Covid-19

Monday

Fraser Nelson

Sweden’s rule of eight marks a change of strategy

Sweden has been pretty much the only country in the world to have responded to coronavirus using a voluntary system: advising, rather than instructing, the public. But this has changed today with Stefan Löfven, the Prime Minister, saying he will pass a law to introduce a ban on gatherings of eight people or more.  ‘Do your duty. Do not go to the gym, do not go to the library, do not have parties. Do not come up with excuses that would make your activity OK,’ he said in a press conference. ‘It is your and my choices — every single day, every single hour, every single moment — that will now

Carl Heneghan

Can Boris be reinfected with Covid?

Boris Johnson is self-isolating in Downing Street after hosting an MP who subsequently tested positive for Covid-19. As we all know, Johnson has already been affected by SARS-Co-V2. So can the Prime Minister, who has presumably built immunity to this virus, be reinfected? For once the answer is clear: it’s possible. We know this thanks to the work of the Medical Research Council’s Common Cold Unit (CCU). The unit, which worked on the site of a WWII American Red Cross base near Salisbury, ran over a thousand studies between 1946 and 1989. One of its last projects analysed the time course of the immune response to experimental coronavirus infection of

Matthew Lynn

There’s nothing wrong with profiting from a vaccine

A couple of shots to the arm and this will all be over. With today’s news from Moderna, last week’s from Pfizer, and with a potential update from AstraZeneca in the next few days, we may soon have three vaccines against Covid-19 (and if you add in candidates from Russia and China perhaps more). And yet, it turns out, that some people are already fretting about potential side effects from that. And they don’t just mean a mild fever or muscle ache. They mean something far, far nastier. Profits. While most of us have been feeling a lot better about the epidemic over the last week, Jeremy Corbyn seems most

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Have Moderna outdone the Pfizer vaccine?

Another week, another set of preliminary results from a Covid-19 vaccine trial. This time it is the Moderna vaccine candidate, mRNA-1273. And, to judge by the figures put out by the company this morning, it has outdone the Pfizer vaccine in its efficacy. Out of the 30,000 people involved in the phase three trial (half of whom were given the vaccine and half of whom were given a placebo), 95 went on to contract Covid-19. Of those who became infected, 90 were in the control group and only five had been given the vaccine. Eleven participants had a severe case of Covid, all of whom were in the control group.

Dr Waqar Rashid Dr Waqar Rashid

Is the Liverpool mass-testing scheme a gimmick?

The revelation that both Pfizer and Modena have created seemingly effective and safe Covid vaccines that could be here by December is surely the first bit of good news 2020 has brought us. But we are, of course, nowhere near yet out of the woods. Even if a vaccine gets regulatory approval by early December, all our resources and logistics will have to be focused on procuring, delivering, and then monitoring its roll-out. Boris Johnson himself has urged caution about the Pfizer vaccine, saying ‘there is a long way before we have got this thing beat’. But while the PM is displaying a healthy degree of realism about the challenges

Sunday

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Brexit deal could fall down over fishing

Simon Coveney – Internal Market Bill could mean no trade deal Ireland’s Foreign Minister Simon Coveney returned to Sophy Ridge’s show this week to make clear his objections to the government’s Internal Market Bill. The bill, which famously threatened to break the EU Withdrawal Agreement in ‘a specific and limited way’, has recently been watered down by the House of Lords. However, it is expected that the government will reinsert the offending clauses, which would keep Northern Ireland’s market aligned with Britain in the event of no trade deal. Coveney warned that this move could derail the prospective trade deal altogether: SC: If the British government is determined to continue

Saturday

Joanna Williams

Don’t censor the anti-vaxxers

Pfizer has come up trumps. Now that a vaccine for Covid-19 is more than just a possibility, we can breathe a collective sigh of relief. But before we relax too much, a new problem arises: will people actually take it? A third of people in the UK – and half of people in the United States – say they are either uncertain or unlikely to agree to be vaccinated against coronavirus, according to research from the Royal Society and the British Academy. It’s easy to scorn anti-vaxxers. They are the tin-foil hat wearing idiots who set fire to 5G phone masts at the start of the ‘plandemic’. They are the ‘reckless, ‘shameful’ and

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Where’s the slogan saying ‘Lose Weight. Stop Boozing. Survive the virus!’?

