Society

The eyes of the world were on Britain today, as the first patients began to receive the Pfizer vaccine, after it was cleared by Britain’s health regulators as safe to use. Unsurprisingly, foreign TV news channels sent their crews to British hospitals to witness the first patients receiving the jab. Outside Guy’s Hospital in London, CNN managed to catch up with one charming 91-year-old, who had managed to receive the jab after ringing up the hospital to see if they had any spare shots going. As Martin Kenyon explained though, his main difficulty in getting the vaccine was finding a parking spot in London. Mr Kenyon explained that he had

Roald Dahl was a proud antisemite but if it’s real courage you’re after, look to his family who, a mere 30 years after his death, have finally acknowledged that the children’s author wasn’t keen on the Jews. The Sunday Times reports that the family ‘recently met for the first time in several years to discuss the problem and published a discreet apology for his racism on his website’. In the statement, buried deep on the official Roald Dahl website, his family ‘deeply apologise for the lasting and understandable hurt caused by some of Roald Dahl’s statements’, though they make no mention of what these ‘prejudiced remarks’ were or to whom

A picture of an enormous corporate scandal has emerged at the Grenfell Tower inquiry to little fanfare over the last three weeks. The mammoth inquiry has been slowly going through the evidence surrounding the build-up to the fire, which killed 72 people in June 2017. Until November, it had been examining the fitting of the deadly cladding system to the walls of the building. What the inquiry revealed was dispiriting but predictable: pennies were pinched, no one in an enormous chain of construction professionals took responsibility for key safety decisions, and the external oversight of their actions was almost non-existent. In recent weeks though, the tone of the inquiry changed,

The Pfizer vaccine’s approval by UK regulators marked what many hope is the beginning of the end of the coronavirus crisis. That was certainly the impression Boris Johnson was keen to convey during his Downing Street press conference on Wednesday. The Prime Minister, however, warned the British people to avoid being overly optimistic. Deputy chief medical officer professor Jonathan Van-Tam went even further: ‘I don’t think we’re going to eradicate coronavirus,’ he said, ‘I think it’s going to be with humankind forever.’ If professor Van-Tam is correct, what can we expect to happen in our battle against the virus in the coming weeks and months? To answer such a question,

In spite of the approval of one vaccine and the likely approval of at least two others, the government seems determined to push ahead with ‘operation moonshot’ — mass community testing along the lines of that being trialled in Liverpool. That is astonishing, not least because of the cost — put at £100 billion in one leaked document. There is also, as I wrote here a fortnight ago, the matter of the dismal accuracy of the lateral flow tests being used for community testing. It suggests that the government, for all the Prime Minister’s chirpiness this week, has little confidence that vaccination will put an end to the Covid pandemic any