Bank of England governor warns of ‘apocalyptic’ impact of global food prices
I think the man is spot-on. A very large number of Britons and others are soon going to find that they cannot always buy basics anymore. What are they going to do when their shopping money just will not stretch to cover basics? Will they have to live on noodles? Many Britons already live from payday to payday with nothing saved. It will be grim for them. I can foresee riots in response.
And there will of course be people similarly affected in the USA and Australia. Food shopping in those countries is normally a small part of total expenditure so not as many will be badly affected but some will
As far as I can see, it is time to ease up on Russian sanctions. Let Russian agricultural products flow freely Westward. The Ukrainians seem to be doing a pretty good job of defending themselves so sanctions are probably not needed now.
Britain faces the “major concern” of “apocalyptic” global food-price rises sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Bank of England’s governor has told MPs.
Andrew Bailey warned of a “very big income shock” to households, and admitted feeling “helpless” in the face of surging inflation.
His comments came as veteran Tory MP Michael Fabricant called on the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, to raise benefits in line with inflation, and as concerns were raised over plans by the energy regulator to revise the price cap on bills every three months instead of every six.
Mr Bailey defended the Bank’s monetary policy and said there could be a further rise in food costs if Ukraine, a major exporter of agricultural products, is unable to ship wheat and cooking oil from its warehouses because of a Russian blockade.
“Sorry for being apocalyptic for a moment, but that’s a major concern,” Mr Bailey said on Monday, noting that wheat prices alone had risen by just under 25 per cent in the past six weeks.
Britain is already in a “bad situation” with inflation, Mr Bailey said. The cost of living has been driven up by a host of global factors, which could not have been foreseen by rate setters at the bank, he insisted.
These include the war in Ukraine and the latest response by China’s government to a wave of Covid infections in the country, which has included stringent, economically damaging lockdowns. The result has been a sharp and sudden uptick in energy global prices, forcing up the cost of living in the UK.
“I do not feel at all happy about this; this is a bad situation to be in,” Mr Bailey said, noting that inflation is expected to top 10 per cent later this year.
He was responding to questions from Treasury select committee chair Mel Stride MP on whether he had been “asleep at the wheel” when it came to rising interest-rate pressures.
******************************************************
Pfizer’s COVID Vaccine Protection Against Omicron Fades After a Few Weeks: Study
The protection afforded against the Omicron coronavirus variant fades quickly after a second and third dose of Pfizer–BioNtech’s COVID-19 vaccine, according to a peer-reviewed study published in the JAMA Network.
A Danish study published in the JAMA Network on May 13 found that there was a rapid decline in Omicron-specific serum neutralizing antibodies only a few weeks after the administration of the second and third doses of the vaccine.
The study evaluated 128 adults who were vaccinated, and of that number, 73 people received two doses of the Pfizer vaccine, and 55 people received three doses between January 2021 and October 2021 or were previously infected before February 2021, and then vaccinated.
“Our study found a rapid decline in Omicron-specific serum neutralizing antibody titers only a few weeks after the second and third doses,” an abstract of the study reads. “The observed decrease in population neutralizing antibody titers corresponds to the decrease in vaccine efficacy against polymerase chain reaction–confirmed Omicron infection in Denmark and symptomatic Omicron infection in the United Kingdom.”
The antibody levels, which are associated with protection against future infections, dropped within a few weeks of getting the vaccine doses. They were also much lower than the antibodies specific to the Delta and original COVID-19 strains, according to the study.
The proportion of Omicron-specific antibodies fell to 53 percent between the eighth and tenth week from 76 percent four weeks after the second dose. At weeks 12 to 14, these levels dropped even more to only 19 percent, according to the study.
Those antibodies increased with a third dose, increasing 21-fold three weeks after the dose before dropping to eightfold at week four. But with the third dose, antibody levels dropped as early as three weeks, falling 5.4-fold between the third and eighth week, the researchers said.
They concluded that it may be needed to provide additional booster doses to combat the Omicron variant, which emerged last fall, primarily among older individuals.
However, a study from Israeli researchers published in early April in the New England Journal of Medicine found that a fourth dose, or a second booster, of the Pfizer vaccine, doesn’t offer strong protection.
“Overall, these analyses provided evidence for the effectiveness of a fourth vaccine dose against severe illness caused by the omicron variant, as compared with a third dose administered more than 4 months earlier,” the study’s authors wrote at the time, after analyzing data from the Israeli Ministry of Health. “For confirmed infection, a fourth dose appeared to provide only short-term protection and a modest absolute benefit.”
****************************************************
The truth is struggling to survive in the modern West
You may have missed the news that at the end of April the US Department of Homeland Security announced the establishment of a Disinformation Governance Board. You probably, however, heard the news of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.
