Covid-19

Tuesday

Matthew Lynn

The EU’s vaccine shambles is turning into a re-run of the euro crisis

Rewind a few months, and it was all meant to be very different. With Covid-19 rampant across the world, the European Union would take charge of sourcing vaccines from the major drugs companies. Its massive buying and regulatory power, coupled with its finely-tuned administrative machine, would make sure its 440 million people were protected from the virus before anyone else. It would be a magnificent demonstration of the whole point of the organisation. The trouble is, not only has the project already started to come off the rails, it is getting worse with every day that passes. Europe’s vaccine alliance is crumbling with potentially far-reaching consequences. Europe’s vaccine alliance is

Monday

Kate Andrews

A lockdown crackdown is no walk in the park

Jessica Allen and Eliza Moore had a bad experience with the Derbyshire police last week. The two women met for a socially distanced walk roughly a five-mile drive away from their home. This resulted in the pair being ‘surrounded’ by police officers, who fined them £200 for leaving their local area and drinking takeaway coffee, which the officers classified as a ‘picnic’. Since the story broke last week, the police force has backed down significantly and are reviewing their policies as a result of the incident. Allen and Moore were not, it seems, breaking any laws (although No. 10 and other departments remain unsure about how this fits into government guidance).

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Six things we need to know about the vaccine rollout

We are supposedly getting a lot more data on the numbers of us being vaccinated, later on Monday. What’s less clear is whether we will be getting data that is useful. Here is what we should be told on a granular daily basis, to reinforce confidence both that the vaccination operation is efficient and effective and to provide hope that the end of this social and economic misery is a realistic prospect: 1. Numbers vaccinated per day should be published. 2. This number should be broken down between first and second dose so that we know how many are protected to the maximum possible. 3. The status of those vaccinated

Jamie Njoku-Goodwin Jamie Njoku-Goodwin

How we can save our summer

The crisis facing hospitals is truly awful and cannot be understated. But while the short term situation is grim, it is important that we detach the immediate challenges from the post-vaccine outlook. They are radically different landscapes and must be addressed separately. Before enough people are vaccinated against Covid-19, we can’t pull any punches in cracking down on the virus. This is not just because of the increased transmissibility of this new variant, or the huge challenges facing the NHS, but because with the vaccine being rolled out we are so close to success against this awful virus. The lower the infection rates, the sooner we can relax restrictions properly.

Nick Tyrone Nick Tyrone

This lockdown is the worst yet for parents

Lockdown is no fun for anyone, but spare a thought for those of us with kids. The third lockdown has, once again, made full-time teachers of parents. But this time, things are much harder. Why? Because during the current restrictions, teachers have been turned into a sort of truancy police force.  ‘Important information. If your child is working from home, they MUST register online daily by 9:00 by submitting at least one assignment….a follow up attendance phone call will be made for those pupils who have not submitted.’  This was the text I received several times last week from my two elder children’s school. Of course it’s right that kids still received

Sunday

Jake Wallis Simons

What Amnesty International gets wrong about Israel’s vaccine programme

Israel’s remarkable vaccine rollout has been deservedly praised. But not everyone is full of goodwill. Depressingly and inevitably, commentators and human rights groups have queued up to find a reason to condemn the Jewish state.  Israel, which is leading the world in the speed of the rollout, has been accused of ‘excluding’ the Palestinians from getting the jab and giving it to ‘settlers’ instead. ‘Denying Covid-19 vaccines to Palestinians exposes Israel’s institutionalised discrimination,’ Amnesty International has claimed. To people familiar with stories about bogeyman Israel, this is an easy narrative to get behind. But it fails to account for a simple fact: the Palestinian leaders themselves haven’t complained. Let’s start with the facts. Under

Edwin Gale

Despite Covid, things really are getting better

If Covid-19 had swept Britain in 1800, the chances are that no one would have noticed. The clinical signatures of plague, smallpox and cholera, for example, are hard to miss, but you need a laboratory to diagnose coronavirus. Nor is it (relatively speaking) that deadly: its case-fatality rate is scarcely enough to feature on the Richter scale of pestilence and its victims are overwhelmingly the elderly. In 1800, however, life expectancy was 40. The big difference between people now and two centuries ago is that we feel so much more secure – or we did until Covid shattered the illusion of control. My great-great-grandfather, a seaman, was about to get

