[alancalverd]

A fantastically important insight from our phenomenally well qualified and revered Secretary of State for Health, Sajid Javid.

After campaigning against face masks right up until the moment that COVID cases started their last spectacular rise, this moronic ex-banker (who costs you £150,000 per year in salary alone, never mind the damage he does to your public services) finally spoke ex cathedra, summing up his years of complete ignorance of anything to do with medicine,with this astonishing advice:

"If you feel ill, don't go to work."

I bet your mum never said anything as clever as that!

[acsinuk (OP)]

We cannot continue to live in a state of fear.  Forget about Covid and just treat it as a flu virus. Obviously, if you feal unwell and have a temperature then stay at home and self isolate.

[alancalverd]

You seem to have forgotten that the problem with COVID (apart from lethality and chronic debilitation) is its pre-symptomatic infectivity. If we abandon caution, why bother with driving tests or any other means of preventing us from injuring others?

[Bored chemist]

We cannot continue to live in a state of fear.

Why not?
Is it not sensible to be concerned about things that can kill you, and seek to avoid them?

[alancalverd]

Just received a group email from the first tenor sax player saying he has tested positive and won't be rehearsing with the big band this week. Abject fear or common decency?   

[evan_au]

We cannot continue to live in a state of fear.

There is fear on all sides of this debate - even among those who claim to be fearless.

People deal with this fear in different ways:
- As you say, some susceptible people will fear the disease, and will wear masks when there is an outbreak, and stay away from crowds
- Some susceptible people will fear the disease, and get vaccinated to make themselves less susceptible. Countries with a public health system will promote this, as they know that the cost of vaccination is lower than the cost of acute treatment plus long-term care.
- Some people will deal with the disease by trying to ignore it - "its just a cold". Or "I am young and healthy, so it won't affect me" (and if they are young and healthy, they will probably be right).
- Some people try to project an image of invulnerability by eschewing masks - and by continuing normal activities even when showing symptoms.
- Some people play with these fears by amplifying fears about the vaccine, and minimizing fears of the disease - to the extent that the normal balance of probabilities is reversed, and some fraction of the population refuses to be vaccinated. One imagines that hostile parties may want to fuel these fears as a way of weakening a competitor.
- Epidemiologists fear the emergence of a new variant that might be as lethal as delta variant, and as infectious as omega. It is common that later variants are less lethal - but it's not a law of nature.

The nearest equivalent pandemic was the "Russian flu" of 1889, which was almost certainly a coronavirus. Outbreaks continued for about 6 years - so do you want to continue to live for the next 4 years, or do you want to give up now?
There are some obvious differences from 1889:
- We now have vaccines
- We now have agile processes to develop vaccines against variants - but it will still take 3-6 months to approve a vaccine against a new variant, and ramp up production & distribution.
- We now have large numbers of immune-compromised people due to transplants, cancer or cancer therapy, AIDS, etc. Once infected, these people spin off multiple variants without actually recovering.
- We now have international air travel, so a small localized outbreak can be on the other side of the world in 24 hours.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889%E2%80%931890_pandemic

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

...when fear makes us do stupid things (and susceptible people wearing a mask during an outbreak is not stupid).

[acsinuk (OP)]

Fear caused a panic which allowed ignorant politicians to listen to pseudo experts to err on the side of caution and advise everyone to stay at home with a mask on with scant regard to the mental stress this would cause. 
Lockdowns resulted in massive economic disruption and our children to miss out on education and social mixing attributes plus the isolation of our old folks in care homes
On the plus side it has reduced the time to develop vaccines to months rather than years; so the next pandemic will just require a rapid R&D response from the pharmaceutical industry. 
Fear shows weakness and courage in times of adversity shows strength. Everyone is going to die sometime and prayerfully in a relaxed and dignified manner.

[Bored chemist]

Fear caused a panic

Where?
The only panic I saw was idiots buying toilet paper.

On the other hand, today, travel is disrupted because people who do stuff like run trains are off sick with covid.

Sadly, the choice for the old folks was lonely in a home or even lonelier in the grave.

