IOM Covid removing restrictions

[code99]

22 minutes ago, Non-Believer said:

WTF sort of Govt do we have on this Island?

Incompetent, petty, vindictive, and based on Dr Glover's testimony, a danger to anybody who displeases them. They put on a façade of being kind, competent and generous, but underneath they are menacing. The experience of listening to Dr Glover's torment was just awful.

 

[Albert Tatlock]

8 minutes ago, Banker said:

Here’s the best bits from PAC meeting with Rachel very unhappy!!

https://gef.im/2021/04/01/dr-glover-i-thought-they-were-just-exploiting-me/?fbclid=IwAR00atLvUyKSEPcYuRsHvkYUer0U3EAyIaeAg9HbMfHeB5Yn00sYEntMu04

Needs to be a public enquiry...might be Robertshaw's parting shot at the incompetence.

[Gladys]

38 minutes ago, Non-Believer said:

"Threatened with negative press".

WTF sort of Govt do we have on this Island?

Arrogant, ignorant and duplicitous it would seem. 

[Roger Mexico]

1 hour ago, Apple said:

Did she say some samples had been discarded from the first lockdown ?

She'd mentioned about samples being destroyed before, in her blog.   This time she made it clear that they were from positive cases from last year's outbreak.   Samples which she has asked specifically to be retained - but which should have been in any case.   

You don't throw away samples from a current public health crisis - a major epidemic you are still in the middle of - because you may need to go back to them for further information.  There may even be legal implications.  It's the equivalent of shredding an important letter.  I remember being shocked by this when I first read it (to the extent of saying "What!!" out loud).  This is something that should be done by scientists.

[Gladys]

1 minute ago, Roger Mexico said:

She'd mentioned about samples being destroyed before, in her blog.   This time she made it clear that they were from positive cases from last year's outbreak.   Samples which she has asked specifically to be retained - but which should have been in any case.   

You don't throw away samples from a current public health crisis - a major epidemic you are still in the middle of - because you may need to go back to them for further information.  There may even be legal implications.  It's the equivalent of shredding an important letter.  I remember being shocked by this when I first read it (to the extent of saying "What!!" out loud).  This is something that should be done by scientists.

Didn't she refer to an issue of getting consent from people who had been tested for the use of their data for other purposes? 

[quilp]

39 minutes ago, Non-Believer said:

"Threatened with negative press".

WTF sort of Govt do we have on this Island?

This sort of government...

9 minutes ago, code99 said:

Incompetent, petty, vindictive, and based on Dr Glover's testimony, a danger to anybody who displeases them. They put on a façade of being kind, competent and generous, but underneath they are menacing. The experience of listening to Dr Glover's torment was just awful.

Having listened to the whole 3 hours, I was shocked but not surprised at the shenanigans. They have been thoroughly dishonest and threatening. A gang of smiling assassins with more faces than Big Ben. 

[finlo]

The usual shills are earily quiet!

[Gladys]

Just now, finlo said:

The usual shills are earily quiet!

Quite, probably all circling the wagons for a good robust and defamatory reply. 

[Roger Mexico]

1 hour ago, KERED said:

I think it might have been Ashie, who mentioned the professor, Glad. He sort of said that the Prof out-trumped a Doctor. (But it was evident that neither Ashie nor Howie could bring themselves to mention Dr Glover by name.)

Especially as it was clear from Rachel Glover's evidence that she has been talking to the Liverpool people for about a year anyway, and they had been enthusiastic backers of her setting up the testing and doing the genomics.  She knows them on first name terms and will in regular communication, as you would expect in a small specialised field.

But of course CoMin won't be getting the advice from the professor.  They'll be getting it after it's been filtered through layers of civil servants ending in Greenhow and carefully adjusted so that the priorities and prejudices of these intermediaries are the most important thing.

