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Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

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Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#121
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed; the reason people exonerate it is that the Tories have been threatening the population with a dismantling and privatisation of the NHS for over a decade now, and that's not what anyone wants. People want the NHS to work, to be funded and managed appropriately. A primary reason it doesn't is the Tories crippling it.

What makes you so sure government bureaucracy is even capable of doing this? It never had a great track record to begin with.

They have actively worked at crippling it. Now that it’s crippled they tell you.. oh but surely the government can’t fix it, we need private enterprises to fix it!

You walked right into it.

What makes you think private business are capable of delivering something cheaper than what the government can do? The most expensive health care in the world is private.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#122
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed; the reason people exonerate it is that the Tories have been threatening the population with a dismantling and privatisation of the NHS for over a decade now, and that's not what anyone wants. People want the NHS to work, to be funded and managed appropriately. A primary reason it doesn't is the Tories crippling it.

What makes you so sure government bureaucracy is even capable of doing this? It never had a great track record to begin with.

I don't wish to be snarky, but you are aware that the NHS as an institution has existed since the late 1940's and has been working reasonably well for a long time? An institution does not become beloved by the public for failing to provide a good standard of care for a long enough time that people become used to it doing so.

So when you say:

> It never had a great track record to begin with.

Are you talking about government institutions in general or the NHS? I maybe wrong, but I suspect you're speaking of US institutions which are an entirely different dynamic to UK and European ones.

If you are speaking of the NHS, then please outline how it doesn't have a great track record commensurate with its lifespan.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#123

[flagged]

The vast majority of myocarditis symptoms in young men resolve in 14 days. There are always other mRNA vaccines too.

Yes that does indeed.

However myocarditis often indicates heart damage. Which is often long lasting, also the CDC just removed the claims the vaccine only lasts a few days. We don’t know how long that spike protein lasts.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mass inoculation with a new type of vaccine that behaved very differently than the science hypothesized is also a very simple explanation. I don't really think anyone here has the ability or expertise to judge which is more fitting. For what it's worth, the fact circulatory issues is mentioned in the article should ring alarm bells for COVID vaccines being a potential cause. We just found out recently the prevalence…

It’s not a “simple” explanation if you take some time to understand how vaccine works. Just because there’s a side effect form vaccine doesn’t mean that the vaccine isn’t the best option. Your thought process is classic example of zero risk bias.

If it's not a simple explanation why did vaccine companies need absolving of any liability by govts?

So safe they need to avoid liability? So safe many of the vaccines had complication rates far higher than any flu vaccine in history?

Look I'm glad we had the vaccines so quickly. Trump pushing them through regulation was extremely good for man kind and we have all benefited.

But stop acting like there is no risk.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's my thoughts as someone who's trying to get a paper published that shows that _potentially_ the vaccine is implicated in injuries and we'd like to do more research. We can't say that! It's getting thrown back at us. We're not saying that it's causal, we're not even trying to propose mechanisms. All we're saying is that using government reported data, we see a signal that suggests that certain adverse events are…

I understand your issue but to say your research saves lives is an overstatement. Your implying that the lack of vaccination will save more lives than Covid infection. The fact that you aren’t trying to propose mechanisms is exactly the issue. You’re stoking more public fear by your “simple observation”. So either provide an alternative, or your potential implication is not important enough to merit a publication at…

On our first draft, we tried to tease out some of your concerns about relative risk of the vaccine to covid itself, and even had some _potential_ mechanisms to study. But peer review didn't like that. So we've been cutting and rearranging the paper and finally have a draft that looks like it will go through.

We're not trying to stoke fear, we're trying to see what's really happening.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#126
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who was embedded in the NHS for a number of years it has many problems, but counterintuitively one of them is actually a lack of paper pushers or at least low level admin and other auxiliary staff. Because governments have constantly demanded the NHS spend less money, but have also been under pressure to preserve numbers of "front line" staff you've ended up with serious shortages of low level admins, medi…

The shift in the western world into paper pushing in healthcare, education, construction, etc doesn't always come in the form of more bureaucrats. Sometimes it's teachers spending time with ever more frequent and granular grading and survey systems, and doctors filling forms for hours a day. It feels like the McKinsey-style design of large orgs has permeated the public sector just as much if not more than the private…

