Off Topic Coronavirus - 606 tales from the Inquiry

Get well soon oh mighty leader.

 

I caught it last summer. I'm pretty sure it waqs at the Madness concert, although my mother in law cheerfully told my children I caught it from the air conditioning, which is a new one on me! She went down with it two weeks later (I was lucky not to be blamed ) and she told them she caught it because she went swimming. So there's lots of new places that Covid lurks which science is oblivious to.

 

Never argue with your mother-in-law.

 

Be careful out there folks...

There's a new COVID19 variant spreading.
The Government is bringing the vaccination programme for vulnerable people forward by a month. It's now beginning in September.

 

Just saying

 

According to Matt Hancock a "toxic culture" at the top of Government hindered decision making in March 2020.

Don't the British People deserve a Government that concentrates on trying to save lives during an emergency?
Not a back-stabbing Shakespearean tragedy.
Honesty, Cummings and this donut are as bad as each other.
God knows what rubbish Boris is going to spout when they get him on the stand.

 

He'll say he "Got all the big calls right" and everyone who says otherwise is either stupid or lying.

 

When the Chancellor, who is now the Prime Minister, brought in his Eat Out to Help Out scheme he did not tell the Health Minister about it until the morning of its release. We already knew that Messrs Vallance, Whitty and Van Tamm were kept in the dark, but the Health Secretary?? Shurely shome mishtake?

 

Eat out to help out. Endless furlough money. PPE that couldn’t be used. It’s no wonder the country is broke.

Whoever was chancellor should be barred from holding any public office

 

The Covid enquiry is becoming a complete farce. It’s not about trying to learn lessons for a future pandemic (which in fact might need completely different actions anyway), it’s a witch hunt and blame game, but above all a money making exercise as usual for the lawyers, barristers and KC’s.

The questioning of Boris Johnson by Pete Weatherby KC this morning is ridiculous. I know he is representing the families of people who have died, so is doing a particular job, but it’s just ludicrous and IS NOT being done to learn lessons. Anyone can pick out a certain data set and make it sound like someone made mistakes, but a different set of data on the same facts can just as easily make it look like someone has made the correct decision. Lies, damned lies and statistics all over again.

Like him or loathe him, Boris Johnson was remarkably restrained in his responses to this prick. I would have been much more forthright.

At one point Weatherby compares South Korea’s figures to the UK figures (the fact that there are so many vast differences between the countries seems to bypass the KC) but when Johnson starts to tell him he is wrong and explain why it isn’t helpful to the enquiry to directly compare the two countries, Weatherby tells him to stop using other countries to excuse his mistakes. It’s utter madness. And no intervention from the chair. I don’t know what the rules of this enquiry are, but if this was a court of law the KC would have got a reprimand from the judge. The fact that he didn’t, makes it clear that this isn’t a search for the truth at all. It’s a witch hunt, blame game, money making exercise and probably a pre-cursor to the families of the deceased suing the government.

Hindsight simply does not exist, but in this enquiry, if you don’t have it then you are damned.

 

I've been following the Inquiry up to now, but will be ignoring Boris's testimony. Sorry but he lies so much that I just don't believe anything he says. All politicians have a degree of dishonesty in the way they present the facts as they want you to see them, but Boris is in a class of his own, and I can't listen to him. I heard some of it yesterday morning and that was enough. His excuses for missing the first 5 Cobra meetings were pathetic; these meetings are not called unless there is an emergency. His apology was stomach-churning, and his false humility was carefully scripted. The judge was right to reprimand him for giving his friends in the press a copy of his statement beforehand. Obviously he is marmite, and has his admirers, but to me despite his gifts as an orator and campaigner, he is unfit for high office because of his total contempt for the truth.

 

Maybe, maybe not. As you say, he is a Marmite figure without doubt.

But regardless of that, the enquiry seems to me to not be about preparing for the next pandemic by learning lessons from this one, but more about apportioning blame. To my cynical mind this is a pre-cursor to future civil claims by relatives of some of the deceased, who’s cases will no doubt be more likely to succeed, if blame for mistakes has been apportioned to the government and/or government figures.