Spat between Chief Minister and Dr Glover

[Gladys]

29 minutes ago, Uhtred said:

HE is based in the Cabinet Office, the epicentre of Quayle’s operation; she’s not at arms length in Manx Care. That’s significant. She was also demonstrating far too much unwavering adherence to the party line in the press briefings, over the top deference to Quayle (in particular) and Ashford, and fulsomely embraced herself the Quayle intolerance and discourteous dismissal of challenging media questions. She’s operating as part of the machine, not as an independent, medically qualified voice. I consider her approach and pronouncements are best treated with circumspection.

Indeed, but I think in her PAC evidence she did allude to not being 100% in support of some measures.  I can't remember which, however.  She also said something along the lines that the role of CMO was not in her remit.  Do we have a CMO? 

Is it possible that she has been expected to fulfill functions beyond those of DofPH? 

Edit to add: Dr Rosalind Ransom was CMD but I can find nothing about her after March/ April last year.  There is someone else occupying the role on the Manx Care board. 

Edited May 2, 2021 by Gladys

[747-400]

12 minutes ago, Gladys said:

Indeed, but I think in her PAC evidence she did allude to not being 100% in support of some measures.  I can't remember which, however.  She also said something along the lines that the role of CMO was not in her remit.  Do we have a CMO? 

Is it possible that she has been expected to fulfill functions beyond those of DofPH? 

I felt she did try distancing herself from some measures by clarifying she had provided expert input, but decisions ultimately need to take into account other factors.

There was a question regarding Liverpool turnaround times and the CMO having said in early January that 5-7 days was unacceptable. Dr Ewart answered saying that as far as she knows the CMO has no qualifications in public health (or words to that effect).

Edited May 2, 2021 by 747-400

[Happier diner]

On 5/1/2021 at 12:39 PM, Roger Mexico said:

I hate to break this to you, but testing laboratories can do more than one test - they don't build a new lab for each purpose.  So the people doing the sequencing in New Zealand will be doing other forms of genetic testing for the rest of their time, just as Taxa Genomics would have done sequencing for IOMG fitted around their usual work of checking the genetic defects of dogs and so on.

As it happens they do still have a trickle of work to do, because even without community outbreaks there are still people arriving in New Zealand who are then testing positive on arrival or during managed isolation, here's three announced on Thursday.  They sequence all of these cases so that when the virus does inevitably leak out into the community, as it has on several occasions, they can find the source quickly and then work out what happened and change procedures appropriately.   Lessons are indeed learned, rather than it merely being pronounced that they have.

My Bush weed point was not literal and yes your point is fair. However this thread us about whether genomics or lack of it has been significant in the war with the virus. Seems that government will demonstrate that is has not.

Admittedly that is probably more by luck than good judgement. Performance to date wrt to lockdowns, illnesses and deaths have been pretty much wholley dependant upon other factors. NZs low death rate is because they have been locked down for over a year. IOM and UK did this too late.

Unrelated but UK now has the better outlook due to its closeness now to herd immunity. New Zealand is a sitting duck and stuck until it gets its vaccination performance sorted. The UK has done this with the loss of 128,000 souls and a knackered economy. Which is best, well it depends if you are, or family of one of the 128,000

[Gladys]

56 minutes ago, 747-400 said:

I felt she did try distancing herself from some measures by clarifying she had provided expert input, but decisions ultimately need to take into account other factors.

There was a question regarding Liverpool turnaround times and the CMO having said in early January that 5-7 days was unacceptable. Dr Ewart answered saying that as far as she knows the CMO has no qualifications in public health (or words to that effect).

Who was the CMO at that time?

[TheTeapot]

12 minutes ago, Happier diner said:

 

Unrelated but UK now has the better outlook due to its closeness now to herd immunity. 

Here's a nice twitter thread about that very subject

https://twitter.com/JamesWard73/status/1388523792234950656?s=19

[code99]

2 hours ago, Uhtred said:

HE is based in the Cabinet Office, the epicentre of Quayle’s operation; she’s not at arms length in Manx Care. That’s significant. She was also demonstrating far too much unwavering adherence to the party line in the press briefings, over the top deference to Quayle (in particular) and Ashford, and fulsomely embraced herself the Quayle intolerance and discourteous dismissal of challenging media questions. She’s operating as part of the machine, not as an independent, medically qualified voice. I consider her approach and pronouncements are best treated with circumspection.

I agree. She is behaving like a politcal advisor because she is primarily a political appointee. She has assumed a role of a cheerleader for the IOMG in order to make HQ and DA look good throughout this crisis.

