“I could cause an insurrection at the capital and wouldn’t lose any followers” is the logical outcome of “I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue & not lose any followers.” As a candidate, he ran on the platform that he could openly commit crimes without consequence.

I've been seeing a lot of discussion around the dosage gaps recommended by government for the Astra/Oxford & Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines. My thoughts on the potential benefits & risks of such an approach, and the need for much greater transparency around these decisions. Thread.

The UK govt announced recently that both the Oxford & BioNTech vaccines would be now administered with a gap of between 4-12 weeks (so prioritise administration of first dose, given limited resources).

What is the basis of this?

The basis that's been discussed seems to be that
1) the first dose is likely to confer some degree of protection against disease, so better to roll this out as fast as possible, and
2) that for Oxford/Astra efficacy may be higher when the gap between doses is greater.

I discuss some of the technical details around the Oxford trial below for those interested in these. If you'd just like a summary of this, please skip to the summary tweet titled 'SUMMARY'.

What does published evidence show? The Astra/Oxford data are a bit messy because of protocol changes during the trial. This is because the trial was originally planned as a single dose trial, but a booster dose was added when developers realised that this would likely help.

"How the Avengers would respond to the Capitol riot" (a thread)

CAPTAIN AMERICA - tells Falcon, "I fought Nazis once before. They're extremely dangerous." They then see the guy scaling the Capitol wall fall into the shrubs. Falcon: "You sure these are the same Nazis?"

IRON MAN - lands by the guy carrying the podium. Says, "Mind if I borrow this?" then tosses it to Hulk, who swings it like a bat at the mob. Guy: "Hey, that's MY podium!" Iron Man: "Actually it's the Speaker's. And technically, it's a lectern." Then punches him through a wall.

BLACK WIDOW - enters hotel room where Jack Dorsey is tied up. Rips duct tape off his mouth. Jack: "I'll do anything you want!" BW: "Disable POTUS's Twitter. NOW!" Jack fumbles with his phone. "Done. Anything else?" BW: "Yeah. Trim your beard for God's sake." *tosses him clippers*

HULK - grabs a selfie stick from one of the guys and beats him over the head with it. Deeming it too small, he grabs another guy's Confederate flag and takes out a whole swath of rioters. He then tosses the flag to Cap, who uses it as a javelin to impale a fleeing Ted Cruz.

HAWKEYE - hears Iron Man in his earpiece say, "Looks like Orange Julius is tweeting from another account." Hawkeye: "On it." He locks in on Trump through the White House window and fires an arrow, knocking the phone out of Trump's hands. Hawkeye: "Damn that felt good."

Here's 100 confirmed conspiracies from the last 75 years. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Purpose: To indicate why we have a RIGHT to be skeptical and critical to our governments, corporations and other large institutions.

Last month PTI government raised base power tariffs by Rs 1.95 per unit. This month NEPRA has determined tariff increases of Rs 1.53 per unit in Fuel Adjustment Charges for December and Rs 0.83 in Quarterly Adjustment for 4th quarter of 2020. 1/17

So your electric bills for February maybe higher by Rs 4.31 per unit. That’s a Tabdeeli we will feel in our monthly budgets.

The PTI govt takes no responsibility for anything and just blames PMLN’s previous govt. 2/17

For instance when the entire country suffered a blackout a minister blamed PMLN. But when asked exactly what happened he said he didn’t know. He just “knew” it was PMLN’s fault. Later it turned out that Einsteins in PTI forgot to carry out routine maintenance last summer.
3/17

So PTI blames increase in basic tariff (Rs 1.95 of Rs 4.31) on PMLN saying that this is due to higher fixed costs incurred as a result of PMLN setting up more power plants. But that is crazy. The higher fixed cost should now divided by an even higher number of units whose 4/17

generating capacity PMLN installed. And the total cost of all PMLN plants is lower than all previously set up plants. Of course we had to set up power plants. In 2013 we had 12 to 18 hours of load shedding in most of Pakistan. 5/17

Is the European Union really being unreasonable over the City of London?

Or are we seeing an inevitable consequence of a Brexit that prioritised sovereignty over financial services?

A thread…🧵💵🏦🇬🇧🇪🇺

Andrew Bailey’s Mansion House speech this week showed clear signs of frustration about the EU’s foot dragging in granting “equivalence” to UK regulators on financial

The view among UK financial lobbyists and regulators is that the EU has various financial equivalence agreements already with a host of other third countries (even the US) so why not the UK, which is currently, of course, totally aligned?...3/

But the view in the EU is that the UK is different from those other countries because it’s so dominant in finance - and they fear outsourcing regulation to an authority outside the bloc when that regulated activity could potentially affect EU markets/business so profoundly ...4/

Andrew Bailey thinks the EU is gearing up to demand the UK be a simple “rule taker” in return for equivalence, unable to unilaterally change UK rules, which he says would be "intolerable"....5/