thereâs no point in taking any measures.
The perfect is the enemy of the good and all that.
Youâve consistently argued against mandatory hotel quarantine but the reality is we needed more of it, not less - and Britain certainly needed more of it, not less.
No, I disagree. There are things we could and should do, and things we canât simply canât. Zero covid is impossible in an Irish context and only the wilfully ignorant say otherwise.
Iâve argued against our version MHQ as it is currently applied, itâs pointless and unhelpful and unfair. Itâs made us no safer and itâs made us a laughing stock. I would be in favour of system that might actually be useful.
But hey, itâs fulfilled itâs purpose. Itâs purpose being solely to satisfy an angry and irrational public at a moment of weakness for the government.
Things that would make us safer:
rapid testing before travel in addition to PCR;
Rapid testing on arrival for people coming from countries where incidence is high, or âvariants of concernâ are in circulation;
MHQ for people that test positive on arrival pending application of a PCR test.
We could have been doing all of these things a year ago but instead we do the ostrich.
Iâd do 10 vaccines. The risks of covid are fairly laughable but the risks of the vaccine are even less again, especially for men. The blood clots are all women.
Reasons:
I donât want to unwittingly infect a vulnerable person or an anti-vacc idiot who might infect a vulnerable person (vaccines stop nearly all transmission, thatâs more fascist scare-mongering from the powers that be).
Youâll probably end up needing it for travel, maybe work and other things as well.
In professional circles it will make you look like a normal person, a man who can get with the programme.
None of those are the real reason though. The real reason is the only way to take back power from NPHET and this is the only way to do it. Low vaccine uptake will be used as an excuse to extend the lockdown. Once the whole country is vaccinated the publicâs patience will be gone but people who refuse the vaccine will be used as an excuse for NPHET to hold onto power longer. Thereâs a patriotic duty to get vaccinated.
Zero Covid like New Zealand is impossible now but it wasnât last year.
âUnfairâ is a word that is thrown around ad nauseum. There is no regime of restrictions that wonât be considered unfair by a significant amount of people. Unfairness or the perception of unfairness has nothing to do with anything. The virus doesnât play fair.
Zero Covid as with New Zealand was the fairest system, but even that isnât immune from perceptions of unfairness. Because people think that anything which inconveniences them is automatically unfair.
Our cases are continuing to go down. I wonder at what point people might start to acknowledge that mandatory hotel quarantine, unevenly applied and imperfect as it is, might have contributed to this continuing fall in cases? And that making travel awkward for people has done similar?
The lack of rapid testing in relation for travel has been astonishing. Even amongst the lads who travel regularly for work. Theyâre vaccinated now but the two lads on my unit who travel in and out for work have never once been tested (essential workers).
The ostrich approach. Those tests arenât accurate enough for Tony, safer not to test them at all.
Who was doing the ostrich? Our government. NPHET asked for MHQ in May 2020. They were told to sod off.
The more people get vaccinated, the less weâll need MHQ.
Surely you would acknowledge that lack of accuracy is an issue though?
There are people in Ireland who bury their heads in the sand and canât seem to acknowledge that 1000s of people move here to work from different jurisdictions, pretty much all of them essential workers. They walk out carrying variants with them whilst others get charged 2 grand to be locked away for a fortnight
An antigen test taken 5 minutes ago is surely better than a 72 hr old PCR.