LongTimeLurker

...and the difference this time is the SNP knows full well that headlines will be dominated on Dec 11th by the FDA (EU and UK will follow in lockstep) emergency approval of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines the day before. Once rapid vaccination implementation starts and Christmas and New Year are just around the corner the talk in press briefings will be of when and how fast lockdown restrictions will get lifted. If they are planning on 1 million vaccinations by late January it won't take long to get the people who actually have something significant to worry about largely protected if the 95% efficacy holds up.

https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/scottish-news/6305374/coronavirus-scotland-restrictions-end-three-weeks/ NICOLA Sturgeon has admitted to being "utterly scunnered and fed up" with new coronavirus restrictions - but confirmed that all areas WILL come out of Tier 4 in three weeks... The key decision we'll have to make before then will be what level different areas go into. "I believe level 4 will mean that overall these areas will spend less time in level 3 than they would if we had just left them. "But whether they can leapfrog and go to level 2 we can't make that decision right now." ...

Whitehill Welfare are free to pull out and accept the relegation they were almost inevitably going to have received on the field of play if they had continued.

Blackburn are free to pull out and accept the relegation they were almost inevitably going to have received on the field of play if they had continued.

It's no accident that the level 4 stuff only runs to Dec 11: Nicola S knows what the headlines are going to be when restrictions start to get lifted again just in time for the Christmas retail season.

There was no wee white lie involved. EoS players sign the same professional registration forms that SPFL players do.

Wouldn't be proper to wish any misfortune on Joe Biden, but they are a heartbeat away from having President Kamala Harris now and that would be interesting to watch unfold because she is far left by US standards. There has always been a suspicion that Bernie Sanders is a bit of a champagne socialist, so he wasn't necessarily as big a threat to the status quo as he was being portrayed.

The SG gave professional football an exemption even at Level 4. The EoS forms part of professional football. The SG is not asking for what you appear to be advocating.

I literally talked about the electoral college and voter suppression being the only thing keeping the Republicans in the game in the following paragraph and how by 2030 they will be toast because of demographic change. Did you bother reading the whole message before hitting reply? Trump should have been road kill in 2016 after many of the things he said and did. The Democrats had fixed their primary process to ensure candidates favored by party bigwigs would win pretty much no matter what by having superdelegates. There was a mood for radical change in the electorate in 2016 rather than backing the establishment. They should have backed Bernie Sanders.

Some of the pish being peddled last time around on Russia fixing the election was just a way to avoid admiting that Hilary Clinton was simply an unpopular candidate who failed to skewer Herr Drumpf effectively during debates despite all the material she had to work with, and was the mirror image of what we are seeing now. Reality is that only the wacky electoral college system and lots of voter suppression is keeping the Republicans in the game and Arizona and Georgia flipping this time will soon be Texas for demographic reasons because America's white majority is remoreselessly ebbing away. By 2030 at the very latest it will be game over completely for the GOP as currently constituted in federal politics. More palatable for Nixon's southern strategy devotees to drone on about Dominion voting machines than face up to a future where the Rose Tico style diversity types and purple-haired Admiral Holdo style SJWs that they hate have the numbers and they don't. It's the suede/denim secret police they have come for your uncool niece...

Good to see that nobody gets to linger in the superleague (forget what the new name is) by doing the sort of nonsense that the WoS league allowed to unfold.

Think that's a very strong indication that the first over-80s and health professionals will be getting Pfizer vaccine jags by then and they see approval as a formality. Think they have 320k shots lined up for early December as the first batch for that in a Scottish context. Once needles starting hitting highly wrinkled upper arms the political optics on this will start to change. Level three versus level four probably doesn't make much difference in the larger scheme of things in terms of actually preventing tranmission given what's still left open in both cases. It was mainly about being seen to do something in the absence of a vaccine.

There's no way the SG will want the optics of giving taxpayer money to the Old Firm when they are getting Europa League money and still have most of the season ticket money they normally would have had. Difficult to see how you go about giving money to the rest of SPFL Premier, if you don't include the Old Firm. The problem is the SFA is so higher division SPFL orientated that the issue is more likely to be whether they push the nonleague professional angle as hard as they could/should. Looking good that there will be some support now though.