What is unclear to me is how much independent expert scientific advice she actually provides government with, or whether she simply parrots information that she obtains from the UK. If she is not an independent scientific advisor, is the government receiving expert advice from anyone else? That I would really like to know.

[Andy Onchan]

From yesterday's DT:

 

Quote

“I have to cancel our chat, I’m on an urgent call with India,” Prof Sharon Peacock writes in a last-minute email. With the pandemic bringing the subcontinent to its knees, Peacock and her team of genomic sequencing experts at the Covid-19 Genomics UK Consortium, known as Cog-UK, are offering technical expertise to their Indian counterparts on virus surveillance.

Monitoring the virus as it mutates by sequencing its genome is something Peacock and her team have, over the past year, become global experts on.

In March 2020 as the pandemic struck, Peacock, a Cambridge expert on sequencing pathogens and director at Public Health England, immediately realised the UK would need to create a country-wide sequencing network to monitor the virus variants. She had a chat with Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government’s chief scientific adviser, made a few phone calls, got 20 people into a room and together they wrote a blueprint for what is now Cog-UK.

“When I was calling people up, my question to them was: ‘I think we need to stand up a sequencing network in the UK. Does that sound right to you and would you support it?’,” she recalls.

“What surprised me wasn’t the enthusiasm among the scientists, but how quickly we did it. We went from 20 people in a room on March 20, to a fully funded consortium on April 1 and that wasn’t easy. We set up the ethical framework, the governance structures, the management structures and working groups, the infrastructure, all from scratch.”

Four days later an application landed on Sir Patrick’s desk. “He was a supporter from the very outset and that relationship with Patrick was very important,” she says.

What Peacock and her colleagues did was to bring the entire genomic sequencing expertise of the country under one umbrella. She says they effectively “hoovered up” all the capability, asking every scientist or researcher, mostly at universities, who had a sequencing machine and knew how to run it, to stop their research and help out by being part of Cog-UK.

 

Luckily, everyone wanted to pitch in. Many of the scientists involved in setting up Cog-UK were well-versed in sequencing pathogens and had even been out to west Africa during the Ebola outbreak.

“It was quite high-risk,” Peacock says. “Because what Cog-UK was doing had never been done before.”

The Wellcome Sanger Institute, a genomics and genetics research giant, which contributed £5.5m to fund Cog-UK, was also involved, in addition to the four public health agencies. Together with the Government’s £14.5m grant from its Covid Fighting Fund, the organisation had raised the £20m it needed.

The result of this remarkable endeavour is today’s little-known network of gene sequencing labs across the country, into which more than 100 hospitals and testing centres feed samples for genetic analysis.

It’s a challenging logistical operation, something like running a supermarket, Peacock explains.

“We have couriers who know where to take the samples. It’s not random, but very orchestrated as to which sequencing lab a sample from a particular hospital will flow into. They have to be transported at a set temperature, they arrive en masse and the positives have to be picked out.”

So far, Cog-UK has sequenced the genomes of more than 452,045 Covid pathogens and, of all the Covid genomes sequenced in the world, half have been done by Cog-UK. The UK punches well above its weight here. All that data is published into a database and monitored and analysed.

“Sequencing has become an essential part of managing the pandemic, it’s not optional,” says Peacock.

Understanding viral mutations is crucial for public health authorities, governments and vaccine developers, and key to staying ahead of the curve and stopping the spread. But it’s only recently that other countries have cottoned on to this, says Jason Betley, science director at genome sequencing company Illumina. Not knowing how a virus is mutating is like flying blind, he says.

“The reason the B117 Kent variant became important was because it grew from nothing to dominating the whole of the UK in a matter of weeks, and that tells you there is something special about it and as a country you might want to change the way you are approaching this problem,” Betley says.

Around 70pc of the Covid genomes sequenced in the world have been done using Illumina technology. The US-based company, which has a major R&D lab in Cambridge, inherited its next-generation sequencing tech after acquiring Cambridge spin-out Solexa in 2007. Genomic sequencing was born in the UK, Betley points out.

Illumina started working with Peacock during the MRSA outbreak 10 years ago, tracking the spread of the pathogen and looking at the mutations. Sanger also happens to be one of Illumina’s most important customers and, when the institute first started sequencing the Covid virus a year ago, there was a great deal of collaboration. Illumina designed a faster way of sequencing the pathogen at Sanger’s request – in just four days.