Saturday

Melanie McDonagh

Closing churches again would be a big mistake

It’s somehow not that surprising to find that the Bishop of London has gone on Twitter to suggest that churches should consider closing. Sarah Mullally wrote:  ‘The situation is serious in @dioceseoflondon do read the request from @londoncouncils and consider the seriousness of the situation as you take your local decisions.’ Well, thanks for that. Her observation is plainly intended to push for closures; it’s the only possible way of interpreting her contribution. And duly, she led the news this morning. She’s following Sadiq Khan here, mayor of London, who, when he declared a state of emergency yesterday, called for places of worship to close. It’s one thing for a politician

Charles Holland

Boris’s latest lockdown rules are more baffling than ever

When Boris Johnson rolled back the legal restrictions over summer as Britain emerged from the first lockdown, he was clear that enough was enough: ‘Neither the police themselves, nor the public that they serve, want virtually every aspect of our behaviour to be the subject of the criminal law…After a long period of asking…the British public, to follow very strict and complex rules to bring coronavirus under control…we will be asking [people] to follow guidance on limiting their social contact, rather than forcing them to do so through legislation’. Alas (as Boris Johnson keeps saying), trust in people doing the right thing voluntarily, rather than under legal obligation, turned out to

Friday

Katy Balls

Covid sparks a major incident in London

Is the NHS at risk of being overwhelmed? That’s a question of increasing concern in Westminster as hospital admissions rise. Sadiq Khan has today declared a ‘major incident’ in London — calling the situation ‘critical’ with the spread of the virus ‘out of control’.  With the coronavirus infection rate in London now exceeding 1,000 per 100,000 people, Khan said that the London Ambulance Service was currently taking up to 8,000 emergency calls a day (compared to 5,500 typical for a busy day). It comes as the reported daily death toll on Thursday — 1,162 — reached the highest recorded since April. There’s little, too, to suggest things are about to improve anytime soon. A leak to the Health Service Journal suggested

Mark Piggott

Dementia brings a unique pain to the misery of lockdown

Three days into 2021, an aunt texts to inform that my grandfather has died. In November he was admitted to hospital after a fall at the London flat where he has lived alone since the death of my grandmother in 2008. Just before New Year’s Eve he was tested for Covid-19 then sent home, only to be urgently readmitted when the test came back positive. By then my aunt and her husband had been in contact and were urged to isolate, causing a huge knock-on effect for the family. Whether it was the virus that finally saw off this 97-year-old former station master, war hero and lifelong Stalinist is unclear,

Felicity Graham

Students are the forgotten victims of the pandemic

University is supposed to be among the most enjoyable and formative periods of a person’s life. Spare a thought then for the class of Covid-19. This week’s lockdown announcement again dealt yet another blow to an already disastrous year for university students. Despite having paid the usual tuition fees – and forking out thousands of pounds for pre-paid accommodation – the majority are now stuck at home, learning exclusively through Zoom. Universities cannot be blamed for the seemingly unrelenting succession of lockdowns caused by the pandemic. But that doesn’t alter the fact that we students have been compelled to pay £9,250 for a programme of often poorly-organised video lectures, alongside

James Forsyth James Forsyth

When will Covid restrictions end?

When we interviewed Matt Hancock this week, he was clear that the government isn’t going for herd immunity through vaccination. Instead, the government is seeking to use the vaccine to protect the vulnerable and break the link between cases, hospitalisations and deaths. Once that is done, the government will start to ease restrictions. Crucially, he was also clear that the government now regards the first shot as the most important metric when counting vaccinations. In his Monday night address, Boris Johnson said that if the government could succeed in giving a first shot to the first four groups in the vaccination programme by mid-February then the government would start ‘cautiously,

