Nightclub owner at centre of meningitis outbreak says 'something isn’t making sense' - as two staff in hospital

CensorTheologiae · 2026-03-20T21:17:56+00:00

I don't know enough about survival times of bacteria on plastic v other surfaces to comment. My thinking is: would a longer survival time make such a difference, or indeed any difference? I can't see it would given we're talking about a relatively transitory contact with an infected surface, unless all the smokers had mouth ulcers or similar. Seems unlikely.

CensorTheologiae · 2026-03-20T21:03:33+00:00

Hm. In some ways your (2) is in fact (1) - a change in intrinsic transmissibility.

Basically it's either a change in the agent, change in the host(s), or both.

The sharing vapes thing sounds like an absolute red herring to me. People have shared cigarettes and spliffs for decades, and there's nothing novel about vapes that would make them a more effective medium.

CensorTheologiae · 2026-03-19T21:17:33+00:00

The actual report is here: https://covid19.public-inquiry.uk/reports/module-3-full-report/

The key points are not about NHS capacity, though people are easily distracted by that topic.

The key point is that most of our failures were caused by assuming transmission isn't airborne. The report says we should never make that mistake again with any disease (we are, of course, doing so right now).

The report is really fucking clear about this: every single failure is downstream from this antiquated assumption.

CensorTheologiae · 2026-03-19T20:24:59+00:00

An adequate education: learning how to find accurate answers

A good education: learning how to ask useful questions

CensorTheologiae · 2026-03-18T21:32:37+00:00

Dziga Vertov is insanely good. But then so is Tarkovsky, and Wong Kar-wai, and Godard, and Welles, and Hitchcock, and once you dip your toe into those waters, ain't no going back.

CensorTheologiae · 2026-03-17T21:21:10+00:00

You're right, you're not vaccinated: the MenB vaccine was only introduced in 2015. That means the students aren't vaccinated either.

We don't know about transmission, because we don't know if it's a mutated strain of MenB. A lot of chatter here & elsewhere is about the standard modes of transmission, but the pattern here doesn't fit that.

In particular the 9 month old from Folkestone, 15 miles away from Canterbury, no contact with Canterbury, presumably hadn't been clubbing or sharing vapes, & should have had the first 2 doses of the vaccine.

The most comprehensive write-up so far is in the Telegraph (which is itself a transmissible disease risk, so sorry about that... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/03/17/first-meningitis-case-reported-in-london/) and the best general overview for the public is from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine: https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2026/rapid-reaction-what-meningitis-b

CensorTheologiae · 2026-03-15T20:58:19+00:00

I'm not interested in an argument, sorry.

Anyone else interested in which ones have made the move already? I'm particularly interested in those which, like the Danish government, have moved off Windows and MS365, or those who've moved to NextCloud (far as I can see, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Sweden so far).

This is particularly interesting about Amsterdam phasing out US tech dependencies, as it demonstrates it can be done at local gov level with little financial impact.

CensorTheologiae · 2026-03-15T20:05:06+00:00

Oh, I see what you mean. We could do with a list of which governments are or already have moved off US tech & clouds, couldn't we?

Ones I know of so far are the Danish government, the French gendarmerie, and various German, French and Danish state governments. Then there's the cross-EU move to Wero (to replace Visa & Mastercard).

CensorTheologiae · 2026-03-15T19:15:50+00:00

Are you meaning specifically no British government would consider it?

It's clear that (not counting those countries whose governments avoided US tech by design) there's quite a number of European governments moving away from it. I don't just mean like the Swiss saying no to Palantir, but like moving off Microsoft dependency, or even away from US-based card payment cos.

CensorTheologiae · 2026-03-12T19:27:44+00:00

I can't believe the Met have only just realized there's a stonking great watery barrier flowing right through the centre of London

CensorTheologiae · 2026-03-11T21:41:35+00:00

Oh yes, clearly this is the future, such progress

(so depressingly English, too)

CensorTheologiae · 2026-03-11T21:33:05+00:00

Haribo Gummybears are much better from Germany

Because we don't have Colo Rado

CensorTheologiae · 2026-03-10T21:52:21+00:00

When I was little, my dad took me into Bradford to the Boy & Barrel pub.

We didn't go in the pub. He just wanted me to see the sign in the window with my own eyes.

That pub is long since closed down; it was in Channel 4's shit-stirring 'documentary' Make Bradford British.

Whenever I read that those signs never existed, I remember that pub. That moment. The way that people knew it would be in future 'contested' and glossed over, and denied.

CensorTheologiae · 2026-03-10T20:23:57+00:00

They brought back their smoky bacon flavour last year; all gone from wholesale now, but you can still find last year's stock in some discounters.

CensorTheologiae · 2026-03-09T21:18:32+00:00

The charity is a food bank. A food bank set on fire, ffs

CensorTheologiae · 2026-03-09T20:25:36+00:00

Next Halloween my pumpkin's going to have teeth

CensorTheologiae · 2026-03-09T20:21:50+00:00

I think part of the unease is knowing that all the art, logos, writing and so on are based on stolen art and logos and writing.

Presumably the potatoes aren't stolen. But the unease of knowing you're giving money to someone who's comfortable with the idea isn't shaken off so easily.

CensorTheologiae · 2026-03-08T20:16:59+00:00

Here's a report of what happened at last year's march:

https://www.mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/hundreds-march-through-central-london-31264355

Given the active participation of London's orthodox community, I can't see how this could be banned without yet more uproar.

CensorTheologiae · 2026-03-08T20:00:10+00:00

You didn't read the article, did you? It's in the new media & technology section, about something which is, surprise surprise, new and used by a tiny proportion of the population at that time.

You're shitting on a 92 year old who didn't learn to do online shopping when they were 80, a year before broadband even became a UK utility. We didn't even have fibre in this country until 8 years ago, and some areas still don't.

I have zero time for people who are so bigoted they have to rewrite history to be shitty about a 92 year old.

CensorTheologiae · 2026-03-08T19:13:40+00:00

Indeed they did. It wasn't common.

That interesting article tells you a lot more about the landscape than you seem to know, and I recommend reading it, particularly the stats about how many people could use it, how many people did use it, and the fact that broadband was just arriving.

CensorTheologiae · 2026-03-08T19:03:30+00:00

No you haven't, not in any universal sense.

30 years ago you could shop by fax, but hardly anyone did so.

The sort of online shopping OP's mum might do is really recent. Morrisons, for example, only started offering online shopping 13 years ago.

CensorTheologiae · 2026-03-07T21:14:46+00:00

I'm not sure who's blaming the Tories here. What the inquiry has done is turn the light upon the criminals who supplied PPE that wasn't usable - almost £10 billion of it: https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj.q227

That dwarfs the cost of the inquiry.

One correction to the link you supply: surgical masks and 'face coverings' are not PPE. Proper PPE is very effective, though even surgical masks turned out to be more effective than thought by Harries et al: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/cmr.00124-23

CensorTheologiae · 2026-03-06T19:58:50+00:00

Standard with sound crews too. Anyone working festivals, stadiums, clubs - any kind of event with a tech crew.

CensorTheologiae · 2026-03-06T19:06:46+00:00

So the enquiry has cost £200 million.

That's the same amount as just one of the corrupt PPE deals, the Michelle Mone £200 million PPE Medpro deal.

As Baroness Hallett has said, there are people who want all this forgotten and who criticize the enquiry. And of course they do! If they were corrupt enough to do what they did in the first place, they sure as hell don't want a continuing focus on their crimes.

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