RandoEFC

It won't be long until every double-jabbed person who gets hit by a bus or bitten by a dog will be claimed by the anti-vaxxers as yet another victim of the vaccine. Ironic when most of them have made the direct switch from the very clever "did they die OF Covid or WITH Covid" critical thinker brigade.

Alternative headline: 984,988 Doctors (US) don't speak out about vaccine dangers.

The Tory > Green shift isn't new. It seems strange on face value because it feels as if people are moving from right to left on the political spectrum and just skipping Labour out which seems like the natural step between Tory and Green if you simplify things by removing the Lib Dems. You could read it as Labour moving back to the center, picking up that -5 from the Tories but then losing just as many voters to the Greens, resulting in no net gain for Labour and a +5 for the Greens, but that isn't really consistent with the evidence. There are many areas in the country, such as the South East, where the Lib Dems have traditionally been the main opposition to the Conservatives and Labour are totally unpalatable. The Greens are starting to displace the Lib Dems as that party in some of these areas. They're also getting some joy in proper lefty/Corbynite areas like Bristol and parts of Merseyside. It's also likely that some of the people who answer these polls but don't pay full attention have been scared/inspired a bit by the COP26 stuff and are just going through a "Green" phase. To summarise, there's a lot of speculation, particularly my last couple of points, but you can see from the local elections in the summer that in some areas of the country, particularly the Tory shires, the Greens as well as the Lib Dems are seen as a valid alternative to the Conservatives where Labour aren't a factor. The Tory > Green swing is a real thing in parts of the country despite it seeming quite a radical shift on the political compass on face value.

First LAB lead from any pollster since the pre-vaccine days if I'm not mistaken.

I'm not scared of getting the virus and I wasn't before I was vaccinated. I am scared of passing it on to my Nana or colleagues/students who are vulnerable though so I get the vaccine as it reduces the chance of that happening if I and everyone else gets it. If I choose not to get jabbed based on my own Facebook comment science instead of actual science and end up contributing more to the spread in my community and increase risk of serious illness or death of the vulnerable sections of that community then I'd be just a bit of a selfish cock, especially when the jab costs me nothing. Is there some reason behind you thinking differently if you had Covid already? Maybe. But it's hard to take that as your genuine reasoning when in the next breath we're hearing conspiracies about destroying businesses and totalitarianism. Stuff like that is dangerous, unfounded nonsense and even on a platform as tiny as this one needs to be challenged.

Scottish independence would be a nightmare for both parties. Look at the mess that has been made in Ireland thanks to Brexit. There is no Good Friday Agreement to cause quite as much bother in a sense but as long as the UK remains outside of the EU there's an absolutely colossal border problem between England and Scotland where all of the infrastructure in place has been built to treat it as one country. I don't blame the Scots for wanting out (or about half of them anyway) but the real solution for all parties is to get rid of the current government in Westminster and replace it with one that a huge number of Scottish people don't find repugnant. Too bad England doesn't seem to want to play ball with that idea, and the Scots are fed up of waiting for it to happen, which is why I totally get the desire for independence. It still doesn't make it a good idea though. And that's not to "do down" Scotland. It's just that getting away from being governed by Westminster is one thing, the reality of building an independent government, constitution and economy from scratch, a return to the EU, a Southern border, it's all very complicated and will take decades to iron out the creases.

Are there any figures on which sector of the NHS these vaccine refusers work in? If it includes admin staff, cleaners and other staff that don't necessarily work with patients face to face, then that makes it a bit less shocking. Unless they've explicitly said its 100,000 nurses and doctors, I wouldn't be surprised if that rate of about 1/13 being unvaccinated was lower still among the actual health professionals. There's also the factor that NHS workers were disproportionately affected by the virus early days because the PPE in many hospitals wasn't up to scratch, so it's entirely logical that some of them might feel, wrongly but understandably, that they've got the natural immunity and thus don't need to get the vaccine as well, rather than them thinking it's got a 5G microchip in it.

