I live in Bedford which over the past few weeks has been singled out as a COVID hotspot and each day, later in the afternoon, I almost always check out the latest data for the borough which is all on the excellent government COVID website. One of the statistics I look at is the total number of deaths which is defined as “Number of deaths of people who had had a positive test result for COVID-19 and died within 28…
The government’s vaccination programme has been one of the government’s undoubted successes. The extensive genome sequencing of the virus and its mutations. The Vaccine Task Force – a team consisting of scientists, NHS staff, a venture capitalist skilled in investing in biomedical companies and others, together with politicians backing them with very significant amounts of public money – which has enabled Britain to invest in the development and production of a range of vaccines. The collective focused efforts of the…
Both Starmer and Davey go on the offensive After more than a year when there has been broad political support for the anti-COVID strategy it looks as though the idea of vaccine passports could become the first party political issue with both the LAB and LD leaders opposing. The most firm opposition is coming from Ed Davey, the LD leader, who in the Telegraph has an article under the heading “Vaccine passports are unworkable and illiberal”. In it he argues…
Easing restrictions remains a gamble for all the UK governments You might think that things are finally going well in the UK in the fight against Covid-19. And, after a pretty awful 2020, so they are. Close to 25m vaccine doses have already been administered – more, proportionally than almost any other country on Earth; weekly case numbers are down by more than 90% from the peak, the weekly death toll is down by more than 85%, hospital admissions by…
When I got my jab at the end of January I was a little bit disappointed that it was the AstraZeneca and not the Pfizer one – after all the test results indicated that the latter was substantially better. Under the system that is going on in England you really have no choice as to which of the vaccines you get. It is possible to go to a particular vaccinations centre in the hope that you might be offered what…
One of the features of American politics I find difficult understanding is in the above polling. As can be seen supporters of Donald Trump’s party, the Republicans, have a much more negative of vaccination view than Democrats even to the extent that 42% say they don’t plan to take it This is not margin of error stuff but a huge divide and from what we know the refusers are likely putting their own lives at risk. The technical term, I’d…
And there’s been a marked increase amongst ethnic minorities