Sounds hopeful about 1 jab providing some help. What happens if a country goes Green whilst you are there, will the rule on your arrival date back to the UK apply, appreciate no saving in tests maybe but the 10 day quarantine could be avoided then?

Oh the light system isn’t for inbound passengers to the UK and if a quarantined will be required?

Are you Macron? I claim my 5 francs. :)

Too many people “holding out” for their vaccine of chose is really going to mess up the progress of the vaccination programme and hence the roadmap progress.
Even on an individual level, you don’t know if you will be in contact with someone with covid in say 2 weeks time; get a vaccine as soon as it is offered and don’t deliberate too much on the manufacturer.

Given how much he was stuttering about vaccine passports it’s clear he is in deep trouble on that issue.

either way he said no scheme as such until at least 17 May

My comments regarding growing up were intemperate. I imagined you were simply citing the views of others.

You take an odd view of freedoms regarded as fundamental.

As far as foreign citizens returning home, I haven't heard of any of my overseas students being stranded in Blighty. And, for better or worse, i have no doubt they will turn up again.

All the vaccines in the UK are safe and effective. That's the party line I'm required to toe, but personally I would add two adjectives into that clause, both "extremely". Get the first one you can at the first opportunity. Whatever perceived advantage of one vaccine versus another, in terms of 1 in a million events, is nullified by waiting a day longer, given the risks of COVID-19. And nullified further by not looking both ways before crossing the street to the vaccine centre. Humans think they understand risk but they are pretty awful at it on the whole. By having any approved vaccine at the first date you are doing a powerful act of service to yourself, those you love, your colleagues, your students, your community. I've spent weeks wading through all the pre-pubs on AZ and clotting, but I still had my second AZ on Saturday.

its funny how in the USA you can book a specific vaccine center that is giving a specific vaccine. So one for J and J, one for moderna and one for pzifer.

also funny how it is open in some cases to any person even if they are not a resident as long as they have their ID with them, vaccine tourism ?

I can understand why ppl would want to
book j and j so they can just get a jab once and be done with it, I think the plan for the youth in the uk is the j and j one? Shame it’s so slow in the uk to get it

The traffic light system on one level is best understood for UK residents wishing to travel overseas and then return. But formally its impact is most on inbound passengers to the UK. There is only one thing stopping outbound travel, namely a specific prohibition on non-essential travel, that I expect will be lifted on 17 May. Unless something goes in its place - which is the topic under discussion here - then we revert back to red list for some places (SA), 10 days self isolation +3 tests for other places (USA).

Thanks CWS, very insightful as usual.

That's not totally uniform though... I had a friend who was booked for Moderna but ended up with Pfizer/Biohazard because that's what they had on that day! ;)

rb211.

In a word ‘no’.

1. The UK and European medicines regulators have approved these treatments. These are not lightly taken decisions. These are highly scrutinised assessments taken by people with deep expertise whose careers are on the line.

2. It’s important to contextualise risk. You have a 1 in 20,000 chance of dying in a road accident in the UK in any given year. If, and it’s a big if, there is a blood clotting risk from AZ, it is estimated at most as a 1 in 100,000 chance. Think about what that means for a second - that’s less than one person in a capacity crowd at Wembley. One. More people in that crowd will die every single week.

3. It is seductive but very difficult to compare trials of different vaccines taken at different points in different countries when different strains were circulating and prevalence rates were, well, different. The 95% or 70% figures are not absolute truths - they are evidence.

4. The numbers themselves relate to shown effectiveness against ‘symptomatic’ Covid. Your protection against hospitalisation is much higher.

5. If you are not vaccinated, you are unprotected. People are still being infected every day. It’s impossible to guess how your body would react to infection or indeed - and I say this in the least emotionally manipulative way I can think of - that of some who is important to you, who may receive the disease from you.

Ultimately, everyone is entitled to choose whether to take a vaccine. If you are unsure, talk to a nurse or a doctor present when you get invited to attend. But personally I think holding out for another vaccine on the basis of press reports and speculation is unlikely to be in your best interests.

Try to look at it this way - these are all wonder drugs created unbelievably quickly by teams of smart committed people pushing the boundaries of human knowledge. Every injection has the potential to save the recipient’s life. Each of the vaccines has done so countless times already. It could save yours. Isn’t that brilliant?

Macron and Merkel have done considerably more damage than any anti-vaxxers ever could have hoped to achieve.

interesting. and how do you balance that with the right to life? courts tend to decide that a state also has a duty to reasonably prevent foreseeable loss of life too.

the human rights whether you read the UK Human Rights Act, the ECHR, or the UN Declaration on Human Rights should be read as a whole and should take account of how some rights in certain situations may be limited by others. your right to travel during a pandemic may be limited by the duty of the state to
protect the lives of others. You can’t simply cherry pick one and say case closed, to do so is completely misleading.

Fair enough. To be clear, once my blue envelope comes, I'll take it. But no envelope yet!