The company then decided to make its own Covid sequencing product that it could commercialise for other customers. It put a big team on that project in April, and in early June it won regulatory approval, a three-month process that would normally take three years. “Because we threw everything, including the kitchen sink at it, and all our best people working seven days a week, we did it,” Betley says.

Illumina, and its British rival Oxford Nanopore, might have expected to be fielding phone calls from health authorities all over the world desperate to get their hands on the technology. Not so. In fact, Illumina’s chief medical officer, Dr Phil Febbo, spent the following summer knocking on doors in the US trying to get organisations interested in genomic surveillance “When we launched it in the summer people didn’t necessarily anticipate the importance of sequencing the entire base of the viral genome, all they were interested in was PCR testing.

“It was only when we started to identify these variants of concern that others realised they had to be sequencing or they would have no idea what was under their noses.”

Now, he says, it is Illumina’s door that is getting the knocks. And the test it developed last spring is now in the hands of dozens of organisations. Manufacturing has stepped up enormously to meet demand.

Over the past year Illumina’s share price has risen by 68pc. Oxford Nanopore’s fortunes have also been transformed by the pandemic. It plans to float in London in what many expect will be one of the largest of the year and could value the company at £7bn.

“The field is booming with a lot of inward investment into start-up sequencing companies. The potential for the technology to transform drugs research and diagnostics is only just starting to be realised,” Betley says. “It has been an interesting ride and we are on a wild phase of it now.”

That last paragraph shows what an absolute balls up IOMG has made by not embracing this technology when they had the chance.

[Happier diner]

18 minutes ago, Andy Onchan said:

From yesterday's DT:

 

 Peacock and her team of genomic sequencing experts at the Covid-19 Genomics UK Consortium, known as Cog-UK, are offering technical expertise to their Indian counterparts on virus surveillance.
 

That last paragraph shows what an absolute balls up IOMG has made by not embracing this technology when they had the chance.

Are we not part of this consortium?

[Happier diner]

On 5/2/2021 at 11:28 AM, Uhtred said:

HE is based in the Cabinet Office, the epicentre of Quayle’s operation; she’s not at arms length in Manx Care. That’s significant. She was also demonstrating far too much unwavering adherence to the party line in the press briefings, over the top deference to Quayle (in particular) and Ashford, and fulsomely embraced herself the Quayle intolerance and discourteous dismissal of challenging media questions. She’s operating as part of the machine, not as an independent, medically qualified voice. I consider her approach and pronouncements are best treated with circumspection.

To be fair you don't know this. It would not be right for her to argue with HQ and DA in the public domain as this would be unprofessional and undermine (even further) public confidence. But you do not know if she argues with them, or not, behind the scenes. I suspect she does. She seems a very determined lady to me

You might be right of course....but I doubt that you are

[Gladys]

29 minutes ago, Happier diner said:

Are we not part of this consortium?

We feed into it I suppose.  But I think Andy's point Is more to make the IOM a good place to set up biotech, specifically genome sequencing, as another business stream, apart from finance, gaming etc.  

The message sent out with the RG debacle is likely to have been very damaging to such businesses who may have been thinking about setting up here. 

If IOMG treats one of their own like that, what would they do to an outsider? 

[Roger Mexico]

33 minutes ago, Happier diner said:

To be fair you don't know this. It would not be right for her to argue with HQ and DA in the public domain as this would be unprofessional and undermine (even further) public confidence. But you do not know if she argues with them, or not, behind the scenes. I suspect she does. She seems a very determined lady to me

You might be right of course....but I doubt that you are

Actually you're both right.  The point is that Public Health jobs like this are a bargain.  Medical professionals have input into the decision-making process at a high level, but in turn they have to agree with whatever that process eventually comes up with.  The only way you can disagree is to make faces at media briefings.

[Apple]

5 minutes ago, Roger Mexico said:

The only way you can disagree is to make faces at media briefings.

...or use the Tynwald committees or the public best interest disclosure argument. 

[Andy Onchan]

1 hour ago, Happier diner said:

Are we not part of this consortium?

Not according to the map that accompanied the article. (I did try to convert the article to an image so that you could see all the graphics but couldn't get it below the 1.95MB limit).   

[Happier diner]

7 minutes ago, Andy Onchan said:

Not according to the map that accompanied the article. (I did try to convert the article to an image so that you could see all the graphics but couldn't get it below the 1.95MB limit).   

I know we don't pay anything so I assumed we were

[Andy Onchan]

24 minutes ago, Happier diner said:

I know we don't pay anything so I assumed we were

If we are then it will be via LPL, I guess.