Panic at the country feed store. Panic in the horse and pony aisle. I wonder to myself: could life ever be sane again? With apologies to Morrissey and Marr, I started singing a version of their seminal hit on the way back from getting the horse and dog food and I have been humming it ever since. I feel very jaunty, all of a sudden. I know I’m supposed to be paralysed with fear and hugely depressed, but I’m not. Sorry. I arrived at the feed store just in time, getting the last space in the car park before the place became besieged. A little old lady behind me in

Friday

Ross Clark

ONS study finds infections slowed before lockdown

The weekly ONS infection survey suggests that the rise in prevalence of Covid-19 in England has levelled off. Not only that, it suggests that the rate of new infections has actually fallen. In the week to 31 October, the ONS estimates that 618,700 people had Covid-19 — about 1 in 90 of the population. That was up from 568,100 the week before — a 9 per cent increase. However, it amounts to a stark slowdown on previous weeks. At that rate, it would take eight weeks for the number of people with Covid-19 to double — a long way from the doubling rate of eight to ten days which was

Thursday

Kate Andrews

Sunak’s furlough extension paves the way for more lockdowns

England has only been back in national lockdown for a matter of hours and already economic support packages are rolling in — not for the duration of this lockdown (furlough was already confirmed until 2 December) but for the months to follow after the country exits lockdown. Chancellor Rishi Sunak has abandoned a return to the jobs support scheme when lockdown ends — which sees the majority of financial costs fall on the employer — and instead decided to extend the furlough scheme across the UK in its most generous form. Furlough will run until March 2021 at least, with the government paying 80 per cent of workers’ wages for

Jeremy Clarke

The joy of red wine

Everything is happening so fast. First we were put under a night curfew. A few days later M. Macron announced another lockdown. Then, pretty much overnight, I developed a taste for red wine. The Damascene conversion was a bottle of Clos de l’Ours, a local vineyard. It was pricey admittedly, even when bought direct from the vigneron’s shop, but it was a gateway. Now I’m guzzling red. It’s like finally liking sausages after a lifetime’s aversion. The suddenness and completeness of the conversion I can only put down to an organic deterioration in the brain. Old age, perhaps. Or years of drinking this unpretentious, paralysing brand of gin that is

Wednesday

John Keiger

France is revolting against Macron’s second lockdown

Second lockdowns are increasingly difficult for democratic governments to impose and maintain. Violent anti-lockdown demonstrations in Spain and Italy have hit the headlines recently. It was with considerable trepidation, then, that French political leaders ordered France’s second lockdown to begin at midnight last Thursday. It did not help that Macron like Boris had repeatedly said there wouldn’t be a second one.  Ahead it went, to last officially until 1 December with a mid-term review around 14 November. In his TV address to the nation, president Macron foolhardily declared that lockdown would end when daily infections – running at 50,000 – were reduced to 5,000. The next morning, the head of

Tuesday

Tom Goodenough

Vallance and Whitty hit back over ‘scary’ lockdown graph criticism

Sir Patrick Vallance and Professor Chris Whitty have come under fire over slides used during the weekend announcement of the second Covid-19 lockdown. Today, the pair hit back.  A chart suggesting there could be up to 4,000 deaths per day by December under a reasonable worst-case scenario was described by Oxford expert Carl Heneghan as ‘now proven to be incorrect’. The modelling on which the chart was based appeared to be out of date, indicating that daily deaths would have already hit 1,000 a day. In fact, in the most recent stats yesterday, the UK saw 136 coronavirus deaths. Despite this, Vallance insisted the purpose of the graphic was ‘not to frighten people’. While Whitty, the Chief