Manx government is so obsessed with hierarchies that the people at the top of it seem unaware that the people who actually do stuff are capable of talking to each other and working things out that way.  Or maybe they're terrified that if such a thing is allowed to happen, it might be realised that all these intermediate layers of management aren't just unnecessary, but actually make things worse.

Edited April 1, 2021 by Roger Mexico
Words ended up in wrong place.

[Roger Mexico]

14 minutes ago, Gladys said:

Didn't she refer to an issue of getting consent from people who had been tested for the use of their data for other purposes? 

That was a different problem and applied to all the samples being tested and indeed to a load of other things that had been done over the years.  It was also referred to on her blog:

On 19th June myself and Rizwan had a meeting with Al Darby and Kathryn Jackson from the genomics facility at Liverpool uni, who were carrying out the COVID19 sequencing for the COG-UK project on samples from PHE Manchester. I was pretty sure a bunch of the Isle of Man samples tested at PHE Manchester would have already been sequenced, and it turned out I was right. But this opened an ENORMOUS can of worms.

You see, the COG-UK project only had ethical approval to test and analyse samples from patients in the UK. They hadn’t realised that there could be samples already sequenced by them and in the public domain that were from other jurisidictions not covered by their ethical approval. Which meant that before we could access the publicly available (anonymised) COVID19 genomes from the Isle of Man patients we would need our own ethical approval from the IoM Cabinet Office / Public Health. Only then would I be able to start matching the genomes up to patients, their contact tracing data and subsequent antibody status (my master plan for the first genomic epidemiology paper to ever be produced by the Isle of Man).

That in itself seemed like a simple, if drawn out, process. Write the ethical R&D application where I promise to make sure that patient data is fully anonymised, stored securely and that no-one would be able to be identified from any published analysis etc. Get approval, start doing some science. Simple, right?

Not simple. The can of worms was opened further. No-one had ever considered the legality of samples being sent to UK reference laboratories before, even though the hospital had been doing it for decades. Apparently all Isle of Man samples sent to reference labs in the UK had been sent illegally (in theory) because the legislation did not exist to cover these scenarios. Then there was the matter of consent. Had patients consented to the virus sample they gave being tested further? At first it looked as though we would have to retroactively consent all ~300 patients to ask if it was OK for us to test the samples further. That would have been complicated given a number had sadly passed away from their infection. Thankfully saner heads prevailed and the expected push back from the Attorney General’s office was countered with prior examples. Isle of Man samples containing Salmonella spp. and Mycobacterium spp. had been whole genome sequenced for typing at reference laboratories in the UK on many previous occassions and it was argued that COVID19 was no different. Dr. Rebecca Rowley in IoM Public Health was an absolute star throughout this whole period (it took weeks) and arranged for the Caldicott Guardian to sign off the legal side of things so that I could finally submit the ethical approval application for consideration. Phew!

Cue a long wait while the ethics application was written, submitted, assessed, amended and finally approved in September 2020. In the mean time the microbiology lab chucked out a bunch of those precious positive samples that needed to be sequenced on-Island. I still don’t the how’s or why’s considering they had been fastidiously saving positive samples at my request for genomics since March. I’ll probably never know.

As with an awful lot else in her evidence you can't help noticing the involvement of the AG's Office making everything worse.

[Gladys]

1 minute ago, Roger Mexico said:

That was a different problem and applied to all the samples being tested and indeed to a load of other things that had been done over the years.  It was also referred to on her blog:

On 19th June myself and Rizwan had a meeting with Al Darby and Kathryn Jackson from the genomics facility at Liverpool uni, who were carrying out the COVID19 sequencing for the COG-UK project on samples from PHE Manchester. I was pretty sure a bunch of the Isle of Man samples tested at PHE Manchester would have already been sequenced, and it turned out I was right. But this opened an ENORMOUS can of worms.