Thursday

Dr Mark Toshner

Lockdown was Boris Johnson’s only option

Lockdown is brutal. I don’t want it, you don’t want it, nobody ‘wants’ it. We are, however, at an intensely difficult moment in our fight against Covid-19. The latest wave of the virus is out of control, with the new variant significantly contributing to the huge hike in coronavirus cases. Our healthcare system is reaching the point of no return. This means that there is little choice than for us to face up to the reality that we are in the midst of a crisis – and that Boris Johnson had little choice but to tell us all to ‘stay at home’ once again. 1,041 deaths from Covid-19 were recorded yesterday, and the

Katherine Forster

Cancelling exams shows Boris has failed to learn his lesson

‘Don’t worry, they won’t cancel exams again,’ I confidently assured my fifteen-year-old middle son shortly before Christmas. He was sitting his mock GCSEs, and fretting over how much they might matter, admitting: ‘I haven’t done enough work.’ Only a month ago, education secretary Gavin Williamson gave a ‘cast-iron guarantee’ exams would ‘absolutely’ go ahead in England. It seemed clear he and Boris Johnson had learnt their lesson. They’d not be so foolish as to do the same thing over again: pull exams without a proper plan of what to do instead. More fool me. For my family – and for plenty of others in a similar position – it’s once bitten, twice shy.

Wednesday

Brendan O’Neill

The censorious war on lockdown sceptics

Britain at the start of 2021 doesn’t only have a Covid problem — it has a censorship problem, too. The germ of intolerance is spreading. Anyone who dissents, however slightly, from the Covid consensus will find him or herself branded a crank, even a killer. They will be hounded and demonised; online mobs will demand their expulsion from media platforms and from public life. I fear that this Salem-like hatred for sceptical voices will, like Covid itself, have a long-lasting and severely detrimental impact on this country. In recent days, the censorious fury over Covid scepticism has intensified. The pitchforks are out for experts and commentators who query the seriousness

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Can the PM sustain his vague lockdown timetable?

Boris Johnson doesn’t have as angry a Conservative party to deal with as he might have expected after announcing his third national lockdown. The Covid Recovery Group of MPs has largely moved on from opposing further restrictions to putting pressure on the government over its vaccine timetable, meaning any revolt on tonight’s vote will be much smaller than the 55 who rebelled against the tiered system in December. But that’s not to say that the Prime Minister can afford to be careless with the way he communicates with MPs, and his statement in the Commons today showed that. He opened by telling MPs that there was a ‘fundamental difference between the

Debbie Hayton

Closing schools was inevitable. But cancelling exams is a mistake

On Sunday morning, Boris Johnson told us that schools were safe but, tellingly, did not rule out further closures. By Monday evening he had shut every school in England to most pupils. By then, of course, many primary schools had opened for just one day. Children mingled – as they do – and went home not to return. But after those bubbles were mixed, fewer grandparents may be willing to look after them. When will they return? Johnson said not until half term, at least. But when policy can reverse so quickly in less than 36 hours, just about the only certainty is that it is far easier to close schools than

Constantin Eckner

Merkel’s government faces civil war over vaccine failures

European health ministries have not been happy places of late. Earlier this week, the German daily Bild reported a spat between national governments and the EU, frustrated at the bloc’s failure to procure vaccine doses in any serious numbers. That failure has now ricocheted back from Brussels, destabilising Germany’s increasingly fragile coalition government. So infuriated are Angela Merkel’s junior partners that they are now calling for a parliamentary inquiry into Germany’s vaccine failures, centring on one of her possible successors. Problems began when health ministers in Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands (the four countries with the most advanced pharmaceutical industries in the EU) joined forces to try to get

Alistair Haimes

Lockdown sceptics should support this lockdown

Scepticism is supposed to be the bedrock of science. But where scepticism shades into cynicism it can be as blind to changing events as the unexamined credence it claims to displace. Scientific belief should be based on informed supposition which is then rigorously tested against the evidence — that is the basis of the scientific method. There should be no shame in changing opinions and assumptions when facts change. We start with assumptions, test them against the evidence (which itself changes) and then use that conclusion to repeat the process, ad infinitum. So if conclusions don’t change when facts change, something might have gone awry. As an example: your view