Bob Dylan warned us about following leaders. I have no heroes beyond Noam Chomsky and the late Edward Said, though profs Sridhar and Bauld are getting there, for their young age. We’ve been here before with the beatification of wholly undeserving rock stars. Bowie was a deeply cynical man, happy to play with the darkest of ideas in pursuit of his art. I don’t entirely blame him for that but he was no hero and certainly no model for the rest of us. Playing above with Nazi imagery is, you might say, just a bit of fun or even irony … Continue reading Not Cynical? What, like this?

STV’s Jenness Mitchell might want to use a different photo for this kind of story unless it really does reflect the mood at STV when they got their hands on this big number headline. This is classic tabloid statistics where if the number isn’t big enough to impress readers you just add up over a longer period until you get what you want. As for context that might help the reader understand what is happening in the world they live in, there’s none. Here’s some: The death rate, over the last 7 days is far lower in Scotland than in … Continue reading but the rate is now lower than it was at Christmas?

According to a report by BBC Teeside: Dr Paul Williams, former Labour MP for Stockton South, which said: “Some local patients have turned down an offer this weekend of getting a Covid vaccine when they found out it was the Pfizer one. ‘I’ll wait for the English one’.” Dr Williams was a GP and continued to see patients while he was an MP. After being voted out in 2019 he has worked at North Tees Hospital. The BBC has now offered this evidence that the American multinational Pfizer‘s vaccine developed in Germany by two Turkish-Germans and manufactured in Belgium, is more … Continue reading Covid-19: Teeside Patients ‘want to wait for less-effective English vaccine’

As patients were recently transferred over the border into a Dumfries hospital due to resilience issues in NHS England, the First Minister did not comment, though the PM had tried to pretend there were would be some issues of resilience in NHS Scotland back in March. Today we hear from the BBC in England: The number of hours ambulances spent waiting to offload patients in parts of England is “off the scale”, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine says. Data leaked to BBC News shows ambulance waiting times at hospitals in the South East rose by 36% in December compared … Continue reading Sturgeon to make no comment on issues with resilience of NHS England

Readers will remember the PM’s comments in March 2020: And of course, his comments yesterday on the US vaccine manufactured in the EU: He is not expected to comment on this story hidden away in the Independent yesterday: Coronavirus patients needing urgent medical treatment in northern England are being sent to Scotland as an increasing number of hospitals now face being overwhelmed. Patients in Cumbria who would normally be taken to the Cumberland Infirmary in Carlisle have instead been dispatched across the border to Dumfries, The Independent has learnt. The move came after the hospital triggered the highest Opel (operational pressures escalation level) alert, essentially an admission of … Continue reading Sturgeon to make no comment on ‘issues’ with England’s NHS

AMBULANCES were turned away by a major Scots hospital today amid rising Covid cases and injuries in the icy weather.  Several emergency calls were redirected from the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital as it struggled to cope with a sudden influx of patients this morning.  Were they redirected from the incident location or did they turn up at the QEUH A&E department to be ‘turned away?’ They have radios. Does anyone really think they turned up to be turned away? How many calls were redirected? Ten. What percentage of calls is that? Too small to report? What is the source of … Continue reading redirected to another hospital only two miles away in the same city?

According to the Herald: THE rollout of Covid vaccines to the over-80s could be stalled as thousands of GPs and primary care staff have yet to receive any inoculation. There are warnings that unvaccinated doctors do not feel safe to start bringing hundreds of elderly patients into GP practices from next week. The ‘warnings’ come from Andy Mcintosh who runs an online forum GP Survival Scotland. They are only a Facebook page with an empty ‘About us’ section and less than 4 000 followers who may be doctors across the UK. There are around than 60 000 GPs in the … Continue reading Do GPs do jags?

According to the Herald: BORIS Johnson launched a stinging attack on Nicola Sturgeon’s Government, saying if it was up to the SNP there would not have been a single Covid-19 vaccine in Scotland. The Prime Minister is believed to have told a private virtual meeting of the 1922 Tory backbench committee that the mass roll-out of the vaccine programme was a “UK effort “ and down to the strength of the Union. It is thought his criticism of the SNP is a reference to what might have happened if Scotland were independent. So by ‘UK effort‘, does he mean the … Continue reading Israel vaccinates 11 times as many as England despite no manufacturing capacity or advantages of ‘UK effort’

On BBC Reporting Scotland, a trade union leader is once more allowed to present his own narrow views as somehow representative of a profession he has not consulted and of other health professions who have not expressed any view at all. BBC regular Lewis Morrison, above, is always available to find fault with anything the Scottish Government does. The decision to delay the second dose to maximise the vaccination rate is supported by all leading professionals but a jumped-up shop steward is platformed, unchallenged, by BBC Scotland: Doctors raise concerns that delaying the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine could … Continue reading BBC Scotland shockingly Risk vaccine compliance and lives

Regular and friend of TuS, Bob Lamont, posted this and perceptively compared it to Nick Robinson’s editing out of Alex Salmond in 2014. The data is available from the ONS but largely ignored by BBC Scotland: The trend too is easily revealed thanks to the FT: Continue reading How BBC Scotland tries to hide the Scottish Government’s life-saving competence