[Samanfur]

And more seriously, why is this inquiry not being debated at length throughout the country? What the absolute, total fuck is it going to take to get people angry?

How do you gauge and measure widespread anger? Maybe people will be playing ‘Fuckpig, moron or cunt?’ Gavin Williamson is all three.

Mitch Benn has responded (NSFW, if you hadn't already guessed):

[Spoonman]

Thank goodness real people like Carolyn 69816106 are around to defend Boris.

I hold a rule whereby social media accounts whose usernames have more than three digits at the end shall be classed as bots until otherwise proven beyond doubt.

[Boiler]

Words fail me.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-67297446

[davidjay]

Time for Leveson 2

Still say the ICU bit was staged.

From ICU to discharge in three days. Praise be, 'tis a miracle.

[Boiler]

Time for Leveson 2

Still say the ICU bit was staged.

From ICU to discharge in three days. Praise be, 'tis a miracle.

For Mrs. B., the first time from admission to ICU to discharge onto a ward was seven days, followed by four months on various wards including a rehabilitation unit.

The second time was five days in ICU and... well, most know the story by now.

[Andy McDandy]

He was on ICU as a security measure, which is fair enough. He then milked it as much as he could.

[Boiler]

He was on ICU as a security measure, which is fair enough. He then milked it as much as he could.

Couldn't he have just been given a side room, given how few ICU beds there are in a typical hospital? In Mrs. B's case, there was one ICU bed for every 35,000 residents of Peterborough at the time.

[Spoonman]

Words fail me.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-67297446

It would somewhat explain the rumours going around that Hancock was supposedly looking for immunity from prosecution for giving evidence to the inquiry.

[Boiler]

A BTL comment from John Crace's piece today.

Screenshot 2023-11-03 at 21-57-17 The trolleying PM a guide to the language of Boris Johnson’s No 10.png (51.58 KiB) Viewed 1694 times

[Yug]

A scathing piece from a senior NHS person writing under the name of "The Secret Consultant".


Reproduced in full as there are too many highlights to choose from.

I have been reading the testimonies submitted to the Covid inquiry with rising anger this week. I think back to the meetings we had in our hospital as the pandemic approached in early 2020.

We had never experienced this before – nobody had. We were terrified. And yet, as I recall, we calmly and methodically tried to anticipate how we could best use what we had to meet the incoming tide.

We set up daily meetings, formed working groups, reached out to others in our local networks. We didn’t know whether we were doing the right things, but at least we were trying to plan logically and work together to keep our patients safe.

But we are just one tiny cog in a massive machine. I assumed at the time that our processes would be mirrored at the highest levels, only better. Those in government would have more information and better people than us. There would be at least some high-quality leadership to plan and direct the national response. How could there not be?

How wrong I was. It appears that planning at the highest level was utterly shambolic, driven by hubris, ego and idiocy in equal measure.

To read about the petty preoccupations consuming our leaders – when it was already clear that Covid would be the biggest medical disaster of modern times, and when from dawn to dusk I was thinking about almost nothing other than planning for it – fills me with a dull fury I find hard to put into words. They couldn’t even be bothered to follow their own rules. It is beyond shameful.

And yet, after all that has already emerged, evidence of chaos in Downing Street isn’t that shocking any more. What really struck me was what seemed to be a throwaway comment by Simon Stevens, the head of NHS England at the start of the pandemic. While discussing Matt Hancock taking decisions over who should live or die if hospitals were to become overwhelmed, Lord Stevens mentioned that “fortunately this horrible dilemma never crystallised”.

I don’t know whether he really believes that hospitals were not overwhelmed. We may not have been inundated to the point of complete collapse. Maybe we were able to keep up the appearance of safety. But do not be mistaken: we were forced to take decisions that will have affected who lived and who died.

Even now, the denial continues that this happened. It did. Our resources were so short that we were forced to choose which patients we were able to treat in all sorts of ways.

