Vaccination

I am considering cancelling my second Covid-19 vaccination. I received my first jab in March, and at the time I happily booked the date for the second one in June, confident that by then we would be continuing to see a fall in infections. But last week the story changed. The B.1.617.2 variant, first identified in India, could, according to Sage minutes, be 50 per cent more transmissible than the variant identified in Kent. Early numbers suggest we could be at the start of an exponential growth in infections. The lesson of the past year is that if you wait to act until you’re certain of the data, you’re too

Laikipia Until I promised to slaughter a fat-tailed sheep with a goat thrown in for a feast, the farm cowhands looked doubtful about going for their vaccinations. ‘Come on, it won’t hurt you,’ I cajoled. A panther-like man I’ve seen pursuing bandits with a rifle and reckless courage announced that he was frightened. The others nodded and rubbed their left arms. But at the offer of meat and sizzling fat over an open fire, everybody cheered up. Time was running short. A village clinic two hours away in Maasai country had phoned to say its supply of doses was sitting there unused and would I urgently muster some people? Vaccine

Home The Duke of Edinburgh, who was married to the Queen for 73 years, died at Windsor Castle, aged 99. The Queen was said to feel ‘a huge void’. Union flags flew at half mast; gun salutes were fired. For a day the BBC cancelled television schedules and broadcast the same programmes on all its channels. Parliament was recalled a day early. No laws would be passed until after the funeral on 17 April at Windsor, to be attended by no more than 30, in compliance with coronavirus legislation. As a mark of respect, the Prime Minister thought better of being photographed drinking beer in a newly liberated pub garden,

We have a government which is basically libertarian in its instincts, despite its current affection for telling us what we can and can’t do on a daily basis. This seems like a paradox or a non-sequitur, but it isn’t really, because in a sense it is a coalition government between libertarian politicians and a big-statist regulatory medical clergy. It is an interesting political marriage, a marriage of expediency. And it will soon become very strained. The government is about to run into big problems over its rollout of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, which many scientists believe could have a causal link to the prevalence of blood clots in a very small

As Britain celebrates its vaccination success, we’re in danger of missing something important. A great many people have been offered the vaccine, but have turned it down — and we hear very little about them. No. 10 briefings trumpet the numbers vaccinated in the past 24 hours but are silent on the numbers who have refused. This matters, because if vaccine passports are on their way, granting access to pubs and so on, the unvaccinated will be excluded. More importantly, the unvaccinated will be vulnerable to the virus as we unlock. We need to know more about them. Dig deep enough and rough figures are there. Let’s look at the

Home A Metropolitan Police officer, Wayne Couzens, 48, was charged with the kidnap and murder of 33-year-old Sarah Everard, who was last seen on 3 March as she walked home from Clapham to Brixton. A mass vigil on Clapham Common was called off after the High Court declined to interfere with a police ban on the event in accord with coronavirus regulations. The Duchess of Cambridge came alone and left some daffodils at the bandstand. Women who stayed in their hundreds saw police struggle with women who refused to leave the bandstand. There were four arrests and pictures of policemen subduing one of them, Patsy Stevenson, on the floor fed

Around the time that poor M. Macron was casting televised aspersions on the AstraZeneca jab, I was offered one by Mme Michaud, our hardworking French village GP. Concerned about her bosoms, Catriona had visited for a routine appointment and while there had asked what the chances were of getting a Covid jab. By a stroke of good luck, Mme Michaud said she had a batch of the AstraZeneca vaccine arriving in a fortnight and would her friend like one as well? Consequently my name was pencilled on her list, but with a question mark against it. My busy oncologist at Marseille replied to my email within two minutes. He said

Desperate to find someone to commemorate with a statue for having done great things, but who isn’t a white male, some people in Devon want to honour a couple of lesbian pirates. A statue of Anne Bonny and Mary Read has been proposed for the beauty spot of Burgh Island, to salute their important work in ‘breaking gender boundaries’ in the 18th century. Their long careers of psychotic violence and theft are easily eclipsed by the suggestion that they liked a spot of how’s your mother from time to time. A problem here is that there is no proof that they were actually lesbians. A few revisionist historians, of the