You see, the COG-UK project only had ethical approval to test and analyse samples from patients in the UK. They hadn’t realised that there could be samples already sequenced by them and in the public domain that were from other jurisidictions not covered by their ethical approval. Which meant that before we could access the publicly available (anonymised) COVID19 genomes from the Isle of Man patients we would need our own ethical approval from the IoM Cabinet Office / Public Health. Only then would I be able to start matching the genomes up to patients, their contact tracing data and subsequent antibody status (my master plan for the first genomic epidemiology paper to ever be produced by the Isle of Man).

That in itself seemed like a simple, if drawn out, process. Write the ethical R&D application where I promise to make sure that patient data is fully anonymised, stored securely and that no-one would be able to be identified from any published analysis etc. Get approval, start doing some science. Simple, right?

Not simple. The can of worms was opened further. No-one had ever considered the legality of samples being sent to UK reference laboratories before, even though the hospital had been doing it for decades. Apparently all Isle of Man samples sent to reference labs in the UK had been sent illegally (in theory) because the legislation did not exist to cover these scenarios. Then there was the matter of consent. Had patients consented to the virus sample they gave being tested further? At first it looked as though we would have to retroactively consent all ~300 patients to ask if it was OK for us to test the samples further. That would have been complicated given a number had sadly passed away from their infection. Thankfully saner heads prevailed and the expected push back from the Attorney General’s office was countered with prior examples. Isle of Man samples containing Salmonella spp. and Mycobacterium spp. had been whole genome sequenced for typing at reference laboratories in the UK on many previous occassions and it was argued that COVID19 was no different. Dr. Rebecca Rowley in IoM Public Health was an absolute star throughout this whole period (it took weeks) and arranged for the Caldicott Guardian to sign off the legal side of things so that I could finally submit the ethical approval application for consideration. Phew!

Cue a long wait while the ethics application was written, submitted, assessed, amended and finally approved in September 2020. In the mean time the microbiology lab chucked out a bunch of those precious positive samples that needed to be sequenced on-Island. I still don’t the how’s or why’s considering they had been fastidiously saving positive samples at my request for genomics since March. I’ll probably never know.

As with an awful lot else in her evidence you can't help noticing the involvement of the AG's Office making everything worse.

Yes, that was it.  Practices within DHSC were not up to snuff.  Perhaps a light was being shone on matters that no one had even considered, far less that would, in the normal course of things, ever see the light of day. 

Imagine if you were a manager in that environment thinking "Jeez, I didn't even know that was something to think about, let alone consciously decide not to do it"?

[b4mbi]

1 hour ago, Sheldon said:

What boils my piss even more is when someone says "I'm on a mission". 

That mission, almost invariably, is some tedious and inane piece of pointlessness like getting Starburst to be called Opal Fruits again.

They changed the name of Opal Fruits? Utter Bastards. They better leave Marathons alone.

Edited April 1, 2021 by b4mbi

[slinkydevil]

1 hour ago, Banker said:

Here’s the best bits from PAC meeting with Rachel very unhappy!!

https://gef.im/2021/04/01/dr-glover-i-thought-they-were-just-exploiting-me/?fbclid=IwAR00atLvUyKSEPcYuRsHvkYUer0U3EAyIaeAg9HbMfHeB5Yn00sYEntMu04

Fucks sake the the Government have acted like the Mafia over this. It's really sad reading. 

[Gladys]

3 minutes ago, slinkydevil said:

Fucks sake the the Government have acted like the Mafia over this. It's really sad reading. 

Where does sadness fit in the five stages of grief in the loss of good governance? 

[Utah 01]

1 hour ago, Sheldon said:

"I'm on a mission". 

That mission is to go on journey using a gold-plated road-map along which lessons will be learned by the great Manx public going forward, pushing the envelope at all times and not forgetting to cross all the Ts while reaching out, but at the same time touching base wearing different hats, because we're all in this together hitting the ground running but not falling outside the box in spite of blue sky thinking.

There - now I bagsy Mr Toad's job!