Offshore you are either a liar or a wanker
That old truism still stands, 90% of men wank and 10% are liars.
Thatās because the 10% get wankers cramp and donāt want to admit it. 
3 years after Covid - Trying to explain to fuckwit relative what 2 red lines on a test result means - luckily youād posted a pic @Shroppie so was able to do a show and tell.
I sometimes wish I was adopted.
Iām happily back to one line. 
In such strange times one could be forgiven for paraphrasing RenĆ© Descartes: āI wank, therefore I amā (wanking keeping death at bay?)
Aye the āUā and the ānā are missing from your test kit 
I still like the tinned meat mantra.
Iām pink: therefore Iām Spam
That includes the girls
Who have to take the batteries out of the toys before they get on the helicopter
āWelcome aboard RabbitAir!!ā
This is very interestingā¦
The death of free speech in Canadaā¦scary. 
What is now most concerning is that we are entering phase of shit throwing. There has always been a problem when good science is overtaken by political drivers. Add in that Pharma companies are always going to take advantage of legal policies that enable them to accelerate development and marketing/sales of new products and you have a recipe for the scientific truth being lost amongst political and commercial rhetoric.
A few very simple truths that we MUST never lose sight of in this debate if we are to benefit from the knowledge of hindsight:
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COVID was a very real pandemic with several strains resulting in peak excess deaths many multiple times more than ābad flu yearsā
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At the start of the outbreak, the direction and evolution of the virus could NOT be predicted. The fact that successive strains became more easily transmissible , yet symptomatically less serious was pure luckā¦ we could have seen the virus mutate to more deadly strains that were more easily transmissible (This could still happen in future years as with ābadā flu strains)
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Therefore, the WHO and Governments worldwide needed to do something rapidly. I do not think there is in any debate about how many made mistakes and with benefit of hindsight some of these do now look look ridiculous
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RNA vaccines were not a new technology for COVID, they have been around for some time. In āNormalā situations, there is always a long term safety monitoring which leads to changes in approval and access over time should it be necessaryā¦
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What happened in the COVID case is that Governments granted accelerated approval based on assumed (results not yet out) risk/benefit ratio. Itās very clear and undebatable that the vaccines have saved lives. What is not yet clear is the full extent of the Adverse events both long and short term.
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The biggest issue is NOT that these vaccines were approved and used much earlier compared to normal 8-10 year clinical development, but that the Governments are now trying to conceal some of these resultsā¦why? Because they granted the pharma companies approval and removed liability - in effect the Governments become liable for any long term safety issuesā¦ so no surprise that they might not be too happy with future publication of ALL the data
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Sadly, the real message should be very simple:
āā we (government) granted early approval to novel vaccines in an attempt to save lives of very vulnerable people. We acted in good faith knowing that long term safety data and epidemiology data might mean we did not need to vaccinate everyone, only the most vulnerableā¦ that we did not need all the lock downs, again only for the most vulnerableā¦ sometimes better to be over cautious than blasĆ© ā¦āā
- However, all the above does NOT in anyway provide an excuse for the utter corrupt twats who made millions out of awarding āmatesā PPE contracts, or other servicesā¦ a despicable episode, but sadly made possible because a majority of the electorate still to this day would be happy turning a blind eye to Boris and his corrupt cronies /practices because of āgetting Brexit doneāā¦
Good summary.
It annoys me that the MLT Brigade focus on you said the vaccine would stop the spread.
That was political.
Here we all took the vaccine because IT REDUCED THE RISK OF OUR DEATH.
We understood that and now we all know the current strains are less severe and so nobody is taking the vaccine.
You wouldnāt take the view that an already extremely difficult situation for whichever PM was in place, (ie getting the declared wish of a small majority as decided by the referendum past an almost completely hostile Parliament,) was suddenly and unexpectedly made enormously harder by the appearance of a global pandemic then? And that whatever the government did do or didnāt do was always going to be"damned if he does and damned if he doesnāt"? Because thatās the way I see it. Obviously todayās critics are cashing in on the political manna from heaven by carping with the luxury of hindsight, but I doubt any other leader would have actually done much differently.
Poor old Boris. I mean itās not as if he should have had a plan or anything, to you know, know what to do when he advocated for Brexit and then made political capital out of internal party disruption to get himself elected leader of the Tory party based on the mantra he could āget brexit doneā.
He used brexit to get what he wanted - the top job - and then didnāt know what to do with it once he got it becasue heās a useless, inept cunt. The pandemic added another layer of shit to the already large lasagne of shit heād created for himself by wholly underestimating the task in hand.
You are somewhat missing the point Scotty. I think everyone can appreciate the pressures of an unknown pandemic and not be too critical of decisions made in good faith that with benefit of hindsight could be viewed as mistakes.
BUT, I am critical off decisions made during the pandemic for political reasons rather than scientific/medical and worse still the corruption. The awarding of contracts to companies that dod not even exist before the pandemic, but suddenly sprung up to provide PPE and other services with directors being friends of tory leadershipā¦
Corruption that to this day has been ālet goā because of that small minority in favour of Brexit empowering this arseholes to do as they pleaseā¦ thankfully, despite Starmerās best efforts to fuck it up, theres is only so much bullshit that even Brexiteers can stomach, only so much economic hardship, inflation, reduced choices in shops, delays in travel that has ānothing to do with leaving the EUā to be believed. As I said at the time, for every 1 person who voted brexit who was ideologically opposed to the EU due to desire for absolute sovereignty, there were IMHO at least 2 who believed in the ābusā and how we would be economically much better off, even better able to cope with such things as the pandemic without EU rulesā¦ these folks are starting to smell the bullshit