We rationed oxygen, intensive care beds, non-invasive ventilation, even Covid tests early on. We did this with eyes open, in the full knowledge that we were treating patients differently to how we would if we had our usual resources available. If that isn’t rationing of healthcare, making choices for patients based on what we had available, then I would like to know what is.

We tried to make ourselves believe at the time that this was justifiable clinically. Lower oxygen levels were still safe, we said. Shuttling critically ill patients between hospitals on portable ventilators wouldn’t be too risky. Patients would be safe to go back to their care homes, and we needed the beds, so that was all right too.

Maybe these things were true. But the fact is that we had to make choices based on the resources we had at the time.

To my knowledge, at no time has anyone publicly put their hand up to say that yes, we had to ration resources, the NHS failed patients and the public on a systematic basis but that we did our best with what we had.

To say to all of us – doctors, nurses, the thousands of healthcare professionals who worked to breaking point but were still unable to offer the standard of care that we hold ourselves to – that it was not your fault. I cannot overstate how important that small piece of recognition would be. It would help to mitigate some of the moral harm we have all suffered by doing the things we did.

I still come back to these decisions in my darker moments. So, please, be honest with us. These life-or-death decisions did happen, and we on the frontline still hold the responsibility for them without acknowledgment or support.

After everything we have all been through, some honesty is the least we deserve.


https://amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/202 ... consultant

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Gove on today. He's having a 'mare.

Gove thinks he's very clever, but he's nowhere near as clever as Hugo Keith KC...

>edit<
Continually being pulled up for longwinded and irrelevant answers, running down the clock.
He even threatened the KC with even longer answers - which isn't a good move, and was noted by the chair.

Man's a cunt.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Hugo Keith KC is clearly thoroughly pissed off by Gove. He is maintaining a polite demeanour but every now and then his expression shows his true exasperation and distaste.

[Youngian]

Humble Mike, a future Tory leader who listens and takes responsibility.

But in a collective responsibility sort of way. If they’d listen to me in the first place, Gove adds

Michael Gove tells the COVID inquiry of how he was "hawkish" or "cautious" when it came to resurgences of the virus, and that it was his view that acting earlier was the best course of action.
Mr Gove says that around autumn 2020, he had to "prosecute" the case for restrictions with some "vigour".
He says there were conversations during the course of September and October in which "one could see the PM's hope that the worst might be behind us" but that others had concerns that "conditions for a difficult second wave were growing" and that "timely and serious action needed to be taken".
Hugo Keith KC recalls how Mr Gove said at the time: "We cannot make the same mistakes yet again."
Asked what mistakes he was referring to, he says allowing too much social mixing.
He adds: "Too often we didn't go early enough and we didn't go hard enough."

[Andy McDandy]

He's also said some shit about Johnson favouring tackling decision making in a truly dialectic manner, rigorously (what is it with that word, does it make him come?) gaming different options against each other and seeing which wins out in the gladiatorial arena of ideas, pitting thesis versus antithesis and savouring the beautiful synthesis that emerges; as opposed to some Napoleonic, inquisitorial, implicitly foreign decision making process.

Or he could just be an indecisive cowardly cunt.

[Youngian]

He's also said some shit about Johnson favouring tackling decision making in a truly dialectic manner, rigorously (what is it with that word, does it make him come?)

Cultural Marxism’s insidious influence has even reached Tory ‘intellectuals’ like Gove.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Has anyone else noticed that Mikey is now sporting rather long sideburns? What????

[Malcolm Armsteen]

'Twas Tuesday, and the slimy Gove did gyre and bimble in the wabe...

[Youngian]

Is Gove on the Bolivian sherbet, who’s he trying to impress apart from his ego? Certainly not his government colleagues he’s sticking up.

[Abernathy]

Right, Gove. Outside, ya CUNT !!!!!!

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Sajid Javid was (relatively) quite impressive.

Raab now on, looks like he's spaced out.