Vaccination

Gloss over Should we be worried that the head of research into respiratory drugs at AstraZeneca is called Dr Pangalos, given that his near namesake, Dr Pangloss, is a byword for foolish optimism? Dr Pangloss was tutor to Candide in Voltaire’s satire on Gottfried Leibniz’s work on theodicy: the attempt to reconcile why a benevolent and all-powerful God should allow evil, tragedy — or a pandemic — to exist. Dr Pangloss’s favourite phrase, ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’, encapsulates Leibniz’s belief that the Earth, for all its apparent faults, was the best that God could possibly have created. Dr Pangloss’s belief collides with

The NHS plans to vaccinate everyone who wants a jab by early April, according to leaked documents seen by the Health Service Journal. This marks a shift in strategy from the government’s previous plan to only vaccinate the vulnerable. If successful, it would mean that all social distancing measures could be ended in April. The documents operate on a 75 per cent take-up rate for the vaccine among the general population, which seems a touch high given polling on the subject. It assumes that the NHS would be vaccinating 4.5 million people per week and for both the Oxford and Pfizer vaccines people would need to take two doses, 28 days

Earlier this week, the Labour party wrote to the government urging it to bring forward legislation so that social media companies which fail to ‘stamp out dangerous anti-vaccine content’ can face financial and criminal penalties. ‘The government has a pitiful track record on taking action against online platforms that are facilitating the spread of disinformation,’ said Jo Stevens, Labour’s shadow culture secretary. ‘This is literally a matter of life and death and anyone who is dissuaded from being vaccinated because of this is one person too many.’ My first thought on hearing this was how pitifully out of touch the Labour party is. Does Keir Starmer not realise how zealous

After a difficult nine months, we are naturally all sick of lockdowns and other Covid restrictions. Everyone misses parts of their pre-coronavirus lives, from seeing friends and family, to pubs and restaurants, to the theatre and concerts and, yes, even our workplaces. It was therefore no surprise that this week’s news of a vaccine breakthrough was widely applauded. It is human nature, after all, to cling on to things that give us hope. Hope that was encouraged by leading scientists such as Sir John Bell. After the Pfizer news broke, the Oxford professor was asked on BBC radio whether we would be returning to normal by spring. His response? ‘Yes,

Woeful Wales Sir: Allison Pearson succinctly points out the absurdity of the so-called Welsh government and its assembly, now trying to masquerade as a parliament (‘Wales of grief’, 31 October). For those of us living in Wales it is difficult to talk of the Welsh Assembly without using the F-word: failure. For the past 20 years it has failed the Welsh people at every conceivable level, while building a conceit that it is a true government. The only irony of the current Covid-19 debacle is that for once it has been forced to actually do something instead of talking endlessly around a subject before doing nothing. I have described its

You have to admit it, Operation Warp Speed is a good moniker. It’s the name for the American interagency programme, initiated by the Trump administration, to produce 300 million doses of a safe vaccine for Covid-19 by January. Who couldn’t get behind this all-hands national effort to defeat the virus and end the pandemic, excitingly named after the faster-than-light space travel in Star Trek? While we wait for clinical trials led by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca in the UK, America warps ahead. Warp speed allows the Starship Enterprise to put aside the laws of physics. Vaccine development also has its own laws, or rather guides, that describe the