Musk is a free speech absolutist and, seeing Twitter as the ‘digital public square’, wants to restore its political neutrality. This has caused something of a moral panic among those sufferers of, as Musk put it, the ‘woke mind virus’. On 5 May, the New York Times published a smear piece under the banner ‘In Musk’s Past, a South Africa Rife with Misinformation and White Privilege’.
The announcement of the Disinformation Governance Board followed the announcement of Musk’s takeover by a few days, and I found myself wondering if there is any connection. But then I checked myself, fearing that I have become a conspiracy theorist –like the people who got booted off Twitter last year for propagating the Hunter Biden laptop story, the lab-leak theory about Covid 19, or the idea that vaccinated people could infect unvaccinated people with the virus (I mean Covid, not the woke mind one – sadly, there is no known vaccination against that as yet). If I do not stop my errant thoughts, I might end up on the DGB’s watchlist! After all, as Orwell’s 1984 said, if you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
Anyway, what could possibly go wrong with a government department deciding what is and isn’t correct information? I trust governments to do this, because they are powerful and omniscient, act for the greater good and always tell the truth.
There is scant detail about the DGB and its powers. We do know it will be targetting disinformation from human traffickers and Russia, which sounds reasonable. However, it will be headed up by ‘disinformation researcher’ Nina Jankowitz, who said of Musk’s Twitter bid: ‘I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms’, called the Hunter Biden laptop story a ‘Trump campaign product’ and asserted that ‘critical race theory has become one of those hot button issues that the Republicans and other disinfomers…have seized on’. Totally impartisan!
Since Trump’s reign, and further impelled by the pandemic, there has been a burgeoning of self-appointed conspiracy theory and disinformation activists like Jankowitz. These people may do good work. But there are problems.
The soldiers of this new army tend to have a worldview that imbues them with the moral certitude that they are the sole arbiters of truth and acceptable thinking. While insisting that science is racist (but the public health response to the pandemic requires you to follow it anyway) and men can get pregnant (but commenting on abortion is not a man’s right), they believe that their dissenters must be hapless victims of disinformation and conspiracy theories who cannot be trusted to come to the correct conclusion. And woe betide the heretics, for the army of believers will unleash their pile-on powers with a fury that would make the God of Sodom and Gomorrah blush.
Another problem is that, not only do the thought vigilantes not confront the conspiracies in their own cohort, some of them partake in them. British-Lebanese conflict journalist Oz Katerji has noted that, through an anti-imperialism under which progressives see the West as the root of all evil, ‘Conspiracism and war crimes denial has now deeply embedded itself in the Western Left’. As examples, he cites Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, hugely influential figures on the left who have both denied the Bosnian genocide at Sebrenica and that Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his own people, despite incontrovertible evidence. Journalist George Monbiot has said, ‘Part of the problem is that a kind of cult has developed around Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, which cannot believe they could ever be wrong, and produces ever more elaborate conspiracy theories to justify their mistakes.’
In her recent article, Izabella Tabarovsky explores ‘the ideological roots of Soviet-style conspiracist anti-Zionist rhetoric that is taking over the American liberal mainstream’, being the ‘deadly tropes of the anti-Semitic theories of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Nazi theory’. Starting in 1967, a global USSR propaganda campaign infused into the hard-Left what Steve Cohen, the British author, called ‘transcendental’ anti-Zionism – an anti-Zionism that ‘has no necessary relationship to anything a real Zionist, or real Jew is doing. It exists in the air quite apart from material reality – except for the reality it creates for itself.’
While disinformation and conspiracy theories are nothing new (an early use of the printing press was a publication about witches that incited thousands of murders), undoubtedly social media has supercharged this phenomenon. Something does need to be done about it. But increasing censorship only risks exacerbating the problems it purports to fix, which is to ensure the truth prevails. As writer Jonathan Rauch notes, objectivity is ‘a function of viewpoint multiplicity and diversity’ by which we challenge our biases; without it ‘fact and faith become indistinguishable’.
If the aim is indeed getting to the truth and not narrative domination, there are much better solutions – such as making algorithms open source and introducing user authentication to get rid of bots, measures that Musk has championed to increase transparency and decrease manipulation. Beyond the architecture of social media, teaching children digital literacy and critical thinking is crucial.
But these remedies will not suffice. Because fundamentally, the ailment is a symptom of an increasingly polarised, fragmented West where trust in institutions has atrophied, there is no meta-narrative, and people are increasingly disaffected and disconnected. Enlightenment principles that prize objective knowledge, science, reason, free speech and universal truth have eroded. In their place, a post-modernist ideology has seeped out from academia and been mainstreamed, holding that objective knowledge is impossible, and knowledge is a construct of power and intrinsically political. There is no truth, only a ‘hegemonic discourse’. That is why people struggle to know what to believe, and don’t trust those who claim the authority to tell us.
As Hannah Arendt wrote: ‘The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie., the standards of thought) no longer exist.’
https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/when-fact-becomes-faith/
************************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
**************************************************
No comments:
Post a Comment