First I've heard of any of that. I'm fairly sure none of the vaccines were redesigned without the relevant spike protein as well. I'll happily stand corrected if you can provide a credible source but I don't think you can. There are plenty of credible sources though that do a rigorous analysis of the pros and cons of getting vaccinated and in every single one of them, the benefits overwhelmingly outweigh the risks. If you're not worried about getting Covid because of the 99% survival rate and "muh mune system" then you shouldn't be worried about the vaccines, the most risky of which has a 99.9999% safety rate of not killing you through a blood clot.

Is that what happened? Or was it that medical bodies responded to the vanishingly small handful of cases of blood clots by doing a full risk assessment on the AstraZeneca vaccine that caused it and reacted accordingly, for example the UK pulling that vaccine for under 30s and holding a public briefing to explain exactly why?

The NHS employs approximately 1.3m staff so if 100k not being vaccinated is "evidence" of anything then what are we to say about the other 1.2m that have been vaccinated? Also 84% of the UK population have had at least one dose of the vaccine. That rises to 92% of NHS staff using the numbers above. If your point is that "these health workers haven't taken the vaccine which proves it's dangerous because they would know" then it sort of falls down when you actually do some basic research and discover that an average member of the public is twice as likely to be unvaccinated as an NHS employee. Aren't there enough Facebook comment threads for you to play in to stop us from having to deal with all the tripe?

Best thing I've seen from Twitter in a while .

It's one thing having had a traumatic personal experience with a vaccine in the past. It's quite another spreading deranged and baseless conspiracy theories on the internet. You might think you're having a laugh, I genuinely don't know, but when we're back up to 100-200 people dying a day in the country, many of them that would be surviving if they'd taken the vaccine and haven't, often because people like you are peddling nonsense like this on much bigger platforms than this one. Bad information is literally killing people and it isn't a laughing matter. You don't want to get vaccinated, that's fine, but what I don't understand is how anti-vaxxers are obsessed with the "I won't be told what to put in my body" line yet can't shut the fuck up trying to scare other people about what to put in their bodies. It's irresponsible and dangerous. The science speaks for itself. If you have good personal reasons to ignore the science and not get vaccinated then keep it personal, chance it yourself and let everyone else make the personal choice you claim to be such an advocate of. We've all heard you say your piece now. Why are you still going? What do you have to prove here? People on this forum have lost loved ones to this virus and your patter about the vaccine is so ill-informed that it's hard to take seriously and comes across as a wind-up. At some point you're going to seriously offend someone. Having a different opinion is fine but none of us need to be reminded of it every 5 minutes when it comes to sensitive topics like people's health.

It's very telling of the anti-vaxx lockdown-sceptic psyche that they've if anything got more vocal and angry since the lockdown restrictions were lifted. It's almost as if the majority of them are just angry and confused individuals with a chip on their shoulder who saw their opportunity for some righteous outrage and now that all of the things they were complaining about have stopped they're clinging onto it because they liked having an excuse to wind themselves up and point the finger at someone or something else. I don't know that anyone is advocating for another lockdown but looking at the cases and deaths in the UK at the moment it shouldn't be so controversial to take simple mitigations such as people working from home where it's not going to have too much impact on productivity and an increase in mask wearing on public transport. The UK has a government and ruling party who won't even set a responsible example by wearing masks in a full House of Commons. The UK is also having the worst time (again) of comparable countries despite getting a huge head start on vaccination. It's not a coincidence.

He's had a couple of injuries through the start of the season, he's been on the bench but I don't think he's that high in the pecking order. I think there's a player in there still but no chance he comes in and fills Doucoure's role for several weeks, he's more of a deep-lying midfielder and doesn't have the more explosive side to his game as much. Gomes is probably the closest substitute but lacks the physicality. He has had a decent start to the season, the best he's played since his injury in my opinion, but he's also missed a couple with injury. Davies can do a job alongside Allan but again, he just offers far less than Doucoure and is prone to having particularly bad days. Then there's Delph, the less said the better. Doucoure is probably underrated outside the club, but then he probably hasn't ever sustained a level of performance like he's shown so far this season for long enough to really get noticed. He's been like a low-key Yaya Toure for us when we've played well. He had an off day against West Ham this weekend and we suffered a lot from it. I think in terms of replicating the performances from the start of the season where we surrendered a lot of possession but really got at teams on the counter attack, we can pretty much forget about being as effective in that sense as long as he's injured and we'll probably have to make reasonably big adaptations to how we play.