Think that was posted by Stedfast who seems to be linked to BUJFC. Will try to hunt that down at some point. As stated I am definitely not in the loop on this and tend to see this question in line with a slogan from The Highlander. There can only be one. With the west region moving to the pyramid and the Lithgae Rose tribute act possibly having folded outright the two big selling points they potentially had especially with the more casual few games a season sort of fanbase are not looking as likely to be an ongoing factor as they were when they launched. Firstly, with Junior Cup runs with games against big clubs from the west like Auchinleck Talbot that BUFC could no longer meet in competitive games, and secondly, derby games that were not necessarily going to happen so often in the pyramid once BUFC could rise beyond LRFC as quickly happened. Now the clubs from further south in West Lothian that wanted Linlithgow Thistle to join so they could pretend the real BUFC were back and were no doubt hoping fans in Bo'ness would gravitate to them rather than the pyramid version will probably bolt for the EoS over the next few months and leave BUJFC high and dry. No idea what that will ultimately mean for BUJFC as a fully separate club. Lots of trips over the Tay Road Bridge, a rebrand and an attempt at EoS entry, or slink back to the Edinburgh amateurs as Bo'ness & Linlithgow Thistle? Time will tell I guess. Edit: Found the old post in question that is mentioned above.

https://news.stv.tv/scotland/health-staff-care-homes-and-over-80s-to-get-covid-vaccine-first?top ...More than one million people in Scotland could be vaccinated by the end of January, the health secretary Jeane Freeman told parliament on Thursday. Everyone aged over 18 – around 4.4m people – will eventually be offered the protection from Covid-19, with rollout possibly starting from the first week of December if a vaccine is approved by then...

You need to read up on the latest info. They are already being mass produced because the companies involved are anticipating approval, first approvals are likely to be happening by early December with very rapid implementation thereafter. https://news.stv.tv/scotland/health-staff-care-homes-and-over-80s-to-get-covid-vaccine-first?top ...More than one million people in Scotland could be vaccinated by the end of January, the health secretary Jeane Freeman told parliament on Thursday. Everyone aged over 18 – around 4.4m people – will eventually be offered the protection from Covid-19, with rollout possibly starting from the first week of December if a vaccine is approved by then...

If politicians go completely gaga over COVID-19 because of what the 24/7 cable news cycle is obsessing over, there is inevitably going to be collateral damage elsewhere in public health terms. The people who think they have some sort of moral high ground when they argue that harsher lockdowns are needed to "save lives" should bear that sort of stat in mind, but everything gets dumbed down in terms of the public discourse on this subject and whether the EoS keeps playing takes on much greater importance in some people's minds than it really should have. Vaccines that are already in mass production in anticipation of approval and are being reported to have > 90% efficacy could start being administered to high risk groups as soon as two weeks from now. The number of new COVID-19 cases being identified through testing is already in decline in Scotland. I have no idea how you could reach that conclusion.

....and as long as those things are opened up in the absence of effective vaccines there was always going to be a second wave after the drastic measure imposed earler in the year were eased because there is no herd immunity at this point and a new highly contagious virus is always going to result in an epidemic peak under those circumstances. Whether nonleague professional football has an exemption for closed door games or not is in no way pivotal in the larger scheme of things. The recent news on vaccines has been spectacularly good, so there is light at the end of the tunnel now and it definitely isn't an oncoming train. There is every reason to believe that crowds will be back well before the end of the season even with Nicola Sturgeon's track record of playing it very safe.

How anyone can try to justify secondary schools not being an issue after what is known to have happened when university halls of residence started to be occupied is laughable. Being 13-17 rather than 18-21 makes a crucial difference on virus transmission = aye right.

....with Livingston United already having applied for the EoS in 2021-22. Would be very surprising if what remains of the east region south of the Tay doesn't start to unravel at this point once the application deadline looms. What's more interesting maybe is if any more clubs from north of the Tay (plus Tayport) will try to do what Luncarty did last season and how the EoS membership would vote (for any club other than Tayport) if they did.

Already happened in a Scottish context. Hence the "remains stubbornly high" phrasing to justify the move to level 4 in some parts of the central belt.

The SJFA is included in the definition of professional football.

...because Lithgae are on the fringes of a relegation battle with Blackburn perhaps not coincidentally looking like dead certs for it. If these two clubs were up with Tranent and LTHV chasing a playoff for promotion to the LL a very different tune would be being sung given a Pfizer vaccine appears to be just around the corner with 95% efficacy being claimed even for OAPs.

It's Agnes spelled backwards. Very much a scheme thing, but was mildly popular as a name back in that era and wasn't something Rikki Fulton made up.

That's what Phase 1, 2 and 3 clinical trials are all about. Proving it is both safe and effective in a rational scientific manner.