Yes the demand to have a documented policy, procedure and metrics for everything even if no one ever reads them, follows them or analyses them is insane. At the same time there's been this huge increase in the amount of useless correspondence and a cultural shift away from hiring people to help manage and filter this stuff so people can do actual work (aka old school secretaries and admin assistants). Harrumph

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#127
post #33

Covid is one aspect of this. Another is the massive. underfunding of the NHS over the last decade. This has become much more evident post-covid thanks to the backlogs. - Getting a GP to see you in person is now quite difficult (they want to do everything via phone). - Seeing your GP (depending on your area) can involve a 2-3 week wait and waiting in an hours long phone queue. - When you are referred to hospital for t…

We are never going to get a serious debate around reforming the NHS until people move on from only comparing the UK to the US. There are many other systems that work - people only need to look across to Europe.

In fact, I would argue that for all its possible faults (which all systems have) the fundamental problem with the NHS is not in how it is structured or in its processes.

Rather, it boils down to funding. Nothing else. Just that. The one feature that the NHS has proven time and time again is that it is one of the most cost-efficient healthcare systems in the World, and given that it is working suboptimally that is a clear sign that the NHS needs a significantly greater (and stable and dependable in the long-term) financial investment.

Once that is sorted, all other further changes and optimisations that may be needed can be worked on. But debating how the NHS needs to be reformed today is arguing on the helm of the Titanic on how to improve its unsinkability while it sails merrily towards an iceberg.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#128
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "underfunded" mean? The UK has a similar system to Canada. Costs are controlled by controlling the funding. You set a cap to what you'll spend and let the system figure out how best to allocate those funds. It's a big reason why the cost per capita for healthcare is quite low - you simply choose not to spend more. The demand for healthcare spending is almost infinite. You can set it up so everyone get an MR…

You can start by paying doctors/nurses a better wage for the shit they have to put up with for the last 2 years Our Ontario government capped nurse pay to 1% per year which is effectively a 8% paycut/year given the current inflation

As a start, that means that your costs have substantially increased to provide the same amount of healthcare as before. That makes the funding problem bigger. I'm not sure how it is in Canada, but the NHS in the UK employs about 1.4 million people - and a lot of the problems with it are actually problems with our social care system being broken and leaving it nowhere to discharge patients to, which accounts for another 1.6 million workers. The UK's population is about 70 million people in total, a reasonable proportion of which are either too young or retired. This is only going to get more daunting as the population ages here and in other western countries, and as new treatments are developed and healthcare expectations increase.

On top of that, the real economy's capacity to supply workers with stuff to buy with their income is in deep trouble worldwide right now and everyone is feeling it. That means real wage drops across the board and real damage to the ability to actually fund something like this.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#129

Covid is one aspect of this. Another is the massive. underfunding of the NHS over the last decade. This has become much more evident post-covid thanks to the backlogs. - Getting a GP to see you in person is now quite difficult (they want to do everything via phone). - Seeing your GP (depending on your area) can involve a 2-3 week wait and waiting in an hours long phone queue. - When you are referred to hospital for t…

There has been no drop in funding that might account for the recent "soaring excess deaths". Quite the opposite. https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/nhs-in-a-nutshell/nhs-...

You speak of massive underfunding, but NHS funding has increased in real terms almost every single year since the 1950s: https://fullfact.org/health/spending-english-nhs/

"At the moment, UK public health spending is the equivalent of about 7% of GDP, similar to what it was back in 2010 and higher than in previous years. Back in 1955, it was worth about 3% of GDP."

If the NHS quality of service is as poor as I hear, after decades of increases in funding, why on earth do I also hear it referred to as a "beloved public institution"? Is that just something people feel they are required to say?

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#130
post #107
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An aging obese population is the elephant in the room. This problem is not only happening in UK. About 15 years ago the NHS tried to add easy to read labeling to foods with a semaphore: red, yellow, green. And it was blocked during a Labour government with majority. Giving it more and more funds while not fixing the underlying problems is going to cause a massive budget crisis. We need to fix the causes not the sympt…

We need to fix the causes not the symptoms We need both. You don't fix a skull fracture by giving the patient a helmet.

Well you might give them a helmet to protect the injured area if serious, so bad example there I'd say.
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