Sorry, anger and sadness are odd bedfellows.
First: ‘The weeks ahead will be the hardest yet,’ but we are apparently entering ‘the last phase of the struggle.’ So says a prime minister who promised on Sunday it was safe to send children to school and then closed them down the next day. On Monday morning all the papers said that scientists agreed we were at Covid Alert Level Five – there is a material risk of healthcare services being overwhelmed. Surely they didn’t keep that a secret for the weekend. If the news media knew that on Sunday (to write Monday’s papers) it beggar’s belief that no one had told the Prime Minister, or perhaps his £145,000 a year press secretary kept it from him.
Second: Somewhere along the line, the politicians are being misinformed or selectively choosing the information they share. We have been presented with this illusion that the vaccine will defeat the virus and we can ease the lockdown in February and enjoy Christmas at Easter. I have no desire to burst anyone’s bubble, but do our leaders pay no attention to what the scientists are saying.
While Moderna’s and other’s vaccines do appear to prevent people from getting ‘severely sick’ from COVID-19, ‘they do not show that they prevent you from potentially carrying this virus . . . and infecting others.’ This is not a quote from a random scientist, this is Moderna’s chief medical officer Tal Zaks. He makes that vaccine.
‘I’m very confident that transmission between people will be reduced by such a highly effective vaccine—maybe not 90% but maybe 50%.’ Again, not a random scientist, but Professor Ugur Sahin, founder of BioNTech which developed its Covid vaccine with Pfizer.
And they were talking about a full dose, not the half measures we will be dishing out. It seems that even after vaccination you can still spread the virus.
This matters, a London hospital doctor said he was seeing as many patients under his age being admitted as those over his age. He was 54. This is no longer an old person’s problem.
Finally, by the end of the month we will almost certainly have recorded 100,000 deaths – family and friends who have Covid on their death certificates.