This is at best ingenerous, at worst offensive. He’s a doctor for Pete’s sake, not Gengis Khan. The man might have foibles, has made mistakes (like anyone I should add) but to say that he’s secretely hoping for more people to die so he can be proved right is just not on.

Germany’s death rate is half the UK’s. Even France is 20% lower. This isn’t over by any rate, but attempting to judge based on the last few months of vaccinations and ignoring what went before is somewhat of a heroic take.

Not die just lots of cases in kids etc because he hasn't been out seeing them all mixing and playing together over the last few weeks.

I say it again, a doctor (bound by all the “do-no-harm” Hippocratic ethics and so on) is wishing, in your view, for people to get sick?

Are you serious?

I'll see your doctor, and raise you a Shipman.

No I'm saying he's scratching his head as to why there's not been a big spike in cases yet as his model was telling him there would be.

That’s quite a looooooong jump from “I bet he hopes that cases go up so he can be proved right” as per your previous post.

And BTW, as him and BoJo have repeated ad nauseam, it takes some weeks for data to be confirmed. We all get that you’re super eager to go to Marbella but can you hold on for a few more weeks?

A comment to add before this thread goes into lockdown itself...

This scientist (who doesn't even have all the medical qualifications, honours and titles that Mr Whitty has) sounds like he's the politician making the decisions, and its easy to see how this irks people.

but, crucially, is he? According to Wikipedia he’s a member of SAGE, a modeller. He’s not an expert on variants, on the efficacy of vaccines against those variants and so on. His will be a voice in the chorus, together with virologists, other medical experts and, of course, the economists. Boris and the government will need to factor all of them in before making a decision come April 12th. Personally I’m not too optimistic. Hotel confinement might be here to stay, especially for LATAM considering Brazil...

These are the decks they're producing...

https://assets.publishing.service.go...worst_case.pdf

If you turned up to a real-world client with that they'd throw it in the bin and you won't be coming back. And this is one of the better slide-decks.

What's the matter with them?

I'm not optimistic about travel in 2021. In my opinion, the current rules for anyone coming from any country having to quarantine for 10 days at home will be here for most of 2021 if not all and the red-list will grow a lot longer. The "task force" that has been formed that will deliver a report on the 12th of April will most likely amount to nothing.

The logic given is that overseas borders have to be closed (for years if it is up to some of the scientists we have) because of the threat of current variants and new variants that I'm sure will be found in due time have on vaccine effectiveness. It seems like the Oxford/AZD vaccine is much less effective against the South African variant, and possibly the Brazilian variant. If this is found to be conclusive, then every single one of those millions of people who has received the AZD vaccine is not protected (from overseas guests/tourists) until they receive their booster shot that is being developed - and that booster apparently won't be ready till Autumn. By the time the vaccine booster has been approved, checked and administered to likely half the British population, 2021 is gone.

I think any foreign travel this summer is almost impossible now, and most likely not going to be possible this year. So much for "global Britain".

Sure he/she is making a point: but it's a naive point.

that doesn't take much consideration to be seen as rather a reckless premise.

One piece of evidence does not mean that a case is definitively proved. Or to put it in a folksy way: One swallow does not a summer make etc

Who are these "everyone" ? It sounds like an echo of Trumpian rhetoric.

Who wants a lockdown as long as possible? What benefit do you believe they achieve from a lockdown imposed without reason?

That document is not a slide deck but, rather, a simple pdf containing a few charts and explanatory notes. It's not the most attractive document, but is presumably for internal use, where it is the content that matters.

I can't get my head around anyone attributing such malicious attitudes towards children's well-being to a scientist and clinician following a life devoted to public service.