Yeah this season can start to get fucked with the rumours that Calvert-Lewin is out for a lot longer than expected too. We have nobody who can come close to standing in for Doucoure in midfield.

Sir David Amess has now died from his injuries. A very dark day for the country, not for the first time.

A horrific and sick attack. I know any such attack is horrific but it's worrying the steady increase in violence against elected officials in recent years. Obviously we don't know the details but you have to assume it was politically motivated. You've got to have real problems to think this is the way to win people to your cause and effect the change you desire. It's just sick and cowardly going into someone's office while they're inviting people to come and speak to them about issues that affect them and you go in with a weapon and attack them. I hope he pulls through.

My Nana is getting a booster jab soon. I'm not going to lie, I've gotten so tired of the increasingly deranged antivax "arguments" that I avoid reading much about the science anymore and am now just going to wait for whatever public health advice is given.

I quite like the eyebrows personally.

The fact that he picks on these examples is telling, rather than stating that teachers shouldn't be expressing political opinions in front of impressionable teenagers (which I broadly agree with). I wish somebody would ask them to square their free speech/cancel culture shtick with their irrational, paranoid fear of the BBC reporting things that happen and the army of teachers and lecturers who are apparently radicalising a generation into a massive woke mob by ecuating them about climate change, history, democratic rights, etc. Some of them contradict themselves almost every time they open their mouth in public.

Yeah that's the thing. I don't know if that takes into account wage expenditure but while £170m in a year is a lot for a non-top 6 side and a lot for a team who have had the financial restraints that Newcastle have had under Ashley, the going rate for a decent top half Premier League player now is £30m and if you want even a single player of the quality that the likes of Chelsea and Man Utd are shopping for, you're going up to more like £50m. It'll be tough and it's probably realistic that it will take about 3 seasons to get established in that "maybe we can sneak 7th" tier with Everton and West Ham.

You can't begrudge them it after decades of Mike Ashley but you need more than just money to break into the elite bunch of clubs. We've found that out the hard way. Even though people point at Everton and say they've spent lots of money, and it is a lot more than the likes of Leicester and others outside of the Super League Six, but I'm not talking about how well the money has been spent, our outlay remains absolutely dwarfed by Chelsea, Man City, Man Utd, Arsenal, to a lesser extent Liverpool and to an even lesser extent Spurs, because of Financial Fair Play. Newcastle could literally have a never-ending supply of money from their backers but because of Financial Fair Play, they won't be able to spend more than the Super League Six even if they want to so they'll still get outstripped on development of facilities, marketing, transfers, wages and basically everything else you'd need to change the competitive order. It's all just stupid anyway. The amount of money and the politics together is just tedious and boring now to be honest. I'm actually annoyed I've read anything about it and opened this thread to comment because I like to pretend none of it exists and just focus on the actual matches at the weekend. As soon as you start digging into this side of things, it basically ruins football from where I'm standing. Although just for the getting rid of Mike Ashley factor I can absolutely see why Newcastle fans won't feel like this is ruining anything.

Dowden is one of the worst. And the landlord donors thing is definitely a big deal. It was pretty much outed as the only reason they forced universities to go back to in-person lectures in September 2020 despite the fact that pre-vaccine it was very clear that this would lead to huge outbreaks and students isolating in halls getting their education remotely after all, paying for the accommodation when they could have been educated back at home and saved the money. They went ahead with it for the primary reason that they were under pressure from a lot of wealthy donors who own property and relied upon the country going back to work/school/university and filling the office space. This whole conversation about whether work from home is something that should be integrated partially or fully in some cases to your working week where appropriate is a massive threat to the Tory donors who own buildings in big cities and make very nice bang for their buck by renting it out as office space. Another thing that the Labour Party as the party of employees and therefore the majority of the country should be banging on about often and loudly.