Politics

In Kate Bingham’s interview with the Financial Times, where she says that vaccinating the whole population is ‘not going to happen’ and would be ‘misguided’, she is deferring the holy grail of herd immunity for months beyond next spring, and saying we will be living with the virus for years. Because as chair of the UK Vaccine Taskforce, she is saying that only the old, vulnerable and those working in healthcare settings will be vaccinated. In other words, the vaccine would be protection for those most likely to become acutely ill or whose services are most needed. But all the evidence shows that young people are the principal spreaders of

We seem to be entering another era of political party expansion. There’s Laurence Fox’s new party, not to mention the quiet, faint resurgence of the Brexit Party that is likely to become louder soon enough. The peculiar thing about this is that all political parties are fairly terrible, and most of the great British public not only knows that but uses this knowledge as the backdrop to every political calculation they will make throughout their lives. I myself have been a member of a political party; I was a Lib Dem for about a decade. This was an odd move as I am far from a joiner of anything. Yet

Cineworld is to close its 128 cinemas – saying that the Covid restrictions have made its business “unviable”. It’s terrible to see that word applied to the cinema industry – and even worse to think of the 5,500 jobs this will impact. But the truth is that many businesses can’t survive what will be a year’s worth of restrictions – based on PM’s timeline where he’s talking about some kind of scientific breakthrough by Easter. The final straw for Cineworld was the delay of the new 007 film No Time to Die, now due out next April on the logic that this would maximise takings.  But how many cinemas will still be around then to show this

As Conservative party conference gets underway online, Boris Johnson used an appearance on the Andrew Marr show to warn of the difficult months ahead. With over ten million people currently under local lockdown restrictions, the Prime Minister said that while he is aware people are ‘furious’ with his government, things are not about to get better. Johnson said it was going to be a bumpy few months – which could extend well beyond Christmas:  ‘It’s possible that we will make significant progress on the vaccine this year. I went to see the scientists at AstraZeneca in Oxford and those teams and they seem to be doing fantastically well. But I don’t want to get

The recent warnings of exponential growth of Covid-19 cases, inevitably followed by a rise in hospital admissions, is one focus of the Government’s Covid messaging. Jeremy Hunt described this spike in admissions as a ‘wake-up call’ for the Government. But while this year the disease is newly identified, warnings of a winter crisis in the NHS occur annually. So should we be worried? For 20 years, ‘influenza’ has been blamed for putting hospitals under pressure in winter. Now, this fear has been substituted by ‘Covid’. Yet both are one-track, one-pathogen scenarios, which ignores the reality that there are scores of different pathogens that cause respiratory infections across a community at