You lot take the piss out me for being a tory boy, but it got me access to all those Covid contracts and I filled my boots. Trouble was my Chinese broker stiffed me and sent me all this toot.
Still not my problem anymore
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Dr. John ainât a happy bunnyâŠ
Quite 
This I dont have a problem with
We backed a number of horses hoping one would come through and to short cut the companies investment / feasibility judgements, we underwrote the development.
The vaccine procurement program was one of the things the govt did well during the pandemic
There was always going to be some runners that fell along the way
Backing hopes is perhaps understandable - but you canât really argue with this, or will you?
â⊠Dame Meg Hillier MP, Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said:
âThe story of PPE purchasing is perhaps the most shameful episode the UK government response to the pandemic. At the start of the pandemic health service and social care staff were left to risk their own and their familiesâ lives due to the lack of basic PPE. In a desperate bid to catch up the government splurged huge amounts of money, paying obscenely inflated prices and payments to middlemen in a chaotic rush during which they chucked out even the most cursory due diligence. This has left us with massive public contracts now under investigation by the National Crime Agency or in dispute because of allegations of modern slavery in the supply chain.
Add to that a series of inappropriate, unauthorised severance payoffs made by clinical commissioning groups in the first year of the pandemic and the impression given falls even further from what we expect.
DHSC singularly failed to manage this crisis, despite years of clear and known risk of a pandemic, and the challenges facing it now are vast, from getting the NHS back on its feet to preparing for the next major crisis. There are frankly too few signs that it is putting its house in order or knows how to.ââ
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The PPE issue is bad
There were mitigating circumstances - like every country in the world was scrabbling for it, and the fear of running out created the perfect environment for the piss to be taken
Bypassing normal procurement procedures was necessary as time was of the essence but some of the the decisions made and who ended up with those contracts were awful
Was there some nest lining - yep
Was it wholesale corruption - I donât think so - there was a huge amount of really fucking poor decision making against a backdrop of a ridiculous amount of pressure
Also we were woefully underprepared
But who thought what happened would have 5 years ago
So youâre saying the Public Accounts Committee arenât 100% spot on? Not sure thereâs a bona fide reason for making up any other excuses tbf. Am sure you think otherwise but itâs not worth an argument as we both think completely differently. 
There was a precedent for the absolute carnage.
The Gulf War, Saddamsâ invasion of Kuwait and the expectation he had WMD.
At the time I worked on the fringe of the IT market, we dealt with Brokers & Traders and Grey Marketeers, all legit and I did a million quid deal to supply IBM & HP to a large Oil Co.
Come the invasion, those same Brokers were running around trying to find Chemical Weapons NBC suits, Gas Masks etc for the general population of most of the Middle East.Every Dealer we worked with was trying to buy/sell Gas Masks. It was INSANE.
Some of our clients at the time worked at Porton and so they saw what was going on on the phone and fax and we had a visit.
I was flown by Brokers to Geneva & Frankfurt to meet up on such deals. In Geneva the broker was trying to sell us the kit we were buying from him. In Frankfurt they just lied about the part number and were pushing 25 year old expired Eastern European kit.
Most people lost a lot of money, I made a lot as a "special consultant 
Fast forward to Covid. Exactly the same thing happened. I had maybe 30 or 40 calls in the first week as it became a âthingâ. I actually had a supply of legit kit in NHS Packaging I just wasnât going to spunk out nearly a grand to ship the samples over to the Middle East. I could maybe have made money. A mate of mine made a lot AND donated a huge amount to Help for Heroes.
The desperation to get SOMETHING the lies from the Brokers who the day before were probably grey marketing Cisco Kit.
Real kit got sold by people who had links to manufacturers or people in China who could visit factories.
And a lot of shit flowed upstream.
It happened before, it will happen again sometime with something. Very few will have knowingly cheated over here, the cheats would have been packing the gear onto pallets to ship. Nobody is going to get to sue them The Party wonât let you near any of them. The people here who received dud gear wonât get sued âthey didnât knowingly do it.â
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Read through the big story and at the end it refers to another case run from Krakow.
Actually from our village!
âŹ890k how did i miss that idea?
A huge Covid bonus Phil, and you missed out on it. 
Could have set you up for life.
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I know cant believe i was so slow!
Jeezus, some people were so desperate not to get that vaccine that they forked out near âŹ2k to get a fake certificate!!
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Yep. Vaccine Roll out dates were by age so
If you had a holiday or travel booked before that the only way was fake papers, not just vaccine deniers
#covidisairborne is trending on twitter with the accompanying hysteria
The psychological impact of covid is going to take years to overcome
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It is making a comeback.
Cousin has it, numbers of hospitalizations esp in NYC are up⊠etc
I had it again earlier this year - just like very bad flu.
Donât deny vulnerable people may be being hospitalised, but âsocialâ media is a fucking cesspit of lies and half/full untruths. More fool those who buy in to it.
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Secret is to be aware it is back and get some rays & Vitamin D into the system while there is a gap in your rain clouds
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What clouds? Itâs always sunny in Cobham Towers
(Btw I was using that before those sad sacks in Philadelphia)
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