Well now, would you look at that? A massive, 4-YEAR-LONG study of NEARLY 30 MILLION people in France found that individuals who received a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine had a 74% LOWER risk of death from severe COVID-19 compared to unvaccinated individuals and ZERO increased risk of all-cause mortality.

Discworld QOTD, from Hogfather

True story. My wife's colleague lost her job due to AI. She was really crap at the job, no ability and no desire to learn how to do it, and tried to make up for that by using online AI chatbots, which were worse than her. The company had to let her go. People are losing their jobs due to AI

Incredible how free speech seems to have become analogous with some groups opinion of what is correct imposed on everyone else. About as far from free as possible.

I mean yeah it’s an authoritarian takeover but can we take some comfort in the fact that the people doing it are INSANELY stupid?

I think the Government should adopt a single new years resolution: ban all use of focus groups and opinion polls by policymakers. Focus them only on what works, not what gets good feedback...

twitter keeps switching me to its "for you" algorithmic feed (I usually stick with "following" to constrain the insanity). It is an insanely biased feed full of absolute trash and propaganda elected, I assume, for anger-baiting and conformance to Musk views...

Happy Christmas, all. I wish my (temporarily unpaywalled) final thoughts on the English NHS in 2025 could have been more positive, but reality is what it is. www.healthpolicyinsight.com/cowpers-cut-...

Free speech news

"We need to be able to make every effort to get the principals on the record and on camera." Bizarre. If you offer officials the chance to speak on camera and they decline, it isn't your job to hold a critical story until they change their minds. The right of reply is not a right to delay.

We don't need conspiracy theories about Putin having kompromat on Trump to explain his attitude on Ukraine. He instinctively agrees with Putin that strong countries should be able to take what they want from their weaker neighbours.

Collider bias: the gift that keeps giving.

Poor reporting by the FT here, the K2-18b results have been pretty robustly debunked www.ft.com/content/0695...

New editorial with John Carlisle: Detecting inconsistencies and fraud in research data: Time for authors to share the data underlying their summary statistics as a matter of course tl;dr Let's stop doing party tricks journals.lww.com/anesthesia-a... Final draft: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Whatever the merits of the current doctor strikes in England, the BMA campaign is having a dangerous side-effect that will do the NHS great harm...

When I was a medical student 45 years ago, I clerked in a 13 year old girl with deep jaundice and an abdominal mass. She was Hepatitis B positive. That had led to a primary liver tumour. In a 13-year-old. She was dead within the month. Avoidable with vaccination.

We don't have good enough data to fix NHS waiting lists: www.hsj.co.uk/technology-a...

This is very good analysis: giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

The only reasonable response the BBC should make to the Trump lawsuit is: "see you in court".

Sarah Pochin MP is wrong. Christmas is not being ‘cancelled’ in the UK

The Guardian is as much the house journal of the Nimbys as the Telegraph

The four blocked pictures were a random naked female Roman statue; One of Cranach's Adam and Eve paintings; Artemisia Gentileschi's Susanna and the Elders; and Ary Scheffer's painting of the Dante scene with Francesca de Rimini...

This entire weekend

So much for that

He may not be the worst president ever but he is without question the worst person to ever serve as president.

Too much NHS strategy: www.hsj.co.uk/daily-insigh...

Posted this at the start of the year. Sad to say it's aged liked the finest of wines.

This, from an excellent piece by @philipstephens.bsky.social on the end of US global power. philipstephens.substack.com/p/making-sen...

To be fair it’s going to be very funny when these clowns invent AGI and the super intelligent machine tells everyone to get offline, avoid processed food, stroll in the woods, seek community, eschew racism, pay high marginal rates of tax and ignore the ravings of deranged billionaires.

Lady in pink who speaks English as her third language Says the statement from Reform UK's Nigel Farage criticising English as a second language for school children is "bang out of order" "Because you don't need English as your first language to communicate" #BBCQT

Now they said no and he doesn't or can't stop federal funding, it's clear it's an empty threat from a diminished old man. See folks, it’s simply not that hard to tell this guy to pound sand. cc: university presidents.

Great take. We looked at the data a few weeks ago and concluded that other than starting early, this year's dynamics are comparable to previous bad seasons. Our scenario models suggest a peak in infections (not hospitalisations which lag 1/2 weeks) in early/mid December. zenodo.org/records/1770...

The NHS has some persistent zombie ideas about what "capacity" means. Those bad ideas are huge barriers preventing effective improvement: www.linkedin.com/pulse/nhs-do...

Big new blogpost! My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more. --> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful. www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...

Lads, lads, sans serif fonts are woke now!

I found this today (from Peter Kellner/YouGov) which answers part of your query.

For something officially regarded as completely unacceptable, corridor care in A&E is disturbingly common: emj.bmj.com/content/earl... Important new study out today.

Needless to say, the teacher was not banned *because* they told a Muslim child that Britain is a Christian country🙄 I mean that was *one* of the things he said And he was banned *after* several incidences So technically the headline is true, but that’s not the actual story! 🧵 1/12

Boris Johnson narrowly avoided deportation by renouncing his US citizenship in 2017, then

I think the challenge is that the NHS interprets productivity as doing more with the same (or less) resources. Which is really a good measure of busyness rather than productivity

It also matters for how we think about productivity. The NHS is rightly focused on delivering hospital activity more productively, but it should also ensure that the right activity is being delivered for patients to complete their pathways, rather than simply more activity. 11/11

Plex Submits $35 Bid For Warner Bros.

“I’d have no problem releasing the video” “I didn’t say that, you said that. Fake news.” 5 days apart 😬 (From @therecount.com )

Some people have made the analogy between the 1938 Munich accords and Trump's apparent attitude to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. There are similarities but also a huge difference...

The gargantuan red flag about the new US National Security strategy is that Russia welcomed it warmly. Surely some people in Washington noticed? Alternative hypothesis: they did, but didn't care.

The sheer laziness is one of the things that bothers me most about the style of column writing Phillips embodies. If I make a small mistake in a post I spend all day wanting to crawl into hole but these guys will just happily write any bollocks without any research at all.

My free advice to this couple? Instead of paying £47k a year in school fees and scraping by, stick 15k a year in each kid's bank account so that they each have around £100k at age 18 to spend on a house, business or uni. You then have £17k/year leftover to spend on luxuries. Better life all round

Bottlenecks in NHS processes determine the overall capacity of those processes. Investing in more capacity elsewhere does not improve the overall capacity and is a huge waste of money and effort: www.hsj.co.uk/daily-insigh...