[acsinuk (OP)]

People going off sick with covid will slow down now that testing is no longer mandatory and anyway.  But the NHS is still offering  vaccines to over 75's which is really wasteful when all that is required is a Moderna pill. 
Vaccinations always come as a needle, glass capsule kit wrapped in triple plastic with sheets of instruction papers with health and safety get out clauses all creating more and more waste and pushing up the price enormously to around £40 per shot.  A cheap 40p pill could have done the same job slightly slower though; so why O why are we polluting the planet with more waste plastic and paper some of which is bound to land up in the oceans.

[Bored chemist]

People going off sick with covid will slow down now that testing is no longer mandatory and anyway. 

Not really.
Did you actually think that through?
Do you realise that people who are sick, but don't know it will spread the bug to others who will fall ill and take time off sick?

.  A cheap 40p pill could have done the same job

Bollocks.

[alancalverd]

People going off sick with covid will slow down now that testing is no longer mandatory

You forget that our wondrous Secretary of State for Health, who knows as little about the subject as you seem to, has published the following profound advice: "If you feel sick, don't go to work". This seems to me to cover every eventuality from a hangover to terminal cancer, so I don't see why it shouldn't apply to COVID.
Abandoning free tests just means that there will be more COVID spread about by people who think they just have a sniffle and can't be arsed to fork out £2 to protect everyone else.
Anyway I'm delighted to learn that your 40 p pill will do the same job but slower. Presumably by preventing the birth of more idiots. Brilliant!

[acsinuk (OP)]

If we carry on with the proposed vaccine programme the 44 million adults will all need a 4th shot and it will cost £1,760 million which is all inflationary money paid by the government. If you decide pills can do the job the savings will be enormous.

[Bored chemist]

. If you decide pills can do the job

It is not a matter of "deciding" that pills can do the job, is it?
If you "decided" that aspirin cures anthrax that doesn't actually make it true, does it?

Do you somehow think that pharmaceutical technology is magic or something?

[acsinuk (OP)]

Do you somehow think that pharmaceutical technology is magic or is it just profiting at our expense??  Insisting on producing vaccines rather than pills is wasting material resources as well as everyone's time; especially our over worked NHS staff. 
 

[alancalverd]

Making pills is a lot easier than making vaccines and consequently more profitable. I have investors standing by. So what's in your pill, pray? Where can we see the results of your clinical trial?

[Bored chemist]

Do you somehow think that pharmaceutical technology is magic

No.
But you seem to think it is.
That's why you think you can make a vaccine that would work as a pill.
Very few vaccines are effective orally.
Polio is, but polio typically infects the gut first anyway so it's the "natural" route of entry.

Most vaccines are essentially proteins (the covid vaccine is more complex, but the idea still holds).
If you make pills of them, they get digested before they can do any good.

That's why they are given by injection.

As Alan has pointed out, the profit margin would be much better on a pill, so that's what the pharmaceutical industry would make if they possibly could.
And one thing they do know is how to make a profit.
So it must be very very difficult or impossible to make a covid vaccine pill.

Yet you keep insisting that they do it.

So... are you proposing that they use magic to do so?

[acsinuk (OP)]

I seem to remember that we used to have a sandpaper powder scratch on our arms in the very distant past against one of the common childs diseases .  What are the Moderna  and Pfizer Paxlovid  anti Covid  pills made of?  As the latest Covid variant is so weak surely a pill will do and save us all further inflation.

[Bored chemist]

What are the Moderna  and Pfizer Paxlovid  anti Covid  pills made of?

Things that neither cure not prevent covid.

As the latest Covid variant is so weak

It isn't.

save us all further inflation.

The covid vaccine isn't the cause of inflation.

I seem to remember that we used to have a sandpaper powder scratch on our arms in the very distant past against one of the common childs diseases .

Do you have any further information about this?

[alancalverd]

He may be talking about the Heaf test for tuberculosis. TB pretty much died out thanks to isolation and vaccination, neither of which he believes in.

[SeanB]

TB is still alive and thriving in Africa and Asia though, very common, and often the major cause of death in HIV patients, as an opportunist infection.