Could be. He strikes me as a bit … abnormal. He certainly doesn’t have the interlocution skills you’d expect of a lawyer (barrister?).
On the same theme, I’ve just been watching this:
A very wide-ranging discussion here in 20 minutes. I agree with most of what they’re saying here. The COVID files are a disgraceful indictment of Britain’s descent into anti-intellectualism, political dishonesty, populism, and third-world-grade governance. It’s hard for me to see how anything is salvageable from all this.
My take on Matt Hancock is he decided/was persuaded early on that ‘the science’ proved that vaccinating everyone was the only way. Then, he got into his head that he would be the hero who saved the British people from themselves. Oh, they would love him so much that he might get a pop at the top job.
Dunning-Kruger effect, ego, plus ambition.
I’m considering reading his, presumably totally shit, book. Just to compare it with his private messages. It will be interesting to see how they match up.
He seems to have somehow figured that, by virtue of the fact that he was the health minister, ergo he must be the smartest person in the room re. health-related matters. Basically he decided that he was the nation’s top doctor.
It’s incredible that he was making decisions about public health when he has no background in health. Overruling advisers. I’m not saying I agree with the advice he was being given, but how could he decide on the isolation period? It’s ridiculous.
Same info as what @fumarole posted just above, I think.
Not sure why this is getting so much attention. It just seems to say genetic material of animals was found at Wuhan market where COVID was present.
That evidence, they said, was consistent with a scenario in which the virus had spilled into humans from a wild animal.
Yeah, along with about 18 other scenarios?
But the genetic data from the market offers some of the most tangible evidence yet of how the virus could have spilled into people from wild animals outside a lab.
Really? News flash–we know viruses can spill into people from wild animals outside a lab. It doesn’t tell us anything about how it could have happened, unless we’re still counting “Wuhan Market!” as “how”.
The NYT article also seems to say the source of this new data is murky.
“But,” he said, “given that the animals that were present in the market were not sampled at the time, this is as good as we can hope to get.”
Unintended consequences, or entirely predictable? Kids aren’t all stupid: one component here seems to be a broad realisation among teenagers that their elders are clowns who shafted the kids for no good reason. Another large group are simply away with the fairies.
It’s much worse, incidentally, in low-income countries. In the Philippines kids were locked in their homes. Parents lost their jobs and therefore the ability to cover school costs. Lots of feral kids just wandering around now in areas which were previously scraping by well enough. That’s going to morph into a rise in crime, teenage pregnancy, and possibly gang/terrorist recruitment.
