So Why Do You Want More of It?

View Comments

• Doesn't Amtrak Freight run quietly in the background efficiently making profits? World-wide it's passenger rail that ends up a government money pit.

  • That's true, and predictable. Rail benefits from economies of scale in using a huge engine to move large masses over a fixed route. Passengers' needs are more nuanced, and change over time. Passenger rail, like the NHS, is a case of trying to fit people to an enterprise rather than vice versa.

  • Amtrack doesn't run freight. Amtrack is solely the (long distance) passenger stuff. It's Warren Buffett - OK, others too, but his Burlington Northern is a large part of the system - who runs freight.

• Correct; the US gov't funded and pushed vaccine research, Trump ordering the FDA to fast-track approval, but airlifted it to the states and retail distribution was by private companies. Not without glitches; at the end of the day, a hospital may vaccinate all comers, not the targeted population, rather than let a batch spoil. And the politicians, as with any newfound wealth, try to guide it on racial grounds, and to themselves.

  (On the Editor's Note: Tim, is this column yours? or one of your contributors?)

• Germany is now copying the UK's vaccination strategy, having given up on the EU one. Yesterday France managed to vaccinate 500 people (no, there are no zeros missing in that number).

  • Is this the "strategy" I read about, that once the manufacturer determines that 2 doses are necessary to achieve the rated effectiveness, you make a "data driven" decision to give everyone 1 dose so you can "do" twice as many patients?

    • No, the revised strategy is to wait 12 weeks rather than the 3 weeks that was used during the trials. It's a calculated gamble that getting twice as many vaccinated initially (while supplies are still ramping up) will save more lives than are lost by any potential reduction in effectiveness caused by the delay to administering the second dose.

      • Still, methodical medical research, up-ended by a seat-of-the-pants guess by politicians, touted as data-driven.

      • I assume it was the most important 500 people, as determined by government study, who were vaccinated that day.

        • Bien sûr !

• We are the tenth-worst (probably twelfth-worst when Spain and Montegro report up-to-date figures after the New Year break) country in Europe on deaths per million; Belgium's death rate is more than 50% higher.
  Things have been made much worse than necessary by the NHS bureaucracy (as mentioned in passing by Mr Jenkins and blamed on "the government"). There are *at least* twenty European countries with higher infection rates - probably thirty as the UK has one of the highest testing rates per million of any large country so most others understate their infection rates - but NHS managers concerned with saving NHS money instead of lives killed hundreds by discharging patients to Care Homes without testing them for Covid-19 infections picked up in hospital (Scotland's delegated NHS was particularly culpable).