Stephen Griffin

The problem with the Great Barrington Declaration

With England returning to a full national lockdown, calls for a different response — a so-called ‘segmentation strategy’ — have also reappeared. The idea behind such an approach is that a ‘vulnerable’ section of the population is effectively sealed off from the rest of society. Meanwhile, SARS-CoV2 is allowed to spread among the remaining population, generating herd immunity which will eventually protect the entire population. This is the core principle of the Great Barrington Declaration, which has attracted a large amount of media attention since its inception a few weeks ago. This approach has had considerable appeal to those seeking to minimise the impact of the pandemic for a variety of reasons, be they

Monday

Marcus Walker

If anything is essential, it’s worship

That the Church of England shall be free, and shall have all her whole Rights and Liberties inviolable. There are few clauses of Magna Carta that are still in force today. Most have been whittled away by the stultifying hands of generations of bureaucrats. But one clause still stands in its in 800-year-old majesty: that the Church of England shall be free. (I realise that my Roman Catholic readers might quibble about what was meant by the Church of England in 1217, but I ask you to bear with me). Freedom of religion is a cornerstone of a free people. It stands at the heart of every declaration and charter of

Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya

Lockdown isn’t working

Our approach to the Covid-19 pandemic has been a scientific folly. While some mortality is unavoidable during a pandemic, the failure to properly protect the elderly and other vulnerable has led to over 45,000 UK and 225,000 US deaths and counting. Added to that total is the extensive collateral damage on health from lockdowns, which is likely to be exacerbated in Britain by the latest lockdown. We have eroded public trust in the scientific community by ignoring basic principles of public health. To address this, the Great Barrington Declaration has called for a sharp change in Covid-19 policy with focused protection as its central idea. It is based on three

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Farage will make Boris regret his panicky second lockdown

During the 2015 general election campaign, when I was directing operations at the London HQ for Ukip, I had an ‘absolutely brilliant’ idea. The next day Nigel Farage would be campaigning on the Isle of Thanet, in Kent, where he was standing for election. On our grid, it was earmarked to be Small Business Day – designed to showcase the party’s manifesto focus on the self-employed and SMEs, aka ‘the backbone of the British economy’. My plan? During his campaigning, Nigel should visit a butcher, a baker and a candlestick-maker (as mentioned in the nursery rhyme ‘Rub-A-Dub-Dub’). A suitable butcher’s shop and a bakery near to his route were swiftly

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

Boris’s ‘Captain Hindsight’ attack backfires

Boris Johnson may be able to explain his U-turn on imposing a second national lockdown on England in policy terms, arguing as he did last night that he favoured trying to keep as many businesses operating as possible while taking other steps to drive down the rate of infection. But it is far harder to justify politically because of the way he conducted himself while resisting the idea of the lockdown. The Prime Minister appears to have regarded the difference between his local approach and the ‘circuit-breaker’ favoured by Sir Keir Starmer as a campaigning opportunity. Not only did the Conservative party publish a now widely-mocked tweet criticising Labour for

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Why has Boris closed the churches?

This morning, my son, who’s 17, was turned away from our local church. The designated spaces for people attending mass were full. He tried to book online at the church down the road – they were full too (and last week they turned my daughter away). It was too late to make an online booking for the lunchtime mass at the London Oratory, but the reservations system for the tea-time mass was still open, so he’s booked that, on a system that hilariously resembles the booking system for a commercial theatre, except that it concludes, which they don’t, with God Bless You. I say this not to expose my failings

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Backsliding on a lockdown end-date has begun already

Will England’s lockdown end on 2 December? Even before this morning’s media round there was good reason to suspect it might not. The first national lockdown – we were originally told – would be for three weeks, with the explicit aim of building more capacity in the National Health Service. But the goalposts shifted and three weeks turned into more than three months: despite daily Covid deaths peaking in April, pubs and restaurants didn’t reopen until early July. Weeks later gyms and other leisure sectors followed, and public transport guidance changed to encourage employees back to their offices. This morning, half a day after the Prime Minister laid out his