Recent:

Tories be like:

ust over half of the British population took a third ‘synthetic’ COVID-19 dose, aka “booster”. Seems many people decided they had suffered enough and the available cure wasn’t perceived to be potent enough (better than placebo but not enough to curb COVID-19).

Had the government not rushed and instead properly developed something (it sent it to the private sector with patents on publicly-funded work), then tested it more thoroughly/properly, maybe confidence would be higher.

When vaccine giants (read: patent pools) came out to market they said their barely-tested (no real clinical trials in line with established protocols) products were like 90% effective… then 92%…. then 96%… etc. This smelled like baseless, crude marketing (cheating to quote higher figures than the competition’s), with no independent audit or reproducible tests. More than 1.5 years later we can all see they lied about efficacy, hence they’ve caused hesitancy. The problem is, they’ve lowered people’s confidence in vaccination and some became more cynical about other shots, too. Boys who cried “wolf”? Unintended consequences? We now see the monkeypox patent pool; it leapfrogged the normal procedures similarly, showing what a such race to the bottom (of QA) begets.

I’m pro vaccines and vaccinated. There’s nothing wrong with vaccines per se. Not testing them properly, or not learning from major blunders from the past, is what’s wrong. Even the original polio vaccine took about half a decade before large-scale rollouts. We should not tolerate abandonment of quality control, which is another form of public safety. We’re meant to also be guarded from corporate greed; the government needs to properly assess the quality and safety of such products. There should be no shortcuts in the supervision process. None. Don’t prioritise profits.

Critical thinkers and sceptics haven’t lost sight of the fact that British media now pushes for a new vaccine. Yeah, because the first one was so successful that this summer was the worst so far.

Even judging by August, which wasn’t as bad as prior summer months

2022 (latest information to date, UK-wide)

(Date, number of COVID-19 hospital admissions)
25-08-2022 721
24-08-2022 713
23-08-2022 781
22-08-2022 739
21-08-2022 667
20-08-2022 640
19-08-2022 728
18-08-2022 770
17-08-2022 866
16-08-2022 909
15-08-2022 972
14-08-2022 838
13-08-2022 840
12-08-2022 867
11-08-2022 1,011
10-08-2022 1,122
09-08-2022 1,088
08-08-2022 1,081
07-08-2022 985
06-08-2022 850
05-08-2022 1,031
04-08-2022 1,130
03-08-2022 1,189
02-08-2022 1,206
01-08-2022 1,263

2020 (no lockdowns, just masks and some distance; gyms and pubs open)

(Date, number of COVID-19 hospital admissions)
24-08-2020 91
23-08-2020 74
22-08-2020 73
21-08-2020 109
20-08-2020 98
19-08-2020 113
18-08-2020 128
17-08-2020 95
16-08-2020 80
15-08-2020 99
14-08-2020 100
13-08-2020 129
12-08-2020 101
11-08-2020 114
10-08-2020 86
09-08-2020 106
08-08-2020 140
07-08-2020 117
06-08-2020 100
05-08-2020 138
04-08-2020 125
03-08-2020 110
02-08-2020 93
01-08-2020 128

Source: coronavirus.data.gov.uk

Update just published in the site this week:

Updates will move to Thursdays from 1 September 2022

From 1 September 2022, the COVID-19 Dashboard will move to reporting on Thursdays instead of Wednesdays. The last Wednesday update of the Dashboard was therefore on 31 August 2022. Updates will be published every Thursday at 4pm commencing on 8 September 2022.

Daily data up to the most recent available will continue to be added in each weekly update.

This will align the COVID-19 dashboard reporting with NHS England reporting of hospital statistics and with reporting on cases and deaths in Wales.

For more information, read the NHS England release.

For long-term preservation purposes, a screenshot:

The graphs in the “dashboard” compare week to week (rolling/sliding) rather than equivalent times of the year across years. That’s misleading